I am in Misr, who would have thought. As a kid, I always thought of Egypt as an exotic and mysterious place with lot of weird and fascinating history. It was a mythical place where amazing and strange things happened. A place with a lot of interesting stories to tell. Pyramids, mummies, Pharaohs and whatnot. Now here I am sitting in the capital city Al Quairah popularly known to the English world as Cairo. The city on Nile. The place where civilization started. Of course staying in The Grand Hyatt, Cairo helps. Yahoo!! Amazing view from my hotel room balcony. The Nile, Cairo tower, a couple of bridges and what not. Nice. I am going to enjoy this.
Now that I have actually landed in Cairo, I decided to go visit the pyramids and see what the fuss was all about. First thing to notice, yes they are huge. Second thing to notice, they are still standing and in not too bad a shape. Being the adventurous guy that I am I decided to take the a horse ride around them. Of course this can also be attributed to my being very gullible but that would be totally wrong. So here I am sitting on a horse for the first time in my life wondering when the horse will decide that it does not like my smell or that I am too heavy or any such things that horses use to decide which specimen of humans they don’t like and throw me down. I first thing one notices when riding a horse for the first time is the amount of shaking and stirring. The horse owner happily referred to it as a natural massage, yeah right, massage is what I would need the next day when I wake up and find my self stuck in a crooked position which looks very funny/stupid unless you are on a horse. Thus began my trip around the pyramids on the taxi of the desert. My guide started telling me about the pyramids. This “telling” somehow included a lot “All the pyramids are made of the same stone, stone Alabaster” and reminding me of how much fun I was having because he was giving me his best trip. So, I went around the pyramids on a horse, during the middle of the day in the month of May right in the center of the desert. The benefit of being on a horse was that I did manage to cover a lot more ground than I would have otherwise.I saw all the nine pyramids from all the sides. There was a particularly nice vantage point from where all the pyramids appeared in a line, I would not have reached that place on foot. Another benefit of having a guide was that he showed me some of the temple ruins that were a little away from the pyramids. As soon as you enter these temples or the pyramids you realise what bloody showboats these pharaohs were. The living chambers in the temple are small. Very small. I am not claustrophobic but I am pretty sure it was a good place to start being one. Some how all the living quarters in the temples were down some kind of endless hole. These ancient Egyptians were a weird lot. One good thing that came out of the horse ride was that I lost one kg. No, actually I did. If I could do that for a couples of weeks I would get in perfect shape. What with the natural massage and all.
There seemed to be a lot more people around the Sphinx. Another benefit of having a guide was that I was able to get inside the Sphinx without buying a ticket. Woohoo!! Of course he later took me to his shop and slickly made me 250L.E. lighter in exchange for some funny smelling “flower extract”. At least I got out of buying his papyrus art. It is interesting how many people in Egypt know India by Mr. Amitabh Bachchan. I think more people in Egypt watched “Khuda Gawah” than in India. Also people do ask your religion a little more often. The shopkeeper’s daughters seemed more interested in Mr. Shahrukh Khan though. It seems I have dimples like him. Hmmm… who would have thought. Another thing that many Egyptians mentioned was how similar the cultures of Egypt and India were. My canned reply to this observation was “Yes yes of course, very” which seemingly satisfied them enough. Came back to hotel and had a troubled night of sleep. Perhaps because of the jet lag or because of all the “Egyptian action” in the desert. My next tourist activity was to go to the Al Tahrir square. It is the kind of the city center. Of course standing there and looking around one notices the KFC, the McDonald’s etc. Suits me just fine. None of the local restaurant owners seem to be able to speak any kind of English at all. Actually, after a lot of highly scientific experimentation I came to the conclusion that more Egyptians speak Hindi than English. Almost every body knew “Kaise ho?”. Although all this Hindi talking got me into buying some papyrus art after all. On my last day, I visited the Cairo museum, which I heard was one of the biggest in the world. It was. I roamed the corridors north of six hours. Came out so exhausted that I had to cancel all my further touristy plans. But it was a good visit. All my tourist work done, I came to the airport to catch my very human friendly timed flight ,4:50 A.M.. Immediately upon entering the airport I got a feeling of being in a typical Indian railway station. People sitting every where. Kids crying. No space to walk and a lot of noise. But once you manage to get checked in, the international departure terminal is quite nice. Good bye Egypt. So long.
