Day 44..PYRAMIDS, CAMEL RIDE, JEEP SAFARI!

Day 44, July 28th:

Egypt Day 2!

This morning I awakened from my awesome night of sleep around 06:00 in order to shower, eat breakfast, and round up the troops before heading to the bus around 07:00 for our Jeep Safari and Camel Ride SAS trip.  Today’s group for the adventure consisted of Danielle, Heather, Mindy, David, Molly, Megan, Julie and Carmen.  What a great group of people to go explore the desert with!  The bus left around 07:30 and we had a long 3-hour bus ride to the Giza Plateau, right outside Cairo, Africa’s largest city.  The entire bus was out like a light after hearing 10 minutes of our tour guide’s history lesson.  She finally realized that everyone fell asleep so she stopped talking to us until we got about 10 minutes away from the pyramids. 

From miles away, you could see the Great Pyramid in all of its beauty sitting on top of the world for all to see.  It was absolutely stunning!  You always see it in pictures and movies; however, you ain’t seen nothing until you stand at the base of the pyramid and look up!  It is massive!!!  On the other hand, it is still short enough that I could touch the top, put my sunglasses on top of it, and even make it wear a hat.  I even have pictures to prove it!  It was so much fun!  There are three main pyramids in Giza and we got to see all three of them.  (In a whispering voice…) “I got to see one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World!!!!!”  It was pretty freakin’ remarkable!  Just think about how the Egyptians got all of those huge @$$ rocks up to the top of the pyramid billions of years before modern machinery even existed!  We then proceeded down the valley to see the Sphinx!  It was actually not as enormous as I had expected, but it was still pretty large.  It sits down in a little valley/hole so that it looks like it is sitting at ground level.  Pretty neat huh!

After getting a glimpse at the pyramids and the sphinx, we headed to the Sakkara Country Club to have lunch.  Since we can’t eat anything with raw vegetables, dairy products or water, our choices at for lunch were slim.  They consisted of rice, pita bread, beef in gravy, spaghetti and baklava for dessert.  What we actually could eat was really good.  It was just upsetting that we couldn’t eat more because the entire buffet looked amazingly delicious. 

After lunch, we boarded the busses again and headed towards the world’s first monumental stone building, the Step Pyramid of King Zoser.  It was pretty cool too!  They weren’t experts at building things back in those days, so you can actually see that they had to change the height and angle of the steps on one side to meet the other side.  It is still an awesome pyramid.  We all also made a step-human pyramid in front of the Step Pyramid!!! Beat that!!!  We had a great time! 

We then headed back to the Sakkara Country Club for our Jeep safari and camel ride.  This was definitely the best part of the day!!!  I have never had so much fun in my life!  The 4x4 Jeeps full of either 4, 6, or 8 people drove all over the desert at high speeds going up and down the sand dunes, while spinning all over the place.  It was sooooo much fun!  Those sand dunes are HUGE too.  I can’t believe some of the hills we went up!  So much fun!!!  We also went up towards the Giza Pyramids again and then over to the Step Pyramid too.  We could see both at once!!!!  It was absolutely amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  The Jeeps then took us over to where we meet our camels, which took us for a 20-30 minute ride back to the Country Club.  My camel was named Michael Jackson.  It was actually really easy to ride the camel, but I thought it was weird that there was only a place for your foot on one side of the camel.  It was not really uncomfortable, nor was it as bad as everyone hyped it up to be.  The camel didn’t smell and it didn’t have any fleas!  It was pretty neat.  The coolest part was when the camel stood up and laid down so I could get on and off. 

We then got back on the bus and headed back into the city of Cairo; however, we jumped off the bus there because we wanted to spend the night in Cairo so we could explore the next day.  We walked around the corner to where all of the other SASers were staying and they got us a taxi to our hotel and gave us a map of the city.  We stayed at the American House Hotel in downtown Cairo.  It had a great view of the city streets from the balconies.  All 7 of us got 3 rooms to share; however, Heather, Molly and David decided that they were to good to stay with us in our $11 per night hotel, so they left and went back to the 5-star Mena House with the other SASers.  That means that the 4 of us ended up with 3 rooms that could sleep 11 for the 4 of us.  We all decided we wanted to all stay in the same room for safety so we chose the Obama Suite!  It had 4 beds and an in-suite bathroom rather than a hall bath; however, there was no shower curtain on the shower and it didn’t have a fully functioning showerhead (we had to hold the showerhead together to shower)!!!  Oh well!  That made it more interesting!!!  I mean it was only $11 and it was the highest rated hotel in Cairo besides the 4 or 5 star hotels.  After checking in and discovering that half of our group didn’t want to stay with us in the hotel, the four of us headed out in search of some food.  We walked for a little while and didn’t really see anything, but suddenly we stumbled across a mall so we went in search of the food court.  We ended up ordering chicken fingers and fries from a restaurant; however, they were raw when they showed up at the table.  Danielle and I ended up just going and ordering chicken fingers again from KFC.  This time they were cooked properly, so we ate and headed out in search of some snacks and bottled water (so we could brush our teeth…).  We then took our snacks up to the room and hung out on the balcony because it was much cooler outside than it was in the room.  5 other SASers were staying in the Carter Suite next door to us, so we ended up all hanging out and talking with them for hours.  It was a lot of fun!  We finally went to bed around 1 am.

As a side note, I would like to talk a little bit about all of the weird stuff we saw along the way today.  For example, the dead horse in the river full of trash separating the two lanes of the road.  Another example is the man pulling a woman up by her hair next to the side of the road as he kicks her and lets her fall back to the ground before doing it again and again.  It was a very nice place!  I have some pictures to show you how beautiful it was!  I mean I don’t have pictures of the woman or the horse, but I do have many pictures of the dirtiest and trashiest places on the planet!!!! It was so disgusting.  Egypt is the filthiest place I have ever seen in my life!  It is like living in a trash dumpster.  Alexandria is the “RESORT CITY” of Egypt and it is even so disgusting.  As I mentioned yesterday, the water is totally nasty near shore and it is full of garbage.  Even the beaches are filled with trash, but the locals are all hanging out at the beach in their full body coverings.  This is definitely one country I don’t think I will be visiting again! 

They also do not spend any effort on the tourism aspect of Egypt.  There were only two other ships in Alexandria the entire 5 days we were there: a Chinese military ship and one cruise ship.  In the other countries, there were more than 2 ships docked at all times besides our ship.  For example, Barcelona had at least 5 other ships docked at all times and Piraeus had 3 but there also were a lot of ships anchored off the islands.  What a difference!