Egypt, days 1 and 2

After a four-hour flight from Zurich, we found ourselves in another world once we walked out of the Cairo airport. For one thing, it was warm. For another thing, driving in Cairo is about as different from driving in Switzerland as you can get. Cairo is a city of 23 million people and zero traffic lights, at least not that I saw. It's complete chaos. You're always in a traffic jam. Cars just try to wedge themselves in wherever they can. Lane markers are irrelevant. In fact, even if you happen to find yourself in an open stretch of road for a few hundred feet, you are apparently expected to completely ignore the lane markers. Horns are constantly honking. Pedestrians dart across the roads whenever they can find a gap. There's the occasional donkey-pulled cart scattered among the cars. It's like nothing I've ever experienced.

Our hotel was a short distance from the pyramids, so we caught a glimpse of them on the first day, but we got up close to them the second day. You don't need me to post a ton of pictures of the pyramids and the Sphinx; you can look them up if you're really interested. But here are a couple.






Of course, the pictures can't really do justice to the experience. You kind of have to be there. We got to climb down inside one of them, but we couldn't take pictures. (That turned out to be the case with a lot of the sites we visited, unfortunately, so you'll just have to take my word for things sometimes.)

We were on a group tour, but our group consisted of just us and one other family from England.



One more camel shot:



I love this picture, not just because it's a nice picture of the Sphinx framed against one of the pyramids, but also because you can see how tired Tanner was of having me take his picture by the end of the afternoon.



That night, we had a dinner cruise on the Nile. There was belly dancing and other traditional dancing. As you might expect, it was a lot of fun.