bucket list | GIZA
Egyptian Grandeur Explore the ancient wonders of the Pyramids of Giza. BY RICHARD NEWTON
TIMELESS WONDERS: (Left to right) Panorama of the Giza pyramids, and the Great Sphinx PHOTOS: © GÜNTER ALBERS DREAMSTIME.COM, © MARIUSZ PRUSACZYK - DREAMSTIME.COM
72
globaltravelerusa.com
FORTY-THREE YEARS is a significant portion of my life, though it barely registers on the timescale of the Pyramids of Giza. They loomed solidly above the surrounding desert for 4,500 years before I first stood next to them, as a boy, in 1976. I traveled there from Cairo by taxi with my family, driving through fields and open desert. The Yom Kippur War between Israel and Egypt raged briefly less than three years earlier, and tourists still had not returned to the region. At the pyramids, local guides, souvenir hawkers and camels vastly outnumbered us. On my next visit, in 2008, I had no impression of leaving Cairo when I took a coach trip from my downtown hotel out to Giza. The urban sprawl of Africa’s largest city now lapped to the boundary of the pyramid complex. We parked among dozens of other coaches, and I joined the tourist hordes on the walk to the base of the nearest pyramid. The Saharan sun blazed down. Hawkers were doing brisk business selling cold drinks as well as souvenirs. That tourism boom ended with the Egyptian revolution of 2011. In the immediate aftermath, the pyramids were as deserted
MAY 2019
as they had been in 1976. Gradually, visitor numbers increased, with a greater proportion of tour groups now coming from China and other parts of Asia, but they remain significantly lower than 10 years ago. The promise of a new tourist boom looms on the horizon, quite literally. Just a mile and a quarter from the pyramid complex, the Grand Egyptian Museum is taking shape, finally providing a suitable venue for Egypt’s priceless ancient treasures. Until recently, most of the artifacts were displayed in the Egyptian Antiquities Museum in downtown Cairo, housed in oldfashioned glass cases in fusty exhibition halls. Panes of glass were missing from the museum’s upper windows, and plaster crumbled from the walls. It had a certain Indiana Jones ambience, but there was no doubt the collection needed a more fitting — and more secure — home. Last year, the long and delicate process of transferring the exhibits from the old museum to the new one at Giza began. There is no firm opening date for the Grand Egyptian Museum.
