Monday – October 13 – Port Said (for Cairo)

What an early morning, and this is supposed to be a vacation.  The alarm went off at 4:50am so we could be up, breakfasted and at the meeting place by 6:15.  The reason for the early start was that today was the all day trip to Cairo.  It appeared that everyone on  the ship was going on the same tour, there were 27 full bus loads.  All of the buses grouped up and caravanned from Port Said to Cairo, a drive of about three and a half hours.  The reason for the caravan was security.  We had an armed guard on our bus and several trucks with armed guards circulating among the buses.  Traffic was halted as our convoy drove out of Port Said-a good thing since driving in Egypt makes Naples look fairly calm. 

Our guide was very informative during the whole trip, talking about the people of Egypt and some of both its ancient as well as more recent history. The road to Cairo parallels the Suez Canal for the first several miles.  Driving through the desert with a large ship a few yards away is a bit strange.  Our first stop was in Giza,  to see the pyramid of Cheops.  This particular pyramid is the largest in Egypt and one of the early ones.  In the area there are three large pyramids and six smaller ones.  The smaller ones were for the women, queens and princesses  of course.  One of the more interesting things were all the camel tenders trying to make a living by having tourists ride their animals.  The going price was $1 to sit on the camel and $3 for a short ride.  We chose just to take a few pictures.  A short distance from the pyramids is the Sphinx, where we had only a few minutes to take pictures.  One surprise was that the pyramids are larger than you would expect and that the Sphinx is smaller than one would think. 

Lunch was at the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Cairo, where we sat with about 1,100 other tour-goers and enjoyed a delicious buffet.  This part of Cairo is very different from Giza, where the pyramids reside.  It is sophisticated and cosmopolitan, full of lovely buildings, parks and gardens.  Afterwards, we went to the Egyptian Museum.  Unfortunately there are no pictures as they are very serious about keeping cameras out.  It has the most incredible collection of early Egyptian artifacts, including the entire Tutankhamen collection.  Maxine was particularly pleased to see that the famous golden mask was there (they don’t let it travel any longer even though we did have the opportunity to see it in Los Angeles years ago).

On the way home, we drove along the Nile and observed a very beautiful sunset.   I am not sure if the feluccas (traditional Egyptian sailboats) were actually being used for commerce or just for sport, but they were interesting to see on the Nile.   On the road home, we saw some of the new construction of major housing blocks being built near  Cairo.  Though not as huge as the construction we saw near Shanghai a few years ago, this is still very  impressive.  In spite of the improvements, Egypt is still clearly a Third World country.  Poverty is widespread, and we saw several places where horse drawn carts are still being used for commerce.

Our drive back to the ship took another three hours, and when we finally arrived, it was 8:30pm, the end of a very exhilarating yet exhausting day.