I woke up at 7:45 this morning only because I needed the toilet, and realised we never got our 7:30 wake up call!! So I woke Darren and we got up, packed and went downstairs for breakfast. Breakfast was a very disappointing mix of meats, cheeses, stale bread, stale cereal and too-strong black tea. When we told Ramzy about our lack of wake up call, he went and asked reception, and apparently they said our phone didn't work and the bellman was just about to go wake us up! At 8! So very lucky I woke up today! After breakfast we met in the lobby where we met Nardeen, who was the Egyptologist who would be our guide for the day. We said bye to Ramzy and all jumped in the mini van with Nardeen and headed out to the Egyptian Museum. We got out and went through a security check and into the museum gardens. We got some cash out at an ATM, then after a wander through the gardens, which was filled with heaps of cool broken statues pieces, we got given an audio device thing to be able to hear Nardeen better. It seemed pretty pointless as we were such a small group and the place wasn't busy, but we used them anyway. Nardeen took us around the different sections of the museum, explaining to us a few things about certain artifacts and giving us some history of Ancient Egypt as we went. We learnt a lot about different statues and what they meant, and how you could tell what time they were from by the way they were made. It was cool how the different postures of the statues represented different things, like if a statues left foot was forward, and beard was straight, it was depicting someone who was alive, but it his feet are together and the beard curves at the end, and arms are crossed over the chest, its depicting a mummy, then if the beard is curved but the foot is forward it represents the spirit. We learnt all the clues to tell if a statue is a god, king, queen, priest or normal person, and how to tell what part of Egypt they were from. (Interesting side note, upper Egypt is actually the south, and lower Egypt is the north, because of the way the Nile flows, and each side had their own full set of symbolism.) We went around past heaps and heaps of statues and relics before making our way up to the second level to check out King Tutankhamen's collection. King Tut got the throne when he was about 8 or 9, then died by only 18 or 19 from malaria, so during his reign he didn't have time to build a tomb for himself like the kings do, so when he died he was hastily mummified and put into what they think may have been a high priests tomb, and filled it with heaps of treasure for him to take to the afterlife. The only real reason he is so famous is because his tomb was undisturbed when it was discovered in the 1920's (no thieves, no looting, etc) so all his treasure was still there, and still a jumble from the rush they took to put it all in, because after the 70 days of mummification, the body is put in the tomb and it is closed up and no one can enter it again, so they had to get everything he needed for the afterlife in as quick as they could and had no time to decorate the place! Poor King Tut! But because of this, all the treasure was perfectly preserved and it was pretty much all on display at the museum, including the giant sarcophagus of wood gilded with gold, the mummy shaped sarcophaguses of wood inflated with gold, and one of pure gold, the mask of King Tut, which is what you think of when you hear the word 'pharaoh' and so many more pieces. It was amazing. Once Nardeen finished with her tour after showing us some ancient hieroglyphics and explaining a bit about them, we got some free time to explore the rest of the museum, and we all headed straight over to the mummies room, which we had bought an extra ticket for. This room had about 10 or more real mummies on display, which was absolutely amazing, and a little gross too! Some of the faces were amazingly intact, and some even still had hair! Most of the bodies were wrapped in linen with just the faces exposed, but there were a few hands and arms around too! It was so freaky! It was forbidden to take photos anywhere inside the museum, but we just had to get a few sneaky shots in there, it was absolutely amazing! After that, we went to the next room, which was full of mummified animals! There were all sorts, dogs, cows, monkeys, fish, and even a couple of massive crocodiles! We learnt that they mummified animals for four different reasons; pets of the kings, animals for food in the afterlife, sacred animals and offerings for the gods. There was another room of real mummies after that, which was just as cool as the last room, although there was one case with nothing in it, which was a little bit creepy! We kept waiting to turn around and see it standing up!! After that Darren and I wandered back through the relics downstairs that we had rushed through before and found a whole other section with a giant statue of some king and his family and a whole section of statue pieces which had been found broken or incomplete. Still cool. Eventually it was time to head out and meet the others, then we headed back to the van, buying a ridiculously expensive bottle of water on the way! We made our way to our lunch stop and on the way we got our first view of the pyramids, through the desert haze, peeking over the ****** old buildings, which was absolutely amazing! They were still quite far off, but already massive! When we got to the restaurant we were seated at a table with a view of the pyramids too, which was awesome! We got our meals, mine was a pasta and a whole bunch of mezes on the table to start with which was yummy too, then after a feed and a chat there, we headed off to the Giza Plateau! We got out, got our tickets, then got back in the van on the other side and drove up around the absolutely massive structures to a panoramic viewpoint at the top of the hill where you could see the three great pyramids and a few smaller ones at the sides of one. It was so amazing! There was a slight desert haze in the air too, which made it seem fake! It was literally like looking at a real life postcard! We walked down to the edge dodging all the people out selling souvenirs and things, who pretty much put them right in your face, then had a bit of a photo session there and got lots of photos of