Pyramids in Giza

Today - a Friday which is here in Egypt like our Sunday - my colleague Khaled took me to see the pyramids just outside Cairo in the city of Giza, about an hour by car from my hotel. Khaled who was born, raised and educated in Egypt shared a lot of insights with me, and it is interesting that a fair amount of the knowledge around the pyramids is still food for discussions among archeologists. Most of us in other countries think that the workers were slaves; strongly disputed by most archeologists. Most of us think the building teams of the Pharaos must have used cranes; calculations show that with the heavy stones that must have been almost impossible. When Arabs came north from other areas and started building a city wall around Cairo, they took many of the stones of the outside layer of the pyramids. We need some "fact-checking" on all of this, Mr Khaled. On the next photos you can see the top of one of the pyramids which still has some of the original smoother outside stones.

The other story of Khaled has to do with the large sphinx near the pyramids. It was completely covered by sand hen it was discovered. Khaled says that the nose of the Sphinx was broken off by a canon ball fired on command of Napoleon. Some serious fact checking needed on that story!

There are not a lot of instructions to visitors. You can smoke on the site (and people do), you can throw stones (but people don't do that), but you are not allowed to climb the pyramids.

A lot of the visitors ride horses and camels. They are such fun animals and they can make quite the noise if they don't like something. Khaled noticed a lot more tourism than years ago, which is very good for the cash flow to keep these historic icons maintained. Still more domestic tourism, but let's hope that international tourism will pick up as well again after some very difficult years for Egypt.

I stayed away from a camel ride, as much as this fellow was trying to show me how much fun it is (my stomach is giving me some trouble today, so it was wiser to take it easy). The photo below shows how close by the city of Cairo is from this site. A must if you ever go here and have a few hours.

Afterwards we visited a nice restaurant along the Nile. This city never sleeps! Tomorrow on my way to Amsterdam for a few days of visits with my sisters and friends from University.