Sunday 5 November

Early morning start this morning. But boy are we ready for today. So much adventure. It is amazing how on holidays you seem to have so much more energy. When you need to get up for work- its an effort but when you need to go exploring- you are up rearing to go… well that was the case for us anyway.

We had breakfast and then we were met again by Shamir who introduced us to our personal guide Rashir who is trained in Egyptology who will be taking us to and explaining all of the sites in Cairo. She is amazing. We also had our personal driver Mohamed again, who drove us everywhere.

Today we went to Saqqara, just outside of Cairo and the old City of Memphis where the step pyramid is and the Saqqara Temple.

Visited the Great Pyramids, the sphinx, the museum with the HUGE statue of Ramses 2. and the statue of his wife Queen Hatshupsut- “Hot chicken soup” lol. We rode a camel around one of the pyramids and was able to walk down into the second one, which was a bit of a task- not for the claustrophobic, we had to almost crawl in. It was also good it was a bit cool because it was so warm down inside. We were a bit surpised that it was quite cool… we were still wearing jumpers- and asking when was the sun God Rah that they talked about going to come out?

We saw Cairo in the raw today…. Good thing we didn’t drive- people are crazy drivers, you just have to laugh. You can’t help it. They have no road rules and they have no traffic lights and if they do they don’t work. And if they happen to work by chance- red means go anyway. It is funny. The cars are so old. We laughed coz there was a new car today broken down on the side of the road whilst all of the old cars are zipping around the streets, Ironic.

It is unbelievable how they don’t bash into each other. They have taxi vans that they fill so full of people that people are even hanging out. We saw this guy hanging out of one of these taxi vans get clipped by another car but he acted like it happens all the time. Outside of Cairo a lot of Egyptians live like the ancient Egyptians, they work the fields by hand, live in mud huts, their wealth is not in the possessions that we imagine or treasure it is simply in the land, crops and animals that they own i.e: how many mules, horses, oxen, camel etc that they own.

So we saw a lot of people riding on mules, I want one they are so cute, but the poor things they don’t really look like they were made to run- so when people are kicking them to run they look so uncoordinated it made you half giggle and go “ohhhhhhhhhhh that’s so mean- poor thing” all at once. Today was such an eye opener. One thing that Rasher did say is that in the eyes of these people they don’t believe themselves to be poor. Their wealth is in the things that they have. Most of them prefer to be like their forefathers and work the land by hand instead of using modern accessories like tractors etc. and most of the houses are left unfinished, not because they cant afford to finish them its because that if they do finish them they have to pay tax on them. Whilst they are unfinished they don’t have to pay tax. They are smart people lol. But the explanations given by Rasher made us look with different eyes. Check out our day here...