My dad picked us up at the airport and the mustache that he'd so proudly presented to me a month prior had blossomed into even greater beauty! My dad's deep pride about his new 'stache was clearly starting to cause concern with Brett and Amy; their wedding was coming up in a couple of weeks and they were starting to worry that a certain uninvited guest was going to make an appearance in all their wedding photos. (Spoiler alert: Mr. Mustache ends up attending the wedding! Yes!)
My favorite thing about driving from San Francisco to LA via the more inland route is how many strangely different types of country you drive through. There are grassy hills.
We all piled into a pickup truck taxi driven by a man everyone was (sort of?) friends with who claimed he was famous all over Egypt for his spectacular driving. (And by "spectacular" he meant "so fast and recklessly that you almost poop in your pants).
I ended up meeting a Belgian woman who was also looking to go to Dahab and the two of us found a driver who was willing to take us. The road from Sharm el-Sheikh to Dahab is through the mountainous desert and our driver pretty much drove over 120 MPH (no shit) the whole way there.
Bad ass. Ahmed and I had spent the hour-drive down doing our best to get to know each other. Despite the language barrier, we'd managed pretty well and I learned that despite having spent his entire life in Cairo, he'd never been to any of the sites we were visiting. It was cool to drive down the road with him and hear him having the same awed reaction as me.
This is the back of Djoser's Step Pyramid. It's from 2630 BCE (4,640 years ago!!!) and is considered one of the oldest stone monuments in human history.
Saqqara is a huge burial complex for the Old Kingdom of Egypt. We pulled off the lush green local roads and suddenly we were in the middle of a desert and there were two pyramids (well, one step pyramid and a pile of rubble!) rising out of the desert.
BTW, the pile of rubble is the remains of Userkaf's Pyramid! Guess that'll teach him to skimp on pyramid building supplies!
After finishing my breakfast, I grabbed my backpack and hit the streets of Cairo to try to find a driver! After a few failed attempts with drivers who spoke absolutely NO English, I finally met a driver who was willing to hear me out. Not that he spoke a single word of English either, he simply possessed enough patience to sit with me on the side of the road while I tried to communicate with a combination of phrases listed in the back of my guidebook and clumsy hand gestures.
After getting the gist that I wanted to hire him for the day, he told me that "We see friend with English." I agreed and he drove me to a hotel to visit a friend of his working as a security guard. His friend spoke great English and asked me where I wanted to go and how much I wanted to pay. I named the three cities and told him that I was offereing 200 EP (~$38 USD). He told me "Ahhhh! That is a very good and fair price!" He translated what I had just said for Ahmed, the driver, who happily agreed. After sitting in Cairo's morning traffic for close to an hour, we hit the highway and were on our way!