us all jumping, walking like Egyptians and all that. It was so fun! When we all had enough photos there, we took it in turns to get up on a camel that a local had there, whose name was Charlie Brown! When the camel stood up, it was pretty scary, cos you thought you were going to fall! First forwards when he got his hind legs halfway up, then backwards when he got his front legs all the way up! But it was very cool. Just casually riding a camel in front of the pyramids!! After everyone had a turn on the camel and got a bunch of photos, we made our way back through the throngs of sellers to the van and got back in. We drove back down until we were right next to the second pyramid. You really can't imagine how insanely huge they are until you're standing right next to them! We walked along the path next to the pyramid followed by a bunch of guys trying to sell stuff, and another bunch of Egyptian tourists, who wanted to get photos with us all. Nardeen allowed them to get pictures with the boys, but not the girls, then we showed our tickets and went in to go inside the actual pyramid! We walked through a really long corridor going down deeper into the pyramid. The corridor was so small though, you had to walk doubled over! We eventually got to a part where we could stand up again, then another skinny long corridor led up again, further into the pyramid to the tomb. The room was quite plain, with a broken coffin up one end. The actual design of the room actually seemed quite neat and modern considering its about 5000 years old! We weren't allowed to take our cameras inside, but Sophie got a few sneaky shots on her phone of us inside the tomb being mummies, because there were no guards inside the room. When we were done we crouched our way back through the corridors and went outside again. We had some time to explore so walked along one side of the pyramid and got some more photos, including some very cool and creative photos that one of the men there selling stuff took for us. We tipped him a few coins, (and shook him off when he asked for more!) then went back to the van. Steve had a fancy new turban which he'd been suckered into buying, then we headed up the road just a little bit to The Sphinx. As we walked along to the gate we had a view of a KFC and Pizza Hut which were literally across the road, which was pretty ridiculous! Then we got hassled by a guy selling little glass pyramids, because we asked about how much one of them were! We bargained for a while then ended up buying the set instead of just one! We continued into the sphinx area, followed by a couple of young girls selling bookmarks, who were very funny. One girl kept telling us she'd give us a special price of only one million dollars, then as we went through to the next section she told Darren "when you come back, you buy from me or I kill you!". I've never heard such a cute death threat before! So we went through to the amazing Sphinx where we got some more photos while trying to ignore the people there selling things and trying to take our cameras to take photos for cash. The Sphinx was very cool, with the amazing pyramids as a backdrop. After a while we headed back out and headed back to the van, where the girls came out and followed us again, and we bought a bookmark off them, just because they were funny and cute. We walked out the gate and stopped at the KFC to get a photo of KFC with the pyramids in the background just because its so crazy, then we jumped back in the van and went to a real papyrus factory. We got a demonstration about how they make the paper from the papyrus plant, and how they still use the same methods as the ancient Egyptians did, then we got some hibiscus tea and were left to wander around the room looking at all the different paintings. They were amazing! At one point, they turned all the lights off and we got to see some of them which had glow in the dark pictures imbedded into the normal pictures! So cool! We really wanted one, but couldn't really justify the price of them, but after wandering and chatting with one of the women there, she gave us a really good price, so we couldn't say no! So we were deciding between three glow in the dark ones, and she took us into a room to see the glow in the dark pictures on them again. One of them had an entirely different picture when it was in the dark, of three heads, Cleopatra, Tutankhamen and Nefertiti, then in the light it was Tutankhamen and his wife on a boat in the Nile with some lotus flowers. We thought that was extremely cool, so we ended up getting that, despite our groaning budget! Besides, when will we be in Egypt again?! The girls even wrote our names on it in hieroglyphics which looked extremely cool! When we were all done, we went back through some ridiculously crazy traffic to the hotel. We got back and the others went upstairs for showers while we walked with Sophie to the supermarket via an ATM. We got some snacks for our overnight bus ride and Darren got some razors, then we went back to the hotel. We had a shower and Darren had a shave, then we headed back down to the lobby. We tried to order a meal from the hotel, but they couldn't guarantee it would come out within the hour (what the..?) so we walked around the corner to another KFC. It was really cool, because they only employed deaf people, and to order you just pointed at the menu, and signed a few things for what you wanted. It's so cool that they had that opportunity available to them. We took our food back to the hotel to eat and hung out with the others for a while. The bus ended up being about an hour and a half late, because apparently there is a petrol shortage, and they had to drive all around Cairo trying to find a petrol station that actually had petrol! So we hung out using the wifi and having a beer, then when the van finally arrived we got on board and began our 15-16 hour drive towards Aswan. We had a chat and a joke for a while, then put the lights out to try get some sleep. It was such a bumpy drive, it was ridiculous trying to sleep! I tried sleeping in all sorts of positions, even trying the floor (which was the worst!) and eventually we just took it in turns between the two of us on the backseat to lay down and snooze for a while then swapped it around, taking it in turns to sleep! Worst.