After breakfast (a crazy buffet a lot like the ones in Israel) we met our group and tour guide and had a quick orientation. Everyone in the group seems pretty cool. There are 18 of us including two families of four (grown up kids), a few middle aged couples and a mother and son. We struck up a conversation with a couple from South Africa right away. Others are from California, New York City, Ohio, Montreal and Australia. So far, so good!
Our tour guide's name is Wahleed. He has a masters in archaeology, speaks perfect English and is all around great. He has dubbed our tour group "Isis" (one of the Egyptian goddesses), so we walk around with him yelling, "Ok, Isis, over here!".
It was a day of going on and off the bus. This was good for two reasons. First, we could leave anything we wanted on the bus. Second, the bus was always gloriously air conditioned. Did I mention it's really hot here?
We stopped first at Memphis which was the first capital of Egypt. There isn't much left of the city. What is there is a sort of open air museum, with some sculptures that have survived. There is a smaller Sphinx called the Alabaster Sphinx that has a more intact face than the famous one. The most amazing thing was a statue of Ramases II that was recovered on the site. It's displayed lying flat, instead of standing up, in a building where you can go up to a balcony and look down on it as well as walk around it at ground level. The detail and how well preserved it is is amazing and with it lying down you could get a lot closer to the facial details which would have been way up high normally. These Egyptians had some sculpting skills!
Our next stop brought me right back to one of my first classes at architecture school - "The Building and Thinking of Architecture" - which was basically early architectural history taught by a fiery French woman named Nicole. She was also a studio professor and when she wasn't slamming our " 'orrible" work she lectured us on the glories of Ancient Egyptian architecture (along with other ancient civilizations). As we pulled up to Zoser's pyramid, I was channeling Nicole, nearly hearing her voice describing the place as we sat in a hot lecture hall in the dark, watching slides at 8am twice a week. I never thought I'd get to see the place in person!
Back to the present day, Zoser's pyramid is the first pyramid created. Some call it "the beginning of architecture" because it must have been on of the first built structures to take aesthetics into account. It's a stepped pyramid and as you get up close you can see every individual piece of stone stacked carefully to create it. The stones here are small - not the huge blocks at the Great Pyramids. Around the pyramid are the remains of the rest of the funerary complex. Now, if you thought the things we saw in Israel were old, this stuff is on a totally different scale! We're talking 2700BC for Zoser's pyramid. BC!! 4710 years old!!! It's impossible to even wrap your mind around how long ago that was.
I should describe the areas we drove through to get to Zoser's pyramids and the Great Pyramids later. It's basically a slum area with farm land. Awhile back, the government dug an irrigation canal which is now filled with garbage and creepy looking mutant fish. We actually saw people fishing in it though and a couple people swimming. Yick. All the buildings and shacks look pretty run down and most people are getting around on donkeys. There's no clean water for the people, our tour guide informed us. Very sad and a stark reminder that we are in a third world country.
Next it was off to the main event - the Pyramids at Giza! - with a quick stop for lunch. We had gotten little glimpses of them from the road, and even from outside the cafe but nothing really prepared you for pulling up to the site. We were a little afraid of being disappointed after building this visit up in our minds so much, but don't worry - that didn't happen! Stunning and huge, impossible to fathom how they could've been built and just plain cool - that about sums it up. We were dropped off close to the largest pyramid of King Cheops and had some time to walk around. While back in the day all the pyramids were smooth and covered in polished white limestone, today you see the layer underneath as all of the limestone was long ago stolen away for other purposed. The blocks are enormous - each course is at least 4 feet tall - and they are sort of jagged, with blocks popping out and in. You can climb up a little bit (they've built stairs in) to wear you can pay extra enter the pyramid (we didn't because you have to basically crawl up a narrow passage to get into a chamber with nothing there.)
I really can't do it justice, but we took tons of pictures which you'll all have to see later. One interesting thing is that the land surrounding the pyramids is hard stone, not sand as I'd always imagined. The three pyramids are relatively far apart. We only really walked around the Great Pyramid then took solace from the heat on the bus and drove by the others. There is a "panorama point" where the buses can stop and you can get pictures of all three pyramids together along with some of the smaller ones near by (for the wives of the pharaohs). Everywhere you went there were people trying to sell you things, give you a ride on their camel or have you take a picture with them. It's a little nutty - very persistent people! Part of the experience I guess!
After seeing the panorama point we drove to the lower area in front of the pyramids to see the Sphinx. You can get pretty close to it after going through a funerary temple area. In early modern times, people tried to repair the Sphinx with cement which ended up eroding the limestone, so lately they have been trying to remove the cement and add limestone back. So far they've reconstructed the front paws and some of the sides a bit. Seeing all these iconic monuments is so crazy. I keep telling Nate that it feels a little like Disney World or some other recreation of the real thing. But no, there it is - the Sphinx!! - right in front of you, guarding the pyramids all these thousands of years. Incredible.
That was the end of our sight-seeing for the day and we hopped back on the bus. We made a stop at a nice store selling Egyptian cotton items then made our way to the Giza train station. Tonight's accommodations are an overnight train to the very south of Egypt, Aswan. As if that wasn't adventure enough, we were two hours early for the train, exhausted from our day, with nothing to do but sit in the heat and wait. Suffice to say, it was not the highlight of our trip. What made it worse was knowing that there would be no shower on the train! Finally, two hours and fifteen minutes later we boarded and made our way to our tiny compartment. Some seats against one wall folded down into a bed and another bed folded down from the wall above. There was a small sink and, blessedly, air conditioning. Whew. We were served dinner in our cabin and then our "butler" came back and "turned down" (ha!) our beds. We got some sleep, and it really wasn't that bad. Not that I'd want to do it again or anything...
We made it through the night and were served a breakfast entirely of carbs (a piece of pound cake, a croissant, a roll and a cinnamon roll) and got off the train in Aswan around 8:30am. Day two!
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