Giza

Even though the holiday started yesterday, officially the G Adventures Egypt & Jordan trip started today. In classic G Adventures style, we were not to spend much time in our starting city.

But this is Cairo, and you can't come to Cairo without visiting the Pyramids of Giza. Our guide, Michael briefed us the night before, but today we were due to visit the pyramids at Giza, including a stop at the Sphinx, followed by a lunch at a location with a view of the pyramids, an afternoon at the Egyptian Museum and then towards the end of the day, climbing aboard the night train towards our next city, Aswan.

Early this morning we all jumped onto our charter bus for this part of the trip, which would be the first of many buses clearly too large for the size of the group it was carrying.

We drove to the west side of the city straight to the car park adjacent to the Giza complex. A few folks exercised the option to go inside the great pyramid, I chose not to, having already visited in 2000. I'm of the opinion that going to the pyramid isn't very exciting, but you should do it at least once.

I wandered round the outside of the pyramid whilst others went inside, only to end up seeing some sort of air show. Airplanes leaving behind smoke trails, sky painting and a bunch of parachuting groups, seemed to be more military than civilian though.

Look closely round the pyramids, if you can avoid the vendors, and you'll see a bunch of wild dogs further up, just hanging out.

Travellers reassembled and the bus took us to the Pyramid of Menkaure. This one is the smallest of the three, but also the least busy. This was the opportunity for some in the group to go on a camel ride, whilst the remainder had a wander around.

Throughout the day, I was aware of the two extra guys who'd been accompanying us since the start of today's tour. Turns out they were Tourist Police, there to protect us and funded by the government. Guess you have to protect your primary industry. Ours was even armed with a submachine gun, but was very discrete about it. They even helped keep the more aggressive vendors away and even helped our rabble cross the road at times.

Once the camels and camel riders had returned we drove to our next stop, a viewpoint that gave us a new perspective. This panoramic view of the pyramids (thats what it's called on google maps anyway), was pretty good for some extra photos and the best place to capture all three pyramids without doing an extreme panorama.

The last stop was to see the cat bodied Sphinx. Just like the largest pyramid, it was pretty busy, especially so because of the small area it was contained in.

There were plenty of tourists imitating cliche 'kiss the sphinx' photos, which do look a bit more bizarre when you take the photos out of context.

After the museum we all headed to the El-Giza train station to catch our overnight train to Aswan via the bottle shop of course. The experience reminded of the time we caught a similar train from Hanoi to Hue in Vietnam. By similar I mean this train was far superior in every way.

In true Egyptian punctuality, the train was incredibly late (many hours), but once aboard we found each carriage complete with two bed cabins, plenty of luggage space, a sink, and a pair of toilets at the end of each section. There was also a dinner carriage, about 4 carriages away.

After a night of responsible drinking, we did actually get some decent sleep, just in time for a challenging breakfast and our arrival in our next stop at Aswan.