We arrived at Cairo airport at 2 am. We were unable to get any sleep on the flight, so we were tired and a bit disoriented. Luckily, we had pre-arranged a driver to pick us up and bring us straight to the guest house. I didn’t really have any expectations about Cairo or Egypt in general, but I had heard Cairo was a big modern city.
The ride to our guest house was a bit scary. It was in the wee hours of the morning and half the shops along the road were still open. We went through a few police checkpoints where they were armed with machine guns and shields. The backroads that our driver took looked like we were about to be robbed or killed at any moment. We arrived at our guest house in a very shady area down a dead end alley. We were greeted by the host and immediately brought to the rooftop.
When booking this guest house, I knew it was close to the pyramids, but I didn’t realise just how close it was. There was only a small fence between our building and the pyramids. The entrance into the pyramid complex was only a 3-minute walk from our front door!
The next morning when we finally woke up, we went straight to the rooftop to check out the view in the sunlight, and it was better than we imagined! We were staying at the stables where all of the camels, horses and donkeys are kept that people ride through the pyramids complex. This was the downside to our stay in Giza.
The view of the pyramids was enough to overlook many things such as the cleanliness of the guest house, the hassle we went through as soon as we would leave the house from all of the touting, and the dirtiness of the area in general. But, seeing the condition of these animals and the way they were “cared” for broke my heart.
You can’t walk near the pyramids without being asked at least every 2 minutes if you want a camel ride or a horse ride. Once you say no, they do not go away or stop asking you. We finally began saying, “no animals”, and it helped more than just a “no”, but not completely.
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