Following our guests arrival on Saturday evening, we got off to an early start Sunday on their Egypt tour. We had arranged for tour guide Roshdy Rashad Khattab of Rashid Tour Egypt to guide us for the next two weeks. We began at the Great Pyramids of Giza.
It is hard to grasp the size of these pyramids, roughly the height of a fifty story skyscraper until you have a human in the picture or are standing next to the first course of stones.
It takes a couple of hours to properly tour these monsters and the Sphinx without even taking in some of the peripheral tombs and the Solar Boat museum. Traditionally, most tours include a stop at the Panorama which is a good chance to take in the Giza Pyramids with minimal background obstacles for a photo.
We next headed south about fifteen miles to the royal burial ground at Saqqara and the Step Pyramid of king Djoser - generally regarded as the first of the Egyptian pyramids.
There are many tombs to be visited at Saqqara. We spent some time looking at one of the newly discovered ones a year ago. This time we took only the "short tour" but saw plenty of color in the wall drawings.
Along the way we stopped for lunch at a typical tourist restaurant in the area for an excellent lunch with freshly baked bread.
As the day drew to a close, we headed back into Giza to the railway station where we waited for the southbound overnight train to Luxor. Egyptian trains are not easy to sort out at the station. Local trains mix with express trains. Trains frequently run late. There is no master schedule board or English on the P.A. system. You are probably going to need help!
We were booked into a compartment on a sleeper car. I got the top bunk and actually slept most of the night. Dinner was served shortly after we began moving - we were barely beyond the Ring Road,
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