Onto the coach with our tour guide Shabib, or Shmameem or Sabeema or Savolkswagon or something like that. I tried hard but failed to get his name after many repeat attempts - he was a nice bloke too so I didn't want to offend... He told us the agenda was thus:
Museum first stop instead of the pyramids, due to cloudy conditions - the afternoon would see clearer skies and make better for the photography. It's 100LE per adult entry to mummy room - (so prob wont go in there).
Nile cruise
Hard Rock Cafe
Papyrus Institute
Pyramids & Sphinx
7.30pm flight home
We had terrible traffic due to the Egyptian President coming from / going to the airport - he lives quite close apparently. All side roads are blocked off... There are men on the roofs looking like FBI agents. They go all out for this guy.
Cairo is a built up city but we didn't expect it to look quite so run down. Between the shiny, well kept hotels and churches, there are a lot of shabby high rise dwellings. It was also overcast and smoggy, the air was thicker and harder to breathe here than in Sharm. The traffic is so bad and the constant horn blaring is a nightmare.
Some facts:
3 deserts: Western desert, Sinai desert, Sahara desert = 96% of total landmass in egypt is desert. All of the population (80m) live in 5% of all the land. Most of the people working in Sharm are originally from Cairo.
Nile is longest river in world and runs south to north (only one in the world that does).
First stop, the Museum. No cameras of any kind allowed so no pics. Excellent explanation of history of the royal families, mumification, sarcophagus, pyramids and more.
Saw the statues of the first ever pyramid builder and others for what seemed like every Egyptian that lived at that time. There were 10s of thousands of artefacts, everywhere on every wall, nook, cranny and crevice. Sometimes when you thought you were stood next to a decorative pillar, it was the leg of a 10 metre tall statue of King Tall-ifus and his wife Queen Nefer-mind.
It's so rammed full and they have thousands more artefacts never before seen, they are building another museum double the size, nearer to the pyramids. This place is huge so the new one will be jaw dropping. The guide said if you stop for two minutes at every item 24 hours a day, it would take six months to see everything.
Lots on Tutankhamen Inc his pants and flops (what some Egyptians call sandals). Saw his burial chamber containers: 3 boxes inside one another and in those, 3 sarcophagus inside one another, the innermost containing his mummified body. Stood face to face, 3 inches from his golden mask - amazing. He was a child king, ruling from the age of 9 and died suddenly & unexpectedly around 18 years old. He liked hunting a lot but his chariot overturned and he smashed his head on a rock. Two weeks later he was dead from Malaria, which is why his tomb was unfinished. It takes 70 days to mummify each body so, if someone chuffs over unexpectedly, the clock is ticking and whatever is unfinished in the tomb stays that way. I guess things start to smell pretty bad in the heat...
We went to the animal mummification room, which was bizarre and creepy. They mummified anything... Dogs, cats, birds, horses, scarabs, fish, monkeys, snakes and even crocodiles - they were all there. Creepy.
It's difficult to describe the scale of the place, you really have to go see it.
More in part 3...
Bye for now!
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