Currently lounging by the hotel pool, a well deserved rest after a big day.
I don’t know a whole lot about Egypt, ancient or otherwise. Most of the names our guide mentioned today sounded familiar, though, because of all the schlocky movies I’ve seen over the years – The Mummy, various James Bond films, even Ghostbusters.
After an early breakfast (all relative as we shall see later in the week!) we met up with our guide for the week Wael, and the other nine people in our tour group. We are the youngest I think. Wael’s official title is concierge because he’s looking after all our needs this week as well as teaching us things about the sites we’re visiting. He is a trained Egyptologist.
Our first visit was Giza, the site we can see from our deck. The place was crawling with tourists, especially the biggest one. There are three clustered together, we went inside the third one which still has some of the original covering (limestone?)intact at the top.
I’ll show one photo from each place we visited, otherwise it’ll be too much.
Next was the sphinx. I can’t remember much about the history of this but it’s smaller than you’d think.
Speaking of quantities of people, there are small vendors everywhere you go and they can be quite in your face. In Turkey we were told to say “Thank you, no” in Turkish, but Wael said we should just ignore the hawkers and they will give up, and so they did.
Next up was Saqqara. These are where the OG version of the pyramids are, the step pyramid built by Imhotep for his pharaoh.
We stopped at a couple of factories during the course of the day, ostensibly to learn something about the local textiles but really so we could use the toilets and/or buy something. I must say Rita and I were very tempted by the silk carpets but managed to resist with some encouragement from our partners.
From the toilet stop it was on to Memphis. This stop was all about Ramesses (Google tells me that is the correct spelling, although it looks wrong, doesn’t it?) the second. They found this statue in modern (ish) times (Simon tells me it was some Italian guy in 1820). It’s huge and in great condition. They moved it here and built a museum around it.
Note the number of oval shaped discs over him, these are called cartouches and depict his name in heiroglyphics. I am breaking my rule of one photo per location to show you Wael explaining the cartouche to us.
I’m going to go for broke and show you one last photo. This is an embalming/mummifying table. Note the hole at the bottom to drain the liquids. (Ewww. )
After Memphis it was time to head back to the hotel. Even with an air conditioned bus and an umbrella to screen me from the worst of the sun, the 30+ heat was beginning to tell, and I was starting to feel sick. Must remember to keep my water intake up. It’s very easy to get behind on fluids in this heat, and we’re just not used to having to worry about it.
Off to Luxor tomorrow. Eek.
