The other day I had an awesome trip. To summarize the trip I rode a horse from Giza, which is the site of the big pyramids to the Saqqara Pyramids and the Abu sir Pyramids which are less famous but are some of the oldest pyramids in Egypt. Now I will say this, any time you take a 5 hour round trip horse ride, your ASS will hate you the next couple days and I’m not talking about if you have a jealous donkey at home (waant waaant, bad joke, that was for you grandpa and dad). I went with a buddy I met out here at the Arab Academy named Brian and being his last day he wanted to go on one last adventure. I agreed when he told me what he had planned not really knowing what to expect, but that’s pretty much how things go down here in Cairo. Now meeting up was an adventure altogether and involved a crazy taxi ride, which if anyone has followed the other posts already knows that’s inevitable. I said take me to the Sphinx and he took me to this restaurant in town and then I told him the pyramids and he did take me there but to the wrong gate about 5 miles away. Not completely the Taxi drivers fault on this one, so I’ll take the rap. Brian and I met up at the Giza pyramids after I got out of school and were going to try and find a stable and get a good price for the trip without having our horse die on us in the desert. I will definitely write about the Egyptian selling techniques or “hustle” in a later post, because I’ve seen a lot of them and I’ve been involved as well, and I will use this trip as a reference for sure for both the taxi ride over and the stables and our trip, but it deserves its own post for sure. Now getting back to the story we found a stable to take us out in the middle of the desert for LE 250 (Egyptian pounds) to look at these pyramids and to do some exploring on our Egyptian Cadillac’s as our guide called our horses. I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking, but we didn’t make it all the way to Saqqara due to a misunderstanding, but we did get pretty close and took some pictures and had a good time. We weren’t about to argue too much with our guide since he did hold our lives in his hand and if I was on that horse for another hour or two I would have regretted it, and I’m sure the horse was happier too since it try to turn around on me a couple times on the way out there. On the way back from the desert we took the “back way” home and saw a whole other part of Cairo that was really cool to see. This place is huge and so diverse and it really is fascinating. I thought Egypt would be all desert and although we were in dirt for most of the day we saw so much green on the way back. So take a look at the pictures below and definitely the videos. I probably should have taken a couple more pictures to illustrate but I’ll do my best to describe in the captions.


You would think that they wouldn't be that hard to find
(taxi ride there).


Our journey already begin by the base of these. I should have taken more pics
leaving the stables, but this is about an hour into it looking back.


The road ahead for the next couple of hours.


The next time I looked back at the Giza Pyramids.


Coming up to the first destination Abu sir. small but some of the oldest and
possibly the first. We ended up passing it and coming back by on the way back.

Half time, time for some photos. If you look very hard between me and the horse

you can see the Giza pyramids where we began.

Not to many people can pull this look off in the desert and I think I also fall into that

category. Abu sir behind us. If you look really hard about an inch to the right of the big one

you can see Saqqara's very top

The hotels close to mine in the far distance to the right.

I had to cut off the horse on the right due to the PG rating of this blog.

We went on a little bit more to get closer to Saqqara. The original plan was for the guide to

take us here and to explore a little, but do to a "misunderstanding"/we got hustled, this is about as far as we went. to get here we talked him into letting us go to the next hill (about another 2 miles) to take a better picture. The guide didn't mind, but my horse waaas pissed.

You smile you die in the desert. In the distance the Giza Pyramids even further.

Rhinesstone Cowboy, don't hate on the white "boots".

On our way back, going to pass back by Abu Sir

Cairo off to the right, pretty hard to see because of the polution.

Walking by Abusir. Not to far from this is the road and some really huge nice houses. In between these houses (where the videos were filmed below) is a man who lives in a shack, our guide stopped by and had a drink of moonshine.

I only have 1 horse power, but I was still moving. This was after we visited the guy in the shack. the guide filmed this while he was running next to us, if I could state the obvious. That's Brian with me.

Secretariat eat your heart out.

You can see some larger houses coming up behind us and when I say big I mean equivalent to $3-10 Mil American homes. Our guide said that at one houses we passed one of the horses the guy owned and kept there was a show horse worth LE 2 mil or about $360,000. We cut through to the street where you see the backside of Cairo pic about 2 miles up the way.

The "back side" of Cairo and our guide. I should have took more pictures but there were a mixture of really nice homes and as we got closer to Cairo, it turned into more like projects or poor housing. to the left about a mile is the desert we walked through and to the right is farms and homes.

Looking to the right of the road.




Cutting through some hood about an hour away. In between the buildings you can see the slant of the pyramid. It looks like the wall of that building, but its not, I just have bad timing.



Again I should have taken better pictures coming back to the stables, but the walls were lined

with horses and camels who were finishing up for the day. The Giza Pyramids were about 2 miles away and I should have taken a picture of them as well, but since I was visiting them later in the week I didn't bother.