We’d had one full day in Cairo before the Nile cruise. We were supposed to have more, but our bus from Dahab was rescheduled to an hour earlier in the morning, took 11 hours instead of 6, and dropped us off at the wrong station in Cairo.  So knowing that we’d come back to Cairo again at the end of the trip, we had a slow morning to recover from the previous day’s ordeal. In the afternoon we visited the citadel, a walled area with a few different mosques and museums. After a lot of wandering we got a tuk tuk to a market area with a souk tucked away under another mosque. We explored the narrow passageways for a while before grabbing dinner and heading to a whirling dirvish show in the evening.

After the cruise we arrived back into downtown Cairo in the evening, to a bus stop 50 meters from the museum we wanted to see the next day, so we decided to get a room at the closest hotel for one night before moving somewhere nicer. 

In Cairo there is an Egyptian Museum and a newer Grand Egyptian Museum. The new museum has pieces that were moved from the original museum, and there were more pieces that had not yet been moved but would be in the near future. There was a lot of discussion online about which one is best to go to during this transition period. It seems that the largest collection remains at the old Egyptian Museum for now, so we decided to just visit this one – the entrance is $10, and the Grand Egyptian Museum is $25, so this made our decision easier. 

It turned out to be an excellent decision, because we visited just 1 month before the Tutankhamun exhibit got moved to the new museum, so we were able to see the amazing gold mask and sarcophagi. We spent a few hours exploring every inch of this museum. It’s not a huge building, but is absolutely jam packed with artifacts – over 120,000 items, and this is an already reduced collection as some objects are now at the Grand Egyptian Museum. It was once so packed with artifacts that it was known as the ‘storage unit’. It’s fascinating and overwhelming and shows just how much of the Ancient Egyptian civilization has been so well preserved over the millenia, which is very weird to think about.

In the afternoon we moved out to Giza, the area where the pyramids are located which used to be the middle of the dessert but is now a very built up suburb of Cairo. Here we had an absolutely incredible room. It was huge, with a nice big bathroom and shower, but also a jacuzzi bath not in the bathroom but in the corner of the bedroom, which meant you could still in it while watching TV. An enormous bed, enormous TV, but the highlight was the huge balcony with an absolutely epic view of the pyramids. The entire wall was French windows, so you could enjoy the view from the bed, and then every morning our huge included breakfast was served on the balcony. We purposefully booked more nights here than the sightseeing needed, and spent lots of time just enjoying the fantastic room and view.

The next morning we booked a taxi to take us to the south of the city, where the bent pyramid and the red pyramid are located. These two are older than the famous pyramids at Giza, and visited by very few tourists. You can also go inside both of them for a total ticket price of $4. Going inside involves a steep slope that descends for a long time in a cramped tunnel, and then opens into a larger area with stairs to climb back up again in the middle of the pyramid. The insides are not very exciting, there aren’t any hieroglyphics or art works, and they are very hot and smell like bat poop. It’s cool to say you’ve been inside a pyramid though.

We didn’t make to the actual pyramids of Giza, the biggest thing on an Egypt itinerary, until our very last day in Cairo. We went early to avoid the crowds, but ended up spending 4 hours inside the complex. We didn’t go inside any here, since it was expensive and busy, but got some epic photos from lots of different angles. 

Next we headed to Alexandria, a 3 hour bus drive including an unnecessary hour long stop for breakfast half way. We were only here for a day, which meant we were lugging our bags around with us, but the cheap taxis between each site made it easier. First we visited some greek catacombs, a huge underground maze of tombs with some amazing carvings of Egyptian gods depicted in a Grecian style of artwork. We visited the Library of Alexandria, built on the site of the ancient library, but very modern and honestly not very full of books. There are sections you can enter without a ticket, which we did, and the building is quite interesting, but it’s a weird visit. We saw the amphitheatre from outside the railings because it was closed by the time we got there, and then headed to the fort built where the lighthouse, the wonder of the ancient world, once stood. It was a nice place to watch the sunset over the water, but very windy. We wandered along the waterfront for a bit in the evening before heading back to the bus station for an overnight bus back to Dahab.

Thanks for following along on my crazy adventures!

 Ros ♥

If you’re interested in how I got here, or where I went next, check out the rest of the story!