2nd Wonder: Pyramids

The following day Eric and I along with another American from New York book a taxi to take us around to all the Pyramids. Apparently there are hundreds of pyramids in Egypt and only a handful of famous.



The first stop is Dahshur, followed by the Red Pyramid, the Stepp Pyramid, Memphis and finally Giza. I opted for that order so that we could see the most famous one during sunset. I use my KU student ID to get the half price ticket to see Dahshur. In addition everyone had to chip in for a taxi fee to be let onto the grounds.





You can actually go inside Dahshur. The entrance is about a quarter of the way up from the base of the pyramid. The long downward slanting hallway is just at the right height where you can’t really stand upright, instead you must hunch over slightly. In addition to having a low clearance, the hall is also terribly ventilated. A strong smell of stagnant air fills my lungs as I descend slowly hunched over going down into the darkness into what seemed like an endless tunnel. The tunnel leads to a serious of rooms which aren’t really that impressive. Besides the fact that I can now saw I’ve been inside a pyramid in Egypt I really don’t think that the trek was worth it.





The next stop is the Stepp Pyramid. We could actually see the Stepp Pyramid in the distance from Dahshur. Upon arrival we can see clusters of scaffoldings around it. Apparently the Egyptian Tourism board has decided to renovate this site. Memphis is a site of one of the largest statues of one of the Ramseis the something or another, there were a lot. I wasn’t really impressed. It was more of a tourist trap than anything else. We visit another pyramid that’s a little strange looking; I think it was called the bent pyramid. The sides were constructed at two different angles. Half way during construction the builders decided to give the pyramid a more aggressive angle towards the top, thus making it really strange looking.





We hit a traffic jam on our approach to Giza. Luckily our driver did not try to pull the scam where he drops us off in a far away entrance where camel and horse rents charge an arm and a leg to get to the pyramids. This is only place that the ticket person actually looked at my “student” id card. It’s a real University of Kansas ID, it says issued on June of 2003 when I had to replace it. It does not have an expiration date. “This card is finished” he says. I object and say that the date is the “issued on date” but somehow that fails to be communicated. So I try one more thing, I whip out my Kansas Driver’s License. He looks at it, sees the valid expiration date set to 2014 and sells me the student ticket.






There isn’t really much to say about the Pyramids. It was more a “been there, done that” moment. I wasn’t as impressed as I thought I would have been. Sure there big, but I just came from Dubai where you can see the tallest building in the world towering some 70 stories up from just about anywhere in Dubai. I guess the Giza and I just didn’t click. It was impressive, but for me just not as impressive as it seemed to be for everyone else. The constant hassle of people trying to sell you camel and horse rides was pretty ridiculous too.



At sunset, we were trekking pretty far from the main pyramid sights to get a good picture of all the pyramids together. A tourist police on a camel comes by and tells us “the pyramids are finished”. Huh? Five minutes later he finally gets the point across that the attraction is closed at 4:30pm and only if you’ve rented a horse or camel or bought tickets for the lights show can you stay any later. Thus we get escorted off the grounds by a guy on a camel. We take our time and Eric and I are both snapping away as these are the best hours for light. He yells at us and finally make it out of the park but dark.