Getting to Cairo was a nightmare! After having got up really early for the Abu Simbel excursion, the evening flight (which was late enough on its own) was delayed, and between one thing and another I crashed at my room at nearly three in the morning! And they expected us to leave at seven! (They later rescheduled to 8:45 to give us some more sleep) My hotel is the Intercontinental Semiramis, which is amazing in a very classic luxe sort of way, with expansive rooms that look out to Tahrir Square; in a way seeing the comfort of the hotel after four days living on a boat made me angrier at having essentially lost a night: how I wish we had landed earlier and got the chance to enjoy the room and have dinner at one of the hotel’s restaurants…
Anyway, today’s main event was the Pyramids! Really saving the best for last. Here too they merged our group with a bigger one and put us on a bus -with a really obnoxious, noisy group that I can’t wait to be rid of- to the Giza plateau. Once again access is complicated and very agency-centered: we got there by bus, got off to go through security and scan our tickets, then had to get on the bus again, because even after the entrance the different areas are very spread out.
But then… the Pyramids come into view, and everything is worth it.
It’s hard to overstate the monumental (in every sense of the word) significance of the Giza pyramids. The factoid that I always remember is that Cleopatra is closer in time to us than to the pyramids: when Cleopatra was born, two thousand years ago, the pyramid were already two thousand five hundred years old! They were older to her than she is to us! It defies comprehension.
I’ve heard people say they expected the structures themselves to be bigger, and perhaps they aren’t quite as giant, but at 130 meters tall I found them plenty impressive! I definitely felt the same quickening as when I saw Taj Mahal, with the caveat that as a visit it is less comfortable due to the overbearing sun.
Our bus took us on a multi-stop approach, starting first at a vantage point from which you can see all three pyramids at once. It looks like there is a fourth, smaller one, but that is in fact a tomb for the family of the pharaoh, not a pharaoh himself. The other three were built in honor of Keops, Khefren, and Menkaure (also known by his Greek name, Mykerinos).
It was a bright, cloudless sunny day, which made it all the more apparent that Cairo has a giant floating wallflower smog giving the air a dirty gray tinge near the ground even while there is a blue sky above. As the morning went on, it cleared a bit, but in exchange it became hotter under the sun.
The site is of course massively crowded, but while on the plateau you don’t even notice as much because it’s so wide. Even when there were throngs of people taking a scenic picture, I was still often able to get a clear photograph myself simply by stepping a bit to the side or making my way to the front.
After making bus stops at each of the three pyramids, I was startled to see the Sphinx appear into view. I’d been so engrossed by the pyramids and the surreal feeling of realizing what felt like a fantasy that I completely forgot about the sphinx!
This is where the overcrowding really became a problem, because the sphinx is only really visible from one narrow walkway to its left flank, and people have to squeeze into it to get a proper look at it. To their credit, people weren’t annoying and respected turn order to step to the front, take their pictures, and let the next person pass through; the annoyance is more at the physical reality of mass tourism and the infrastructure needed to support it.
I thought the sphinx was beautiful, and wondered what it must have looked like when it was brand new. The only pity is that I couldn’t get a picture of it from the front, I think I would have needed some more time to find out a proper angle from the outside.
The sphinx is the last stop before leaving the Giza plateau. If you’ve only ever seen the pyramids through the typical pictures, you could be forgiven for thinking that they are in the middle of the desert, far away, but nothing could be further from the truth: they are sitting right on the edge of town! Really, look at this, there are people who can stare at the sphinx dead in the face right from their living room:
After this we had to endure the shakedown part of the tour, this time to a papyrus shop. This was by far the tackiest, and also the noisiest, store we have been to yet, and the fact that they can sell these ghastly prints of gas station memorabilia (I saw one of a crudely drawn puppy taking a selfie) is proof that pharaonic curses don’t actually exist. We ended up waiting here for almost an hour, which was grating in light of all the times we were hurried to our next stop while admiring a wonder of the world.
For the afternoon, I had previously booked an optional tour to visit the ancient capital of Memphis and the necropolis of Saqqara. I am not ashamed to admit -I am maybe a bit ashamed to admit- that my whole rationale for booking this tour was that I have been to Memphis, Tennessee, as you can ready for yourself in this blog, and I felt an obligation to also visit Memphis, Egypt! But now I regarded this decision with an encroaching feeling of regret, for compounded reasons: firstly, because my energy was all but drained, secondly, because our whole schedule was pushed back so this activity now threatened my entire afternoon, and thirdly, because I was put all by myself in a different group. It wasn’t the demon group from earlier, but it was a group that had suffered the demon group for the entirety of their holidays, so the mood was pretty on edge!
So, to jump ahead to the conclusion.., yeah, not worth it. The Memphis part of the tour was one small open-air museum with relics from the first capital of Egypt, notably a giant statue of Ramses.
In Saqqara there is a bigger archaeological site, and for sure it is historically extremely significant: the tombs and the step pyramid here are older even than the Giza pyramids by several hundred years. The problem is… they aren’t much to look at!
The tombs are relatively unadorned, and by this point in the trip I am pretty tombed out, so all in all I wish I had struck off on my own around Cairo instead. At least I got back to my room in time for a nice, warm tea in my balcony before trying out the Lebanese restaurant at the hotel.
And then I will finally get to do some sightseeing on my own tomorrow!
This Is A Lake 