Cairo, Egypt.
Today was my last full day in Egypt, so I
set off to the pyramids.
You all know that they are great, so I’m
not going to bother to tell you how great they are, except to say that they are
great.
What is less known about the pyramids of
Giza is that they sit smack bang in the middle of a Cairo suburb.
There is a metro station there. The romance
of visiting the pyramids is kind of lost when you jump on a 7am train, packed
with office workers, to get there.
When you do get there the fist thing you
notice, except for how huge the things are, is how much damage the revolution
in Egypt has done to the local tourism industry.
As I was leaving the site I estimated that
20% of the people there were touts. And they were fierce, you couldn’t turn
around with out having a little sphinx or plaster pyramid shoved in you face.
The poor bastards were desperate.
My tour guide wasn’t too worried though;
this probably has something to do with the amount of hash he smokes. At one
stop of our tour, he rolled a joint the size of my index finger. It couldn’t
have been much later than 10 in the morning.
On my way home that afternoon a young guy
approached me in the street and asked me if “Tahrir Square was good or bad?” He
was talking about the revolution. I told him that I thought it was good, but it
had scared off all the tourists.
He wanted to know when the tourists would
come back. I told him I had no Idea.
Anyway the pyramids are fantastic, everyone
should come and see them.
 |
| Yep, they look just like they do on TV. |
 |
| Totally amazing. |
 |
| Tourists pose, holding the sphinx's head. |
 |
 |
| Tourists; ready for anything. |
