Day 2 - 7 September 2008

Trip Start Sep 06, 2008
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2
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Trip End Sep 20, 2008


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Friday, October 24, 2008

Wake up call at 7.am for the group breakfast at 8.am. As if I needed waking. I dragged myself out of the pool of sweat called my bed and quickly showered. The room was still like a sauna. Should have sweated off several pounds in the night but my clothes told me otherwise - dream on. Had the most bizarre incident in the night when my mattress was moving underneath me, in a wave like motion. I actually looked underneath the bed but of course there was nothing there! It turned out later that several others in the group had experienced the same thing. Weird. There was me hoping George Clooney had dropped by!
Met the rest of the group at breakfast, there were 19 of us, a mix of ages and nationalities which always bodes well.  Seemed like a really nice crowd.
 
 
We got on the coach for the drive to the Pyramids, chattering away and trying desperately to remember everyone's names. The heat was already unbearable and it was only 9am. A short drive and we were standing in front of the pyramids. Unbelievable! They are literally on the outskirts of Cairo, with just a row of shacks separating the area of bedrock surrounding the pyramids from the residential area.
We stood there in complete awe. The Great Pyramid of Giza (also known as Khufu's Pyramid),  the Pyramid of Chepren and the Pyramid of Mycerinus. The  Great Pyramid was built as a tomb for 4th Dynasty King Khufu. This site is the only remaining member of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and its magnificence is breathtaking. The Pyramids are the main part of a complex, including two mortuary temples in honour of Khufu and three smaller pyramids for Khufu's wives. Almost 4,600 years old, it took 20,000 men 20 years to build them.
 
 
The Great Pyramid consists of 2,300,000 blocks; average weight of each block is 2.5 tons. Some blocks weigh 15 tons. The Project Management for this site must have been miraculous. It took the best part of 2 years for our British workforce to build a small bypass near my workplace and they still didn't get it right because its cone city every other month where they keep digging it back up!
We did the tourist thing with the photos and then paid money to actually go inside the pyramid. We were wilting by now and I was so looking forward to escaping into the cool burial chamber deep inside the pyramid. Silly me. Apparently the way in is also the way out of these wonders, and as I waited by the entrance, the sight of people re-emerging from the bowels of the Pyramid, I was gobsmacked. People that had gone inside just 15 minutes earlier, looking perfectly normal, were coming out looking as if they had just trekked the length of the Amazonian Rain Forest. Beetroot red faces, hair plastered round their faces, dripping with sweat, and clothes that looked as it they'd just been for a swim in them.  I moved towards the entrance and realised that you had to pass through a long, dark corridor only a metre high, which dropped quite steeply and then rose upwards in to the chamber. Bent double, we stumbled through blindly, feeling the heat rising all the time. We also had to keep stopping to let the outgoing visitors squeeze past.  Finally we were in the burial chamber. Nothing there of course as all of the pyramids had been ransacked by thieves. Inside the Great Pyramid are three chambers, the lowest chamber was never finished. The middle chamber was for the Queen and the highest chamber for the King. In 1993 a new chamber high in the Pyramid was accidentally discover by a German Scientist. However, it may never be opened as a corridor would need to be built to access it. One wonders what lies inside - maybe the tomb of King Khufu?

 
I didn't hang around in the burial chamber for long, it was stifling, so we returned the way we came, bent double, and emerged into the glorious sunshine, looking, no doubt, as wretched as the people who had emerged before us.  We then made our way over to the building housing the solar boat, which was built to take the Pharaoh on to his next life. It was discovered totally dismantled and took 14 years to re-assemble to its former glory of 43m long and 6m wide. Very impressive and well preserved.

 
Next stop was the Sphinx. The purpose of the Sphinx is not clear but common belief is that it was built to protect the 2 Pyramids. Some believe that it has the face of Pharaoh Chafer, who commissioned it, as the features are very similar to other statues of him. It's a very impressive statue, standing 20m high and 60m long. Its eyes are 2m high.
It was then back into Cairo to visit the Egyptian National Museum which has over 136000 items on show. Taso gave us a picnic lunch to eat en route. Pitta bread filled with falafel, a paste of bean, nuts and herbs, and some fruit. I loved this museum, absolutely fascinating. The highlight being the Tutankhamen treasures - out of this world. A total of 5,000 articles were found in his tomb, including the famous death mask. On display are also the coffins and sarcophagus. I also loved the mummified animal exhibition, which had a huge variety of animals - crocodile, rams, monkeys, fish etc but the funniest ones of all were the cats. Their body and limbs bound so tightly together so that no limbs were visible, they resembled skittles with cat's heads.  Didn't get as long as I would have liked in this museum but it's a definite must see. Apparently they are building a new museum in Giza, near the Pyramids, to replace this one and it will be state of the art.
 

We stopped at a grocery shop on the way back to the hotel, to buy food for our 10 hour train ride to Luxor tomorrow. Not much choice in the shop, no nice bread, fruit or cheese so ended up buying packets of biscuits, crisps and cake and vowing to have a good breakfast before we leave. Back at the hotel there was just enough time for a much needed dip in the pool before we went out to a famous Egyptian restaurant called Felfela. There appeared to be a very ornate tree growing in the centre of the restaurant.  It was adorned with shells, stones and ceramic flowers and made a wonderful centrepiece. The menu wasn't vast but the mezze was good and the mango juice was so full of fruit, you almost had to eat it with a fork! No alcohol served as it was Ramadan. I really need to watch out for this next time I travel to a Muslim country. Still, it's a good way of keeping down the alcohol intake. As the waiters cleared our table, the stray cats that had been lurking underneath while we were eating, were happily tucking into the remains of a meal on the table next to us!
Was feeling tired and looking forward to a good nights sleep in a nice cool room but no prizes for guessing that I returned to my room to find the air con was still blasting out hot air. I told Taso who said I would be given another room. It was a pain packing everything up again but I just couldn't face another night in that sauna. The new room was much smaller but blissfully cooler so I showered and then, due to the lack of alcohol, I decided to have a cuppa to celebrate. Plugged my trusty little travel kettle in - and promptly blew the air con!  There was no way I could tell them what I'd done as I wasn't supposed to use a kettle in the room so I was destined for another sweaty, sleepless night. Hey Ho! I lay on the bed, glistening with sweat and desperately tried to sleep. Next thing I knew, heavy furniture was being scraped across the tiled floor of the floor above. Great! I lay there; hoping that it would stop but an hour later it was actually getting worse, accompanied by hammering and sounds of cable being threaded through steel air ducts. It was now 1am and I was by then, deranged with anger and lack of sleep. Throwing some clothes on, I marched out of my room, got in the lift and pressed the button for the 6th floor, and was amazed at the sight before me as the lift doors opened. At least a dozen Egyptian men were working up there, obviously refurbishing the floor. They froze, mortified by the screaming banshee in the lift, hair askew, no makeup who was shouting "What the hell are you doing? Its 1am for God's sake!"  Most of them pretended they didn't speak English, as I was ranting at them but one managed to deny that they were working. Bearing in mind he was holding a saw at the time, it just didn't quite ring true!
I stomped back in the lift and descended to the ground floor and reception. Taso was sitting down there with some other men and I just let rip. He was very apologetic and promised to get it stopped which he did. By then I was too stressed out from all the aggro, coupled with the lack of air con (my fault), that I couldn't get to sleep anyway.
Still, at least we move on to Luxor tomorrow.
 
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