Our first pyramids!

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  Saqqara, Egypt
Friday, April 2, 2010

The craziness of Cairo vanished as soon as we hopped into a taxi to go to Saqqara pyramids the next morning. Once you have left the city you drive through small villages that do not differ one from another: quiet, next to a polluted canal, garbage all over, carpets making schools that “educate children how to make traditional carpets” while also serving as tourist traps, and donkeys in the middle of the road. Only a few hundred meters of agricultural land under huge palm trees separates the canal from the desert. This meeting point of the desert and the floodplains of the Nile is where pharaoh Djoser – the second king of the 3rd dynasty – build the first pyramid of Egypt: the Step Pyramid. This pyramid was began as a normal mastaba and was heightened by adding one mastaba on top of another until it consisted of six terraces of about 60 meters high. We decided to leave our taxi driver at the entrance and walked through the desert, one little dune after another through an area filled with pieces of pottery (we obeyed the DO NOT PICK UP ANYTHING FROM THE GROUND signs, although Anna would have liked to reconstruct vases and put them in our virtual house), until we saw the pyramid complex in the distance. A beautiful way to approach our first pyramid, almost like the explorers of the 19th century, but of course a hundred or so tourists parked their taxis and buses on the parking next to the pyramid. We felt sorry for them, all this luxury and no explorer experience. Not only we visited the Step Pyramid but also the different tombs of pharaoh Djoser's family, which still have beautifully painted walls. 
 
After their first experience with the Step Pyramid, the ancient Egyptians continued with the construction of the Bent Pyramid and then the Red Pyramid. The first one starts at a very steep angle but is completed at 43° which has since then become the standards of all pyramids. The Red Pyramid is therefore the oldest pyramids of the kind that you imagine as a child: an almost perfect triangle in the desert. We drove to Dashurto see these two pyramids, which were opened to the public only ten years ago, and enter into the burial chamber of the Red Pyramid. After climbing 30 meters up on the outside of the pyramid we entered a narrow shaft going deep down into the pyramid. Being a little more than a meter high and wide, and about 50 meters long going down steeply, this adventure is not recommended for anyone with claustrophobia or weak legs. At the bottom of the shaft we entered into a horizontal tunnel, crossed a large chamber and another tunnel, and finally reached the burial chamber. We felt a little bit like Indiana Jones while exploring this pyramid. What goes down must come up... This was the less funny part. Climbing out through that same narrow shaft was a bit more tiring than expected, we now have a lot more respect for archeologists and are sure that we are out of shape. We should do a special workout every morning... We did not know yet how the legs would feel the next morning... Afterwards we visited the bent pyramid, guarded by tourist police on camels who have nothing better to do than sleep in the shade since there are hardly any tourists visiting. Very happy with our highly authentic pyramid visits we headed back to Cairo. 

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Beautiful art inside the ancient tombs	Pharaoh Djoser's Step Pyramid	Deep inside the Red Pyramid   Comments!	Anna's "rain dance" at the Bent Pyramid   Comments!

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