Ryan arrived in Cairo on Saturday, and by Sunday morning we were at the pyramids!  It has been about 48 hours since he landed and we have already been to Giza, Saqqara, and the Red Pyramid.

We decided to ride horses out in the desert in Giza to enjoy the view of the three main pyramids from afar.  I forgot we would have to ride through garbage alley to get to the desert, but we managed.  And hey, it appeared that we must have just missed the carnival.

My horse, which happened to be named “George Michael,” was a wiley one.  For some reason I always seem to get put on wiley horses!  He spent most of the time ignoring my attempt at direction and instead opted to careen into Ryan’s horse whenever possible.  Apologies to Ryan and his horse on behalf of George Michael.

Anyhow… here’s Ryan on his horse with Cairo in the background.

We enjoyed the view for a few minutes before heading back to the main park.  I got to practice my Arabic with our guide Kareem who may or may not have just been married fifteen days ago.  I think I understood his Arabic and I think he understood my English, but then when he told me about his “bebe” I was only 50% sure we were still talking about horses and not his own child.  But all of that was resolved when he brought out a one-month-old bebe horse that stumbled around like Bambi for a few minutes after we got back to the stable.  All confusion aside, the baby horse was totally adorable.

Next we headed into the Giza park.  It was surprisingly not very crowded and we had a lot of fun exploring some of the nearby tombs, seeing the Sphinx, and even crawling through the narrow passage into Khafre’s pyramid.

We also went into the Solar Barque Museum and donned the canvas booties they require everyone to put on at the entrance presumably to protect the wood floors.  The Solar Barque is a much more recent find from the Giza site.  Excavated in the 1950s, it was reassembled and is now on display next to the Great Pyramid.  It’s amazing to see an ancient boat made of rope and wood that is thousands of years old.

Today, we went to the step pyramid Saqqara and the Red Pyramid.  Neither site was very busy, which was really nice.  In fact, we were one of only four cars at the Red Pyramid.

Here’s a shot Ryan took of Brandon and me not wanting to buy postcards at the entrance to the Saqqara complex.

It was really interesting, because despite the hot weather, the site seemed really active with people working, digging, climbing scaffolding.  If you look closely at this next photo, you can see people walking around on the pyramid.  Unfortunately they had roped off much of the area around the pyramid so we weren’t able to see the statues we saw with Meredith, but it was pretty neat seeing the site at work.  It seemed like they were probably pretty close to locating the map room.  In fact, we could hear the teams of workers chanting while they worked.

And this guy above really sealed the Indiana Jones experience.  I can only assume that this crate is going to be used to pack up something ridiculously important that was just unearthed while we were there, and naturally this wonder is going to then be shipped to Indiana Jones for his careful study.