On-the-Road Tales

We enjoyed some tasty Hibiscus juice for breakfast along with something similar to Baklava and loaded into our minivan. We were enroute to the Pyramids! Yeah! We crossed the Nile in the relentless traffic and could see them just off in the distance behind some buildings. They are literally cityside. We were joking what the exit sign form the highway would be since you have these massive stone monuments just off to the right so we had a laugh when we saw it actually said “pyramid street”. We got our tickets and it was kinda surreal walking underneath these 5000 year old shapes with camels and desert all around and city skyline in the distance. We went crawling inside the second one into the burial chamber. Very small and hot but fascinating to think who and what must have lain there before graverobbers stole it all. One of the pyramids is pointless since the top used to be pure gold, that was taken and most of the limestone cover that used to give the structure its smooth appearance is gone. We went to see the Sphinx with its broken off nose and small temple. Very neat.

We travelled into Cairo to visit the Egyptian Museum. This behemoth of a building was built about 100 years ago to house over 240,000 pieces of history rescued from various tombs and sites. The amount and variation of items in indescribable. Statues, jewelry, writings, sarcophagus, mummies, heiroglyphics – the list goes on and on. It would take you days to see everything. One can not even imagine how much actually existed before the graverobbers and later the Germans, English etc whose expeditions exported thousands of items back to their museums. Tutankamens reign was a mere 8 years and the treasures buired in his previously undiscovered tomb are invaluable. Another king ruled for 67 years! so one could just imagine the loot in there. There was a replica of the Rosetta stone which led to the eventual translation of the Egyptians ancient script. Amazing.

We collected our stuff and headed to the Giza train station for an overnight sleeper train to Aswan. I was expecting the worse so was pleasantly surprised when we got to our clean 2 person cabins. They had a sink, towels, soap. It was like the Hilton in there…We had an attendant who served a fantastic dinner, nice bottle of egyptian wine and dessert. This was the way to travel. I slept fairly well for the 12 hour journey down the tracks.

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 6:59 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.