The Eastcott Family Blog: Cairo

After flying for over 24 hours we finally made it to Cairo, Egypt. It’s hot, smoggy, sandy and the town is in somewhat of ruins since the revolution but of course it’s still rich in culture and history.

We’ll start with their driving … road rules, signs, speed limits, lanes and driving ages are not important anywhere. Horns rule the road and you can hear them 24/7. People tend to drive wherever they want and park wherever they want, there seems to be no system in place. We’ll now move on to crosswalks, or lack thereof. People walk whenever they want and play Frogger across the busy roads. Even the kids can be seen running across a street through traffic, something they are clearly taught from a young age as a survival trait.

Our first day we just hung around the hostel, walked around the town and visited Midan Tahrir (Tahrir Square) which is where the Egyptian Revolution took place. You can still see the buildings that were burned and other ones covered in rubble from the riots. Of course ask any local and they will tell you they were out there and Egypt is a much better place now. The streets are lined with litter, military or tourism police, feral cats and tons of local street vendors selling anything and everything from underwear to tissues. Things are also incredibly cheap here (which is great for us), a 1.5 liter water will cost about $.30 US and a 1.25 liter Coca Cola will cost about $.80 US. Food also falls under the cheap category, a beef shawarma will cost about $1.50 US and a bag of freshly cooked potato chips will cost about $.25 US. Even a cabbie ride to 3 pyramid sites only cost around $32 US for the entire day.

Our second day, which is just coming to an end, was spent at the three pyramid sites. First the Giza Pyramids, then Saqqara, then Dahshur and the Red Pyramid.

The Giza Pyramids are of course the most famous, the grandfather, father and son along with the Sphinx and 3 sons of the grandfather and 3 sons of the son. Once you get past the first lot of locals trying to sell you souvenirs and camel or horse rides, you continue to get harassed by locals trying to sell you souvenirs and camel or horse rides! Of course once you learn to tune them out you have the pure magnitude of the pyramids. It is amazing to think they are still standing today. We choose to walk the grounds and ended up coming across some tourist police and their official tourist police camels taking a nap atop one of the sand mountains far from the pyramids. It ended up being an awesome ten minutes with them. We took some photos of them, they took some of us and they even let us get on their camels for a quick photo shoot. They offered us some Egyptian ‘Tea’ but we kindly passed and went on to the next viewing platform. We took some more photos and walked back down, we are now very sunburnt but it was well worth the two hours we spent there.

Next, Saqqara, is the ‘Stair Step’ pyramid that was the first one to have the architect design and build a pyramid with his name to it, Imhotep. The pyramid itself was made for King Zoser and while it’s not nearly as large as Giza Pyramids it’s still full of history and was worth the visit. It’s also much less of a tourist trap when it comes to locals selling stuff.

Our last stop was Dahshur and the Red Pyramid. The ride there was through farm land where the roads are shared by cars, horses, camels, people and anything else you can think of. Even the kiddos are put to work at an early moving crops with horses and buggy’s. The Red Pyramid is one of the pyramids that you can go inside to look around, it’s a small place but amazing. Dahshur is the pyramid that has two angles to it. After starting to build they realized it would be too tall so they changed the angle of it halfway through. We didn’t go right up next to it, our cabbie was being lazy and we were both tired. These two were even less of a tourist trap so it was a good way to end the day.

Our last two days we’ll spend at the Egyptian Museum and Islamic Cairo before heading on to Dar Es Salam on Tuesday.