The group I travel with in Egypt was supposed to meet at 8 am for a first briefing and our first day together. The shower was anything else than inviting but I simply had to get washed after yesterday's trip. At least I thought after using this bathroom (in which I didn't know where to put down my stuff, not to mention my tooth brush, because floor, sink and bath tub were all disgusting) nothing can shock me anymore for the rest of my trip... By the way, the hotel room itself was much better compared to the bathroom with the slight weirdness that it didn't have a window but just curtains pulled close in front of a brick wall...

The first person I met today was my room mate Felicity from Australia. She's a lively girl of 25. We went down for breakfast where we met the rest of our group. Altogether we are 15 travellers from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and me, plus our Tour Leader. His name is Vincent, he's +/- 30 and from New Zealand. (...) After breakfast we met for a briefing in the lobby before setting off for today's attraction on the programme, the famous pyramids of Giza. On the way there we were stuck in Cairo traffic again and I could only wonder how all these people do manage to survive their wild rules on the road. Asturian traffic is a saint compared to this chaos and as a duly trained DuPonter I could only think SAFETY SAFETY SAFETY! For example, public buses ride around with their doors open (so do trains by the way) and people hang to any type of vehicle wherever they manage to grasp it. If you want to get on a bus in the middle of a 3-lane street or in a roundabout, simply run along, hop on and hope that nobody else had the same idea at the same spot. In that case, all you can do is queeeeeze!! It took us about 20 minutes to cross Cairo and my first impression of the city was - sorry to say so - dusty, chaotic and dirty. We arrived at the pyramids around 10 am and spent a couple of hours there before moving on to the sphinx which is located a little bit further down the valley. About the pyramids - well, what can I say? They are spectacular and impressive, no matter what some guidebooks might say. I took some pictures (which you can hopefully see posted here as well - if not yet, they'll come) but as it is often the case, photos do not really transmit the magic and fascination of these gigantic constructions in the middle of the desert. Well, not quite in the middle anymore, since Cairo has expanded so much that the outer city limits are just a stone throw away nowadays. Two of the pyramids could be visited inside as well and we went to see the smaller one (Menkaure Pyramid, 62 m) in order to avoid the crowds of the more popular Cheops Pyramid. Inside they are pretty much the same we were told, so it didn't matter. In the end there is not much to see anyway because the pyramids are empty and all you can do is crawl through tiny narrow corridors, climb steep passages and check out small tomb chambers that haven't seen a breeze of fresh air in 4500 years. Nevertheless it was worth the experience. The sphinx on the other hand was a little smaller than what I had expected. I don't know why but somehow I thought it was a HUGE thing but in fact, it is not. Well, it isn't directly small neither, maybe the size of a medium cruise ship. Still, while taking a break with the view on the sphinx, Vincent asked me: "So, how are you?" and all I could say was "Tired and impressed." by the way, we were kind of lucky with the weather because it was the beginning of a sand storm that day, so apart from the annoying bits of dust and very fine sand in the air (and soon pretty much everywhere) it wasn't too hot.

After the visit at the pyramids, we went to a Papyrus museum where we were shown the traditional art of producing papyrus. They had very beautiful papyrus paintings to buy with pretty Egyptian motives but onto which wall should I hang them? Afterwards we had lunch at an Egyptian restaurant and the food was surprisingly good! No problem to get a vegetarian dish and on top of that, I had a freshly squeezed mango juice... hmmm...
In the afternoon we visited the Egyptian Museum. This museum is full under the roof with stone fractions and monuments but has nothing to do with museums I've known so far - there was almost no security and hardly any descriptions of the pieces you could see! Many exhibtion items, specially big statues or sarcophagus, are just standing around and you can touch them without being told off by one of the many heavily armed guards lazily hanging around. Nevertheless, the museum contains some very impressive items, although you probably need a week to check it all out. My personal favourites were the mummies (Ramses II and likewise), plus the treasures of the tomb of Tutankhamun. Simply amazing. Later that day we only returned to the hotel to take a shower and have a drink by the pool. We were assigned "day rooms" where our luggage was stored during the day and where we could use the bathroom. This one was much better than the one before!! The only strange thing was that the ceiling of the bathroom right above the shower consisted of loose wood panels during which I could perfectly see the floor above me - I didn't want to know who actually observed me the other way around...

This evening we took the night train to Aswan, leaving Cairo at 20:45.