The Pyramids & The River Nile today. 

A little recent bit of history I know about where we are now…  One of the secrets of World War II was recently unclassified by the British.  Winston Churchill tasked a professional magician named  Mr. Jasper Maskelyne to find a way to protect the port of Alexandria from German bombers.  Maskelyne and a group known as the Magic Gang built a fake port 3 miles west from the real one.  By enforcing a lights out policy in Alexandria and lighting up the fake port the Germans were totally fooled and the true port of Alexandria remained open.  They never could understand why their daylight reconocence never showed damage after an air raid.  Magic baby…

The moment we entered the west harbor of Alexandria, Egypt we knew we were some place different.  The harbor is littered with sunken and abandoned ships.  As we approach our dock, a small boat with a loud siren comes out to meet us.  It’s 6am and this little boat is screaming away right next to our ship. Good Morning…

This is one of the major stops on our trip and defiantly the longest tour we’ll be taking. We need to pick-up our passports which have now been stamped by Egyptian authorities who came aboard earlier.  We need to have our passports with us at all times while in Egypt and the Egyptian authorities check everyone’s passport who leaves the ship.

We board our bus and travel about ½ mile to a large building with lots of soldiers.  Here we must get off the bus and be scanned to insure we don’t have a fever as part of their H1N1 flu limiting effort.  Finally we pile back on the bus and start our 3 hour ride to Cairo, Africa’s largest city.  

As we approach Cairo we can see the pollution that hangs over the city and the tops of the pyramids.  We pull up to the pyramids and as soon as we exit the bus, the people selling stuff are on us. When you walk anywhere, there are hundreds (I’m not kidding, hundreds) of people approaching you to sell you something you neither need or want.  Their on you like white on rice and they defiantly invade your personal space.  Take a picture of them and they want a dollar, maybe they will point to the best spot to take a picture, that’s a dollar too.  My personal favorite is they charge 5 dollars to get your picture with a camel and its smiling driver.  But wait, it’s free to get on the camel for a picture.  The catch is how much it will cost you to get down off the camel.  Unless you can jump, it could cost you as much as $100!

The cruise line also warned us guys that men might approach us offering to buy our wives and daughters.  I’m a quick learner and know the first thing to do is to immediately establish if he’s talking euros or dollars.

You can just feel the difference between Europe and Africa. Here in Africa or at least in Egypt, there are few rules especially where traffic is concerned.  Traffic lights are rare and even rarer are ones that work and a red one is only a suggestion to stop.  No cars are inspected and many don’t have license plates.  There is no such thing as a one-way or stop sign.  Many cars and trucks don’t use their lights at night and I don't believe there is an Arab word for blinker. And clearly the most important part of any vehicle is the horn.

So just how big are the pyramids?  Very, very big...  Try over 2 and a half football fields long at the base!