Day 20: Cairo

Well, not quite. Rob has to get a visa and his bike serviced, so I pop off to the Egyptian Museum. Whilst Cairo hasn’t really grasped me, the EM is brilliant. Almost worth coming to Cairo just to see it. It’s pretty shit, a bit shoddy, but that’s what makes it so fabulous. Most modern museums are so well lit, well organised and too sanitised for my liking. This place is straight out of an Indiana Jones movie. All the display cabinets are dusty, half the lights don’t work, artefacts are strewn left right and centre. It’s organised chaos, but it kind of captures me and draws me in. Due to half the lights not working, there’s an atmosphere in the air. And essentially you’re looking at really old coffins, so it’s a little spooky at first, mesmerising kind of like in a horror movie. Some of the statues are epic, the scale of them enthralling. It’s not that big a museum, dependant on your need to read every description or not, it’s easily covered in a couple of hours. But, standing in front of the golden Tutankhamun head piece is surreal. I find these things a little bewildering, it’s on a plinth inside a glass box, you can get within 15cms of it. It is exquisite, as is the boy king’s sarcophagus. Wow, definitely worth the visit. I guess I actually mean the place has bags of character, rather than being 'shitty'!

Hopefully, fingers crossed, I’ll get to those pyramids tomorrow!