From Amman, Jordan, we took an early morning flight to Cairo, Egypt. We were spending a day in Cairo as a quick layover on our way to Luxor, Egypt. We left our luggage in the airport and headed out to meet our tour guide for the day.
We left the airport and headed out into the crazy Egyptian traffic. We have never seen anything like it. It appears to be chaos, they don’t abide by the lanes on the road, there are 3-5 people traveling on a motorcycle at a time and the drivers constantly honk at each other…not sure exactly what they are communicating??
As we approached the Pyramids, we passed the new Cairo Museum which is under construction. We were told it’s been under construction for several years with no end in site.
We arrived at the pyramids, which we were surprised to see are right outside of the city…not in the middle of a vast desert as we had pictured. They are absolutely massive, even larger in person than you can possibly imagine. We were able to climb onto them and walk across the lower levels. It amazed us that there were people climbing all over these sacred structures. We opted not to go inside the pyramids, because we were going to be going into the tombs in the Valley of The Kings the next day.
There are three large pyramids and several smaller pyramids which can be seen here. Also located here is the Sphinx, which is in front of the large pyramids.
After we left the pyramids, we visited the current site of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. We were able to view artifacts, hieroglyphs, and mummies.
We then went to lunch. Our tour guide took us to a local restaurant which was funnily enough called Onion Rings Cafe. There were no onion rings on the menu (that we saw) and our guide ordered us a selection of local middle eastern cuisine. We got to sample kofta, baba ganoush, Egyptian bread, and marinated chicken. After a delicious Egyptian meal, we headed back to the airport for our evening flight to Luxor.
