Today started really well. We woke up refreshed and raring to go well before breakfast so we had plenty of time to get ready for the day. Breakfast was amazing. There was a full English Breakfast Buffet with eggs, sausage, grilled tomatoes, back bacon, baked beans and toast. There was also a full German/Eastern European buffet with all kinds of meats, cheese, pickles and olives. I especially like the Egyptian soft cheese which is something like a cross between a goat cheese and a soft fresh mozzerella with a very nice subtle tanginess. In addition there was a full Oriental breakfast buffet with fowl mesdames, couscous, and several other meat and vegetable dishes as well as a huge bar with fresh pastries and homemade jam, a yogurt and cereal bar, and if that is not enough an omelet bar with a dedicated chef. Ok, I feel spoiled and I haven't even seen anything yet.
Here are some pictures of the lovely Movenpik hotel in the daylight. If you notice in the background of the second picture you can just see the Great Pyramid at the end of the row. It looks pretty subtle in this picture, but believe me in person, it is all you could see as soon as you walk ut of the hotel. The first picture is of the lovely outside Patio of our room. Unfortunately we may not get to use it it because it is actually pretty cold here, colder than Austin actually, and I am really glad I have my jacket.
We packed up in the minbus and drove about and hour south of town to Saqqarah. So we got to drive through and see more of Cairo in the daylight. OK, I have to say so Cairo is one humongous dirty city. There are over 24 million people in Cairo now, and the city infrastructure is totally not capable of supporting the load. It is a really interesting mix driving through it. Here are a couple of examples of the things you would see out the window.
The most characteristic sites are the irrigation and transportation canals that come in from the Nile. The city government is actually in the process of removing them and filling them in with gardens, but currently they are construction site/trash heaps as shown in the picture above. The second thing you notice is that all of the buildings are left unfinished. We heard a couple of explanations of this, one of which is that it was a custom among families to leave the top floor unfinished and build on as the children grew up and needed space. The other less picturesque explanation was that property taxes increase when the buildings are finished and so no one finishes their buildings. The other amazing thing is the traffic. On a marked two lane roadway you will have 4-5 "lanes" of traffic along with assorted animals and pedestrians. We were continually astonished that we managed to make it to our destinations.
Further out of town the landscape became more green as we got into the farming area near the Nile. There were also a lot more animals and picturesque tradesmen such as fruitsellers, charcoal burners, etc.
Ancient World Tours is taking us to Saqqarh first so that we can see the development of Pyramid building. The Step Pyramid at Saqqarah is the first step in the Pyramid building process. Before Pyramids, The Ancient Egyptians built their tombs in rectangular flat roofed buildings called Mastabas. The Step Pyramid is actually a series of Mastabas built on top of each other and diminishing in size. Like many other sites in Egypt, the Step Pyramid is not just a single structure but actually a huge complex with all kinds of Archeological sites everything from Old Kingdom Egyptian to Greek and Roman temples.
Of course the first thing you see driving up is the Pyramid looming over the hill, but then to enter the site you drive up to the gates of the enclosure which are very intimidating. We were the first group at the site and so we got to have it all to ourselves for the first hour or so. The complex was built for the Old Kingdom Pharaoh Djoser by the famous architect Imhotep (I have no doubt that he was the inspiration for the guy in the Mummy movie, but as far as the history books go there was no king killing, or subsequent undead highjinks.)
After the impressive Zigzag gate, we came out through a Hypostyle Hall (hall of columns) into the main complex. This cool panorama that Jim shot gives a better idea of the scale of the complex.
There are archeologists currently working on the Pyramid to reinforce the bottom step, because in the time since the pyramid was build people have been robbing stones from the bottom layer for other construction projects and the weight of the upper layers is becoming too much for the remaining stones. The archeologists plan according to Islam, our guide is to actually restore the white limestone casing that used to cover the bottom step as well. We were not able to go inside the Pyramid, but inside there are some amazing walls of faience tiles of which we later saw examples in the Imhotep museum on another part of the site. None of the museums in Egypt will allow photographs any more but I found this picture online of the walls from this egyptian monument website which is fantastic. There are 2 miles worth of tunnels under this Pyramid that have been mapped so far, and many of the rooms within those tunnels are still full of artifacts. Amazing!
As we left the pyramid and went around the backside we ran into what we would soon come to realize is the ubiquitous line of Camel drivers, "guides", souvenir sellers, beggars and various other people who want to take your money who hang out at every Egyptian tourist site. You learn that you just have to make your way through them saying "No Thanks"every ten seconds and refusing to make eye contact or engage in conversation. Unfortunately at out first encounter, innocent that I was I ended up asking a camel driver if I could take his picture. Somehow I was the one who ended up on the back of the camel which was a terrifying experience. Camels are dirty, freaking tall, and they make noises like they are possessed. Don't ask how much money Jim had to pay to get me down. But anyway it made for a great picture and hilarious video which will eventually be linked here.
