Today we met our tour guide George. George was cool. He was an Egpytologist who spoke very good english with a slight British accent. He explained to us that Egyptologists have to study for four years before they can be qualified to undertake guided tours. As part of their degree they have to select a language to specialise in and then the WHOLE COURSE is taught in that language. That's right folks. Imagine going to uni, choosing to study Medicine, Law or Engineering and then having to study it in Mandarin, Spanish, Italian, etc. Nuts! One of the perks they get as a tour guide is free entrance to all the archeological sites in Egypt and free entrance to all tourist sites around the world if they visit another city due to their tour guide union. Awesome!
Anyway, as I said, George was cool. We headed off to the Egyptian Musuem where George told us the history of the musuem and then took us inside. We did a bit of a whirlwind tour as we only had three and a half hours in there to look and get some lunch but it was good. The musuem was amazing but it was so higgledy piggledy with stuff kind of everywhere and not really enough room for everything and NO AIRCONDITIONING. You can imagine how awesome the building was with 2000 bodies inside and no airconditioning. Gross. Apparently the government are building a new musuem that they think may be one of the biggest musuems in the world but that's not for a few more years. We weren't allowed to take any photos inside the museum because the Egyptian government banned the use of cameras around Egyptian artifacts because they found the flash was affecting the colour but they couldn't control the tourists using the flash so they've just made a blanket ban on cameras in any sensitive areas.
After the musuem we headed off to the pyramids, for the second time but this time it was daylight! George gave us some history on the pyramids as we drove there so that we weren't waiting inside the bus once we arrived and gave us some advice on some of the scams that the locals try on tourists sometimes.
Steve, Wim and I decided to go into Khufu's pyramid (the second biggest one) so once we entered the area, the bus driver took us to the car park nearest and then we headed to the entrance. The passage way was amazing. The walls were completely smooth on all four sides. They had installed little wooden ramps to help people get in and out otherwise it would have been a bit dangerous to go in.
The passage way was only wide enough for two people to pass and one person to go through comfortably. The roof was quite low for the first 25 metres of the passage (about 1.5 m) so we had to crouch down a bit. The passage way then opened up and we could stand up straight again for about 10 metres before we started heading down a second low roof passage way before it opened up again into another open hall which I could stand up in but Steve and his dad had to tilt their heads slightly (take that tall people!) before we headed into a third low passage way, but this time heading up, into the burial room.
The room was, well, a room. What was amazing was how they made the room. It was one piece of rock, carved and smoothed with an apex in the roof. The old sarcophogus was still there but it was empty. I felt sorry for the poor buggers who had to drag the sarcophogas into the pyramid because it looked heavy and the passage way in wasn't that big!
We had been told by George that we weren't allowed to take photos inside the tomb. Ok, fair enough. This was due to stupid tourists not respecting the 'no flash' rule. While we were down there, it was only us, a guard, and one other tourist. The other tourist asked the guard if he could take a photo, to which the guard said yes after looking around to see if anyone else was there. We joined in the opportunity, but still respected the 'no flash' rule (as the reason they do it is to stop the degradation of the colours in the carvings). The other guy was flashing away (tourists....). The guard held out his hands as we started heading out of the room - nothing is for free I guess. So, we lined the palms of the guard with some dosh and made our way out. As we exited the tomb, some lady was being told to leave her camera at the top. We chuckled amongst ourselves quietly.
At that point, we made our way back to the largest pyramid for some 'free time'. The tour guide recommended walking around the great pyramid, as that's something a lot of poeple like to do. So we took him up on the recommendation. It took us about 15-20 minutes to make it all the way around in the heat. The pyramid was roped off and there were guards watching so that people couldn't climb up the sides. George told us it was because too many people had climbed up and gotten stuck and not been able to come back down, resulting in having to call in helicopters to get them off. On a more morbid note, he also said that some people tried to climb the pyramids to throw themselves off...nasty.
There was a section that you could go up near the entrance of the tomb. There were steps carved out so people could easily go up and it also meant that you could walk a little bit along one of the large pyramid steps. We saw one guy wander too far and get told off by a guard so we stayed within the allowed areas.
We returned to the van and made our way to the Panaroma - a large hill where you can get a great view of the three pyramids in the background, before heading down to the Khufu's temple where the Sphinx was located. George gave us some information on the history of the temple and the Sphinx and then we got to go up a walkway and take some photos of the Sphinx. As you can imagine there were tourists everywhere but it was still cool.
After we finished at the Sphinx, George asked us if we would like to visit a papyrus shop or perfumery. I felt a bit sorry for him as Tina and I both have no interest in perfume but Tina was interested in getting some blank papyrus paper for her artwork so we went to the papyrus shop and learnt how they made the paper. Apparently it's still the exact same process that the ancient egyptians used thousands of years ago. There was some beautiful artwork on the walls but unfortunately no photos so we only have our memories.
We left the papyrus shop and headed back to the hotel. The drive back was horrendously long due to all the traffic that we had to go through. We were pretty tired after a big day - we had started at 8:30 and didn't get back until after 5:00 and it had been extremely hot - so we were pretty disappointed when we got told that we had to be up at 4:30 the next morning to head out to the airport at 5:30. Gross.
So, keeping that in mind we had an early dinner, packed our suitcases ready to go so that all we had to do was get dressed and then hit the hay.
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