The pyramids, center of Cairo’s tourism, were the place where I got the full experience of aggressive touts. In traffic a quarter mile away from the entrance, people would run into the busy street and along side my speeding taxi window senselessly yelling prices and waving merchandise as if I would tell the taxi to stop so I could buy stuff that is available everywhere. It did not bode well for when the taxi actually stopped. My taxi, arranged by my hostel, was mine for the whole day for $25. No bus hassles, no taxi bargaining, and I got valuable tips such as to ignore the guys asking for your ticket at the pyramids themselves; you only need to buy a ticket at the gate unless there is a special tour. These con men stand in the entrances to the tombs/temples and tell people that they have to buy another ticket to get in. They are very stern and demanding and completely convincing if you did not know better. I politely brushed them off only to have them “get upset” that I was going in without a ticket.
The taxi stopped at his choice of camel services, of course. What I did not expect was for him to tell me to take as much time as I wanted and not to listen to the pleas of my tour guide to hurry. They want to get it over as soon as possible to get another customer. I paid for the full tour of the Giza plateau and sure enough the guide tried to give me the short tour. I was insistent on seeing what I came to see.
There were some places that the camels could not go and the guide said I had five minutes to look and come back. Ha! Ha! One of those places was the Giza pyramid with the Royal Boat Museum beside it. When I got back to the camel and guide after an hour, he was annoyed, the guide that is, camels are always annoyed. I humorously insisted that I only took 10 minutes and did not know what he was talking about. He gave up on hurrying me further. By the time we got to the sphinx, I was getting tired of him telling me that I would have to tip him at the end of the ride so I told him that every time he asked, his tip was getting smaller. He stopped asking.
The Giza plateau is an amazing place that would have been really quite a sight before the pyramids were plundered for stone. The pictures do not do justice for the size of the pyramids. They are huge! To think of the work it was to drag those stones through the sand is unbelievable. I went into a couple of the tombs of the smaller queen’s pyramids, ignored the con men at the entrances, and was thankful that I am not claustrophobic because the tunnel to the tomb is about a meter square and about a 45 degree angle down. Those tombs are not spectacularly decorated and only have a few rooms with simple monochromatic hieroglyphics. The stone sarcophagi are huge and had to have been placed as the pyramid was built. The strange thing about Egyptian tombs is that they are hot even though they are far underground. The heat combined with the perspiration and breath of all the tourists makes for a stuffy tomb; not a place to hang out and relax out of the sun as I had hoped. In my three and a half hours there I easily drank three liters of water.
At the end of the day, the guide got a very small tip due to his irritating ways and lack of information about the site, and my taxi driver got a big tip for actually caring about saving me money and working hard to make sure I enjoyed myself. He even had an ice cold Coke for me (free) when I got back from the camel ride. It was a good day of seeing one of the wonders of the world, experiencing the good and bad of a culture, and sweating like a pig.
