It has been cold, wet and miserable for the last week here in Canberra. In weather like that I think about somewhere warm and dry. The warmest and driest place that the Oldies have been is Egypt. Long-time readers will remember that the meanies left me at home while they were gallivanting around the globe back in 2007; they won't ever do that again. The first thing that people think about when they think Egypt is "Pyramids", so here are some more photos of the best-known ones, situated right near Cairo, at Giza and Saqqara. You can see more photos of the big Giza ones in the posts from late 2007. In the top photo you can see the suburbs of Cairo in the background, just beyond the edge of the desert plateau. In fact, the Oldies stayed at a famous hotel just 800 metres from the pyramids. The photo was taken from a lookout point where all the buses stop. It was jammed solid with people but Mum managed to get to the front of the crowd and take lots of photos. What I like is the batches of camels taking tourists for rides. No, the Oldies didn't ride, they say they respect their posteriors too much to have them bounced around on a bony camel. The bottom picture is of their favourite pyramid, the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. This was actually the first attempt to build a big pyramid. It was built for Pharaoh Djoser, over 3000 years ago. Before that time, pharaohs were buried in big rectangular tombs called Mastabas. Djoser wanted something bigger, so his architect, Imhotep, piled six mastabas on top of one another in a tapering pile. Later pharaohs used the same idea but filled in the steps to make the classical pyramids. Scruffy and I make pyramids whenever we are at the beach, but so far we haven't built anything higher than 2 metres.
Labels: Egypt
# posted by Bart Bear @ 5:38 pm
