EGYPT: THE PYRAMIDS OF GIZA AND THE GREAT SPHINX

Mark Twain described seeing the Great Pyramids of Giza for the first time in 1867 in his book Innocents Abroad:

"At the distance of a few miles the Pyramids rising above the palms looked very clean-cut, very grand and imposing, and very soft and filmy, as well. They swam in a rich haze that took from them all suggestions of unfeeling stone, and made them seem only the airy nothings of a dream--structures which might blossom into tiers of vague arches, or ornate colonnades, maybe, and change and change again, into all graceful forms of architecture, while we looked, and then melt deliciously away and blend with the tremulous atmosphere."

Yes, yes, we could see exactly what he was talking about as we approached them, especially that part about the "tremulous atmosphere." (Is that a euphemism for "smog"?)

We had seen them a few times from a distance as we were driving around the city and were suprised by how they stand out. Cairo covers a lot of area, and the edges of the city creep right up to the pyramids. Rising 481 feet above the desert, the largest of the pyramids, the Great Pyramid of Giza, was the tallest man-made structure in the world for over 3,700 years. (Note: It was replaced by the Lincoln Cathedral in England, built in 1092, which stood at 525 feet. These days the tallest building in the United Arab Emirates, the Khalifa Tower, is over 2,700 feet tall.)

Picture from Wikipedia

Of course, I recognized them right away. They are pretty good copies of the pyramids and sphinx in the town where I live in Southern California:

Photo from here

There are six pyramids at Giza (I'm not sure where the other two are hiding), and altogether they are known as the Giza Necropolis, or City of the Dead:

EGYPT: CAIRO CITY SITES

In his book Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses, Bruce Feiler writes:

"If Egypt is the gift of the Nile, Cairo is the cleanup job left after all the boxes have been opened and all the guests have gone home."

I have to agree. Cairo is a tightly packed and messy city in need of a good cleaning. Because the Cairo Airport is over nine miles from the city center, we saw a fair amount of Cairo through bus windows during both our arrival from Luxor and our way back to the airport for our flight to Jordan, as well as during our driving to the Pyramids of Giza. Most of the pictures in this post were taken via those windows, so be forgiving of an occasional bit of glare.

The capital city of Egypt, Cairo is very densely populated and seems to be composed primarily of apartment buildings that are various shades of brown: sand brown, dirt brown, desert brown, and red-brown:

There is also quite a bit of dirty white, gray white, and smoggy white:

EGYPT: CAIRO INTERCONTINENTAL HOTEL AND THE CAIRO MUSEUM OF EGYPTIAN ANTIQUITIES

With a population of over ten million and ten million more people just outside the city, Cairo is the largest city in the Middle East and the second largest city in Africa behind Lagos, Nigeria. It is also one of the most densely populated capital cities in the world. I was surprised to learn that Cairo was founded in the 10th century AD. I would have thought it was as ancient as the pyramids. The really old city of the region is Memphis, just 21 miles away, which was founded in at least the 31st century BC.

Like other large African cities we've visited (Nairobi, Kenya, and Accra, Ghana), and probably like most really big cities in the United States (Los Angeles, for example), Cairo is a shocking mix of extreme poverty . . .

. . . and over-the-top wealth. Our hotel, the Hotel Intercontinental Cairo, was definitely on the high end of the wealth spectrum:

Picture from here

It was hard not to feel guilty about staying here after seeing some of the living conditions in the city through the windows of our air-conditioned tour bus.