Pyramids at Sunset – Saturday 9 December 2006

Chris and I spent most of the day just bumming round home. I went up to Beno’s yesterday and to the Bakery this morning because I’ve FINALLY got my skype working so I can phone home. It was awesome to finally get to talk to people back home. I’ve been relying on email for 2 months apart from a couple of quit chats to my brother. I could get my skype to work computer to computer, but from work I can’t dial a landline using it. I think its something to do with the firewalls or similar at work. Some technical thing I don’t understand :)

Anyways it’s all sorted now, although it does mean I can only phone home on the weekends because during the week by the time we get home from work all my people from home are a long time asleep… in fact if I stay up late enough they’re all just getting out of bed when I’m going to bed. Bloody time difference!

So this afternoon Ahmed rang to see if we wanted to do anything today. Normally we don’t get the driver for both days of the weekend but I guess he was bored. So Chris asked him to take us to the pyramids so we could take some picture of them with the sun setting around them.

We nearly had to ride camels – yuck. I was prepared to suffer through a camel ride, but lucky for me the stable we went to were either out of camels or it was decided that they’d be too slow so we got horses instead.

I’m not the most confident rider… ok I’m not a confident rider at all so after a little ways the boy who was leading our horses let Chris go and just kept leading me. There was Chris and I on ragged horses, a ‘guide’ on a horse, and the boy running along side me. They took us up through the sand dunes to a plateau type place. Unfortunately we were about 20 minutes too late for the proper sunset and it was quite hazy. We got some good photos, but not the ones we were expecting.

The boy leading my horse was at time running through the desert, running up sand dunes etc. The horses were very boney… they don’t treat them very well considering they are their income, but then I guess some of the people don’t live very well themselves…

When we got back to the stable Ahmed took us inside to the perfume seller (of course, why wouldn’t a stable and a perfume shop be connected!! Here everything seems to be connected.)

We smelled the perfume oils and there was the whole ‘no pressure to buy’ blah blah blah, but we decided to get some anyway. They were only £40 a bottle – little bottles but enough. We each bought a few bottles – Lotus, Jasmine, Lavender – they had every smell under the rainbow. They even had ‘peppermint’. They got a glass of boiling water and put one drop of peppermint in and had us breath in the steam. Man it nearly took my head off. It was like the most potent vicks vapour rub you’ve ever smelt in your life. I didn’t buy any, but I think I’ll go back before the adventure is over and get some more…including a peppermint.

I think I’m going to be sore tomorrow from horse riding… I used muscles that I didn’t know existed!!