WEDNESDAY 16 OCTOBER – THE PYRAMIDS
There’s a pyramid in my head,
There’s one underneath my bed,
And my lady’s getting cranky…
– The Alan Parsons Project, Pyramania
We were away from the hotel by 7:15 AM and after spending a frustrating hour cashing a traveller’s cheque, we caught a minibus from Maidan Tahir out to Giza. A guy on the bus showed us a quick way to get to the pyramids area and although he had a Tourist Friends ID¹ and seemed genuinely interested in helping us, we didn’t trust his motives. Sure enough, he took us to a perfume shop. However, as we had intended to buy some perfume (Egypt is one of the world’s leading producers of natural fragrances) we took the opportunity to purchase some Jasmine oil for E£100. Our “guide” then introduced us to a livery stable owner who hired out horses so we paid E£30 each for a 2-hour ride around the pyramids.
We set off on a couple of very skinny horses, accompanied by an equally skinny guide on a lame mount. As we started up the first sandy hill to a viewpoint overlooking the pyramids, the guide’s horse broke down so we told him in no uncertain terms to take the poor thing back to the stables and we would wait at the top of the hill for him to return.
And what a sight from the top of that hill! Before us, standing rigid in the heat and dust as they have done for 4 ½ millennia, were the great pyramids of Cheops, Chephren and Mycerenus. There is no sight on Earth to compare with them – monuments to the achievements of a civilization that thrived while Britain and Europe we’re still populated by savages living in mud huts and hunting mammoths to survive. While the future brokers of power and culture languished in the faceless squalor of prehistory, the people of the Nile were writing and inventing and building lives that no men have seen or will ever see again. And now it is all lost save for this giant legacy of stone.
Our gallop around the base of the pyramids was pretty uninspiring, our guide not being able to tell us much we didn’t already know. The sphinx was surprisingly small and we were only able to view it from a distance before we asked for tips and hustled back to the stables.
We sat in a chay [tea] house for a couple of hours then, as afternoon began to give way to evening, we walked out of town and climbed the low hill near the pyramids. It was quite hot but it soon began to cool as the sun dipped towards the hazy horizon. The sunset wasn’t much but just to sit there and watch darkness fall on the pyramids was pure magic.
A wheezing old bus took us back into town for 50 piastres each and we had a Coke at a sidewalk chay house on the way back to the hotel. We ate at the Falafel Garden again in the evening.
¹Tourist officials had badges to identify themselves but, as with almost everything else in Egypt, these could be easily forged.
CurseOfTheTraveller 