Cairo, Egypt - Day 82 - Boots on the Loose

I must admit, as you come over the hill on Cairo’s outskirts, you can’t help but to have your breath taken away not only by the blanket of pollution, but your first glimpse of the silhouette of the pyramids off in the distance. Amazingly the congested highway goes right up to the edge of the pyramids – it’s a wonder they can get those natural looking desert shots of the backside for the postcards.

Pulled up to the Canadian Hostel around noon which is right downtown (yeah, yeah… the hostel was coincidently part of the tour’s itinerary)! First day spent the same as every other city’s first day – relax, then wander around to get your bearings. Cairo is much more pleasant than we would have ever guessed. It’s very modern (much more than I thought), people seem very liberal-minded (they hassle you to a point, but I’ve seen far worse), you can get anything and everything and it’s dirt cheap. The pollution is terrible as expected (bunch of people from the tour got sick and were blaming it) and the traffic makes crossing the street so dangerous it’s humorous (although amazingly we have so far only seen a single fender bender).

Next morning we hired a minivan to drive us about an hour out of town to some pyramids at Dahshur. Turned out to be the very first 2 pyramids built in Egypt! First one was called the Bent Pyramid and was the very first one built; started too steep at 48 degrees (I think) but wasn’t stable enough so decreased the angle to 43 degrees for the top half. Other pyramid was called the Red Pyramid and was the first proper pyramid built. About halfway up is the entrance; climb down a waist-high shaft right to the ground again – hard to breath with an ammonia stench in the air, trying hard to make sure clostrophobia doesn’t kick in! Bit disappointing inside; was hoping for some cool carvings and inscriptions but really nothing there to see. That said Giza (the main one in Cairo) was closed down in the past few years so perhaps we were lucky to have gotten in when we did.

Next couple days were really just spent wandering around town here and there. There is so much to see and do you could spend weeks. For New Years the plan was to “rip it up” at a night club; quickly changed to a boat cruise on the Nile which got vitoed and turned into playing games a the hostel. At 11:30 decided it was bullshit so headed ou to find something better but after walking in circles for 29 minutes, ended up stuck singing Auld Lang Syne in front of the KFC, followed by Oh Canada! Ah well… we’re in fucking Cairo, I think that’s cool enough (plus we seemed to be the only ones in the city acknowledging the moment anyway).

Next morning we headed to the Cairo Museum (unfortunately there are no pics for the blog since you’re not allowed to bring in cameras :(. It immediately struck me how many tourists were there, yet how few we’ve seen walking around the city – there must be an underground walkway from the Hilton or something. There are 160,000 exhibits there… a full week wouldn’t be enough time. Guide took us around for 2 hours at start – 2 things that I thought were cool were the mummified animals (mainly pets), and King Tut’s stuff (basically the entire 2nd floor of the museum).

Words can’t describe seeing King Tut’s mask and sarcophagus. The mask is about 10kg and the sarcophagus is 120kg of pure gold; both are pristine and look exactly like they do in a textboook – I could have stood their and stared at it for an hour (I might do that when we return to Cairo!) Tut’s mummy was enclosed in 3 sarcophagus’, which were in 4 outer boxes to protect it from raiders (7 layers). As noted, the 2nd floor is virtually everything taken from his tomb from chairs, to dolls, combs, and even an intact ostrich feather (about 5000 years old!)

Finding a tomb FULL of stuff from that long ago seems like an amazing benefit for humanity but I can’t help but to feel guilty for our arrogance – what gives us the right to do that? The reason it looks the way it does is because it was protected in a tomb for so long… we’ll be lucky if the feather makes it another 50 years now. Kinda feeling the same about excavating ruins as well (ie. keeping them buried is the only way they’ll last). There’s also the mummy room which costs an extra $20 (which is a lot in Egypt) and has been closed until recently due to the muslims feeling it immoral to show them. Anyway we took a pass since the day was already so long but I plan on doing it when we return to Cairo to meet Alissa.

That was about it for our first go at Cairo; we’ll be returning at least a couple more times so we didn’t try too hard to see everything. Was a little sad leaving some of the people from the tour… had to say all of our final goodbyes on our last night since we were leaving on the 6am bus the next day!