We ate at a place called Saqqara Nest before arriving at the Saqqara site. This place was extra special and a tourist / tour guide favorite because it is clean. There's a government health inspector in the kitchen (Maghdi kept telling us that.) More about it here:
Food In Egypt - Part 2: Standard Fare et al
Food In Egypt - Part 1: Bread and Salad
Saqqara - Large city of tombs. It's cool to see that they're still excavating.
Highlight: Step Pyramid
Dashur - Black Pyramid, Bent Pyramid and Red Pyramid
Black Pyramid - we can only see this from a distance, not quite a pyramid yet.
Bent Pyramid - they deemed this unsafe and closed it to tourists a couple of years ago. they were still playing with the angles and decided they had to make it less steep half way.
Red Pyramid - the one that was built before the pyramids at giza. this is the one we went inside of. check out the path of stairs leading up to the tiny entrance in the middle.
Climbing the outside of the pyramid. I fast forwarded the first part because it's pretty boring, the 2nd half shows you how tiny the entrance to the inside is. Yes, that IS me running out of breath after climbing those stairs. Of course, the 'guardian' disregards the giant "No Photo" sign for some 'bakesh'
On the way down the long, dark and narrow pathway and the chambers inside the pyramid. Not much inside as I had expected due to grave robbers back in ancient times. Even if there were stuff in there, it'd probably be sitting in the museum.
Now we know why the locals gave us that reaction when we said we want to go in. Your knees AND back need to be bent the whole way down. I'm sure glad we didn't go in Giza, where there's a lot more people and you can't go at your own speed. We blazed down that hatch. Coming back up, not so much... my knees started to hurt and buckle.
It disgusted me to find garbage inside the pyramid. How hard is it to bring the empty water bottles back up with you!?
Memphis - bunch of statues. We had about 10 minutes to look at everything because they close at 4PM and we got there at 3:45PM.
The other Sphinx
Statue of Ramsis II and a 'guardian' looking for bakesh.
Check out my picture set on Cairo, Egypt
No comments:
Post a Comment