Have finally reached Cairo, the last leg of this week's mideast junket. We finished our last meeting this afternoon a bit early and dinner got pushed back to 8pm. Hmmm, what to do. Discovered that (along with me) our Country Manager for Egypt has never been to the Giza Plateau. Where was our last meeting? Giza! Turns out our Cairo based surveyor, Esmat El Komy, is a real amateur Egyptologist, so how could I say no to his excitement of taking the boss of the boss' boss' boss sightseeing for an hour. So we headed through the slog of Cairo/Giza traffic up to the plateau (it is really surprisingly high above the surrounding area around the Nile) to the pyramids. This is one of those classic places where you see the pyramids from across the Nile and they look big, and just keep getting bigger and bigger as you get closer. Unfortunately, we arrived at 4:15 and the police had the road up to the plateau blocked off as closing time is 4pm (keep in mind sunset here is about 4:30). Damn. However, I once again underestimated the tenacity of ABS surveyors. Esmat was in his own car in front, followed by the Country Manager, Regional VP and myself with our driver in the car behind. While the police were enthusiastically waving us off, Esmat was out of his car talking to one of them. 5 minutes later one of the cops joined Esmat in his car as an escort and they pulled back the barricades and we were off up the hill. Hmmm, interesting.
The beauty of our timing was that we had the entire Giza Plateau to ourselves. I mean we were the ONLY ones. Way beyond cool. This brought us up to the foot of the Great Pyramid of Khufu itself (the one withOUT the remnant of the limestone facing still clinging to the peak - the pyramid of Khafre - perspective is very deceiving up there trying to tell which is the biggest pyramid). You can easily see both the entrance blasted by the Arabs when they first raided the tomb and the higher original entrance of the Egyptians. We were short on time otherwise you can go into the pyramid. We then drove around the Great Pyramid, alongside the pyramid of Khafre and the smallest of the 3 major pyramids, the pyramid of Menkaure, and up to the top of a rise to look back over the 3 main pyramids as the sun was setting. Truly awesome. The most difficult part was trying to keep it in scale as there isn't anything around to indicate just how huge these things are. The Great Pyramid is 450ft tall, compared to 555ft of the Washington Monument, but of vastly, vastly greater volume.
From there we drove back down the rise and down between the Great Pyramid and Khafre's pyramid, past the shelter covering the Sun Ships of the Pharaohs that have been excavated alongside the base of the Great Pyramid, and down the hill to the Sphinx. He sits in an alcove in the rock he was carved from looking down the plateau to the city. Watching the sunset behind the sphinx and the second pyramid was staggering. We were all just looking at each other with really ridiculously pleased-with-ourselves glances. 25 brownie points to Esmat.
The cops were very happy to have given this special out-of-hours tour to Obama's special representative to Egypt.
So that was my whirlwind, 30 minute tour of Giza. We will be coming back here for sure.
TWG
Originally sent December 9, 2009
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