Pyramids

Cairo for a weekend was a good idea. If we didn't have a guide though, there's no way we would have accomplished half of what we did this weekend. I'm glad we paid the money to have the private guide and driver all weekend. Otherwise, we might have just gone to the great pyramids and the museum and missed all of the other great sites.

We started our weekend by driving down to Sakkara, south of town. This is where the Step Pyramid and the Bent Pyramid are. The Bent Pyramid is kind of funny to me, because it's basically an engineering disaster that's been left for posterity. I'll let you guess how the Step Pyramid got its name. Unfortunately, I didn't get any good pictures of the Bent Pyramid, it was off in the distance.

After the Sakkara Pyramids, we headed back up to Giza and saw the Great Pyramids up close. We got to ride some camels around for a little while. I was kind of hoping it was going to be longer, but I guess I can always talk a Libyan into letting me ride one of theirs before it gets eaten for lunch.

Next to the main pyramids is a smaller one, of one of the wives that you can climb down into. After climbing to the bottom, I'm still not sure why. You crawl/walk about 100 yards down on a 45 degree slope in a shaft that's about 3 foot by 3 foot. It's as hot as Sebha, and the air is stagnant. You come out on the bottom into a 20x20 tomb full of other tourists. It's been stripped of everything interesting. There weren't any glyphs on the walls or anything else to see. All of the artifacts from this room were in the Cairo Museum so we did get to see them eventually. Once you're down there, you certainly question why you did it. We decided it was just one of those dumb tourist things you have to do when you're in Cairo. Kind of like riding the camels.

Right next door to all of that, is the guardian of the pyramids, the sphynx. The sphynx sits about half underground now so it limits the angles you get to see it from. I would have liked to be able to stand at ground level directly in from of it. I'm not really sure why, but the Sphynx has always been one of my favorite ancient relics. I think I must have done a report on it in elementary school or something.