Around the back of the Pyramid we saw where Khaemwese one the sons of Ramses II had actually done some restoration to the Pyramid and monuments in the New Kingdom period. We walked down a long walkway (the Causeway of Unas) and saw where full size ships had been buried as part of the funerary equipment. Ok, so it's a hole, but a really big, cool ship-shaped hole. They actually have a similar ship that survived in a museum at Giza behind the Great Pyramid.
We spent a coupe more hours exploring the Mastaba tombs of Mehu, Meruka, Idut, Kagini, and Ti. Of course we weren't allowed to take pictures of any of them, but we began to learn about egyptian art and funerary practices from the remaining wall carvings. As we were wandering between the tombs a sandstorm started blowing up and so we were running from tomb to tomb to avoid the weather. I was very glad I had worn a headscarf like the Egyptian women because it protected me from the sand very well. Finally they put us back on the bus and drove us over to the nearby Pyramid of Teti which looks like a big pile of rubble on the outside but which we were able to go down into and saw our first sarcophagus. Then we had to hike our way back to the bus through the sandstorm. As we were coming over the hill I managed to catch this picture of my cute husband in a very Indiana Jones moment. 
Most of the rubble you see on the ground is actually potsherds from hundreds of years of history. This, we would learn, is the amazing thing about Egypt. Almost every site you go to, everywhere you step are potsherds like this. You can lean over anywhere and pick up something from Greek or Roman times. Of course you can't take any of it home, because they don't allow you to take anything over a hundred years old out of the country, to try and preserve their heritage and discourage antiquity robbers.
We stopped for lunch in a wonderful countryside restaurant on the way back to Giza. Stupidly, I didn't get a card and almost immediately forgot the name of the place. It was a wonderful buffet of traditional Egyptian specialities and very good. Because I was wearing the headscarf, a lot of the people who worked at the restaurant thought I was Egyptian and they were very friendly. I had a particularly nice time talking with the school girls who were the restroom attendants. Unfortunately they were the attendants for both the female and male restrooms, and Jim did not find them nearly as amusing as I did.
After lunch we drove back to Giza ahead of the sandstorm. We managed to get to the site just in time to get a few pictures of the Pyramids before it blew in.
Our guide took us to a place on the Great Pyramid near the entrance that tradition has was dug by one of the Arabian kings around 1000 AD. There was a fascinating place where two of the stones had been separated and you could see the stone mortise and tenon holding them together.
Then as the storm was really bowing up and you almost couldn't hear he let us go on our own for free time. We tried to find the ship museum on the backside of the Great Pyramid so that we could see the giant funerary ships they dug out , but there was so much wind and sand, and so many tall ruined walls of the complex that we couldn't find the entrance to the museum, only see the wall of it. Here is a Panorama of the Plateau in the storm looking toward Cairo.
So we kept walking along the road and eventually came around the corner where we could look down the backside of the hill and saw the Sphinx. We wanted to try and walk to it, but the wind was so strong, and we were running out of time so we held on to each other and made our way back to the bus. It was amazing, when we got on the bus and closed the door, it was like someone turning off a very loud stereo because the wind was so loud, and we stood there dropping sand everywhere. I think this picture gives the best impression of what it was like.
So we begged our guide if we could take the bus down to the Sphinx, which he assured us was the next stop on our agenda. We hit the Sphinx in the full height of the storm, and all we were really able to do was get a couple of pictures from the roadway, but it was still really cool to see it. They are doing a lot of restoration work on the statue itself and the temples at the base of it.
Anyway, we finally gave up and headed back to the hotel early. When the bus let us out, Jim and I stopped off at the room to drop our stuff and pour the sand our of our shoes (into bags to take home for our friends who had asked for sand from Egypt.) We then went back to the front of the hotel to the lovely French cafe and had coffee and a sour cherry tart that was wonderful. Afterwards it was time to go back and try to rid ourselves of the rest of the sand. I immediately fell asleep, while Jim went souvenir hunting at the hotel gift shop we had seen the night before.
It was a very cool shop, and so when he came back later and I was awake we went back together. Shopping in Egypt is very strange. There has been a huge influx of cheesy souvenirs from China and Japan and so it is kind of hard to actually find Egyptian made goods. And then of course there is the "flexible" pricing. Just for the record, my husband and I completely suck at bargaining. sigh... But we were able to find some interesting scarab beads and some lovely little carved limestone fish and ducks. I also got a book on Arabic, because it is a really fascinating language. Aurally it seems to have a lot in common with French in some ways, but the structure and grammar are very unique among the languages I have studied.
We had a lovely dinner in the Thai restaurant at the hotel. We intended originally to go back to the main hotel restaurant, but when we came down a bus of german tourists had come in and the restaurant was packed and very loud, whereas the Thai restaurant was empty and blessedly quiet. It turned out to be an very lucky thing because we had the best meal of the entire trip that night with a sizzling shrimp dish, with incredibly fresh vegetables, Tom Ka Ga soup with chunks of fresh lemon grass and coriander, and lovely fresh fruit for desert. It was a lovely way to spend the evening. When we we finally got back to the room we immediately fell asleep because the day was so long and exhausting.
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