5000 years of history on New Year's Day

Our New Year’s Eve celebrations weren’t the most exciting ones as we fell asleep already around nine o’clock in the evening exhausted after a long day of discovering mosques and souqs. At midnight I woke up and heard people in the hotel counting: “nine, eight, seven…” I fell asleep again before the New Year. It would have been nice to experience an Egyptian party, but as we later noticed, night clubs were rare and alcohol hard to find (what is then an Egyptian party, I don’t know, tea and sheesha?). Therefore, we were full of energy at 8 o’clock in the morning next day when our driver picked us up. For 180 pound (around 20 euros) the hotel had organised us a driver for a daytrip to Saqqara, Dahshur and Giza pyramids.

Djoser’s Step Pyramid in Saqqara (behind the pile of rocks that is actually also a pyramid) was the first try to build a pyramid. It is not however a true pyramid, which were only built a bit later in Dahshur.

Going down inside a pyramid was a good thigh exercise. Inside there's basically no oxygen and it's hot and damp.

We started in the oldest site, Saqqara, which was the necropolis of Memphis, the capital of Ancient Egypt, and where they first built a pyramid. Our first touch to Ancient world was in a mastaba of Mereruka dating 6th Dynasty (2323-2150 BC) in the Old Kingdom period. The walls were carved in an amazing detailed, aesthetically perfect style, showing birds, fishes and hippopotamuses. In this beautiful tomb, the four thousand years of history suddenly moved me, and the symptoms of Stendhal syndrome could have described my emotional state. While the several tombs and temples we later saw in Egypt amazed and touched me as well, the first visit to an Ancient structure was the most moving one.

Inside the mastaba of Mereruka in Saqqara.

The ubiquitous tourism police, found next to all possible sites in Egypt, was probably employing half of the working age men. And most often they had nothing to do except for posing to tourists and then asking for baksheesh for this. I'm not exactly sure if they were there to protect the tourists or the ancient sites from tourists. The Egyptians are however quite strict about security after the tourist massacres in Cairo, Luxor and Sinai.

Bent pyramid in Dahshur: After a good start it was too hard for the engineers to finish this pyramid, the slope was too steep and they had to change the angle, thus the bent shape of the pyramid.

Of course, the real must site of the day was the pyramids of Giza, now surrounded by the densely populated suburb of Giza. The offers for a camel or horse ride were constant and you need to hush away the young post card sellers every two steps but seeing the Sphinx and pyramids was quite a wonderful way to spend the New Year’s day. After the heat and dust we finished the pyramid tour in a somewhat anti-climax way: late lunch at Pizza Hut, in front of the entrance to the site.

Napoleon calculated that the 2,5 million stone blocks used for the Great pyramid of Giza would be enough to build a one metre -high wall around the whole of France. It doesn't look that big but I wouldn't question Napoleon's expertise. By the way, seeing the Sphinx you cannot help thinking of the Asterix and Cleopatra comic book where Obelix climbs up on the Sphinx's head making the nose fall off...