Cairo and Giza

So, in one of my last posts, when I insisted I was working, I said that I was leaving Sde Boqer again soon. I went on a Safari in Kenya with Nile and Matt. On the way there, I took an originally unintended, but worthwhile trip to Cairo.

Unintended? I had planned on flying directly into Nairobi and then directly back to Israel, but who would have known that flights would be so hard to get? I tried to make it easier by flying out of Cairo instead (the options were to spend 3 days in Nairobi by myself, or to spend 3 days in Cairo on my own, and I opted for Cairo)....and in the process found new countries that I am not allowed to visit with an Israeli stamp in my passport, which just happened to be the ones that the budget airlines landed in. But I lucked out and not only found a flight to Nairobi from Cairo, but ended up getting a seat on the same plane that Matt and Nile were flying with!

I did have a 2 1/2 day layover in Cairo. Not bad as far as layovers go. On my first full day there I met up with some other travellers and shared a taxi with them to go explore the pyramids. Our first stop was Giza, where the more famous pyramids are....



We were amazed at how close to the city they actually are. In this direction it looks a bit like they are in the middle of nowhere, but if you turned 90 degrees, the city is right there. That haze you see? Smog.

You can still see a little bit of the outer covering on this pyramid. When it was first made, this covering made the pyramid gleam in the sun.


In front of this pyramid there is a small 'sun boat' museum. One of the oldest known boats in the world is inside the museum--it was built to take the Pharoh to the afterworld, and buried beside the pyramids.



Here's the boat itself



The pyramids seemed to be surrounded by people on camels, all following you around trying to convince you that you really want and need to ride their camel around the pyramids. These ones (the policemen and camels) are the only ones who seem to want the camels to themselves.


In addition to the 3 pyramids at Giza, many people also come to see the Sphinx. The Sphinx is slowly deteriorating (I've heard it described as a stone cancer) and any attempt to halt this process has just made it worse.



After Giza, we also went further south to Saquarra to see the pyramids there. The most famous one is the step pyramid. It's said to be the type of pyramid that they made before they figured out how to make the walls of the pyramids smooth. But the dates that we were told for the different pyramids didn't really make sense with this story. May still be true anyways....as we've seen from other posts, my history is shaky at best.



We also went to see tombs at Saquarra. They were full of pictographs all over the walls. The people I was travelling with who had been to Luxor said it was interesting to see the comparison--the tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor are full of hieroglyphics, instead of the pictoral representations of everyday life.

Finally we went further on to Memphis. Memphis used to be the capital of Egypt, but there is very little left there--just a small outdoor museum. In the museum is a large statue of Ramses


And also a Sphinx. Yes, there is another one, and this one has a nose !