Egypt -- Cairo

So Cairo is a city of 18 million people all packed ridiculously closely together. The city was filled with apartment buildings that looked a lot like the ones along the Nile -- mud bricks, looking unfinished, no roofs, crammed. Our guide told us there were tens of thousands of people living in the mausoleums in the city's biggest graveyard. Too poor to afford housing, they live among the dead. The city of Cairo has grown right into the Giza Plateau, so it's all one big metro area and the buildings go right up to the pyramids, as you can see.

Cairo was our last big stop in Egypt and by the time we got there, I was really starting to feel some hip pain from all the walking we'd been doing. So...while Dan crawled around the interior of the middle pyramid, I took a nice air-conditioned stroll through the solar boat's museum. This is the actual boat that carried the body of the pharaoh to the pyramid and was subsequently buried at the foot of the pyramid. Archaeologists discovered it pretty much intact, right down to the ropes that tied the various wooden boat parts together. So, they were able to put it back together and generally restore it to the condition you see here.

Even though camels are not native to Egypt, it's tough to pass up the super-cool opportunity to ride around a wonder of the world on a unique form of transportation. For some reason, this was not an activity recommended for pregnant chicks, so I fulfilled my duty as photographer for the experience.

Though this is the biggest sphynx in Egypt, it seems kind of puny next to the pyramids. It's hard to believe this cool monument is slowly being eaten away from below with water seepage.

After a full day of hiking about wonders of the world, and riding a wheelchair through a museum with the bodies of some of the ancient world's most famous people (Ramesses, Hatchepsut, etc.), we flew back to Luxor to catch our flight home. It was just fascinating seeing the Sahara sands creeping up to the green ribbon of the Nile, plus the rocky outcrops that seemed to be eroded into fascinating branchy patterns by years of slow water erosion.

We had a last meal with our friends from the boat. We had great times with everyone, though I seem to have washed the piece of paper where we wrote down everyone's contact info. So...if you know these people, tell them we say hi and we've lost their contact info...