24-25 Sep11 This ship made port at Port Said, Egypt at 6AM and we disembarked to meet our private tour guide. Mustafa lead us to a bright orange van, where we met the driver Ahmed, and discovered shag seat covers matching the exterior – I felt like we were on the set of a Scooby-doo movie. As we cleared 
Port Said’s security check-point, we were chased down by security in a mini-pickup with 3 cops sitting in the bed of the pickup. After playing a high-speed game of tag/charades for a few minutes we eventually pulled over to the side of the highway. Apparently, the “tourism police” wanted to bunch up all the cruise tourists and escort us all the way to Cairo – a 3 hour drive. Mustafa explained that this was to help in case of traffic jams, given the tight schedule the passengers where on to get to Cairo and back before the ship sailed. 
I tried to get him to admit that it was really to prevent tourists from being attacked and/or kidnapped. Eventually he admitted that post 9/11, the tourism police required escorts for all USA tourists. We talked a bit about the recent revolution and the steep drop-off of tourism since then. Per Mustafa, tourism is the country’s #2 source of income, second only to the Suez canal.
Our drive to and in Cairo was interesting – the number of donkey-pulled carts was surprising, along with the whole-hearted commitment of the entire city to complete traffic anarchy. At one point there was traffic flowing against us on both sides of the van, and I’m 99% certain we were on a one way road going the right way. 
We’ve seen some crazy traffic in our travels, but I think Cairo takes the prize. You’d have to be naïve or driving your mother-in-law’s car to want to drive here.
There were a large number of rug schools along the road as we headed towards the Zoser pyramids. The schools teach rural children to make rugs as a trade and enable them and their families to use the school to make and/or sell their own rugs. We got a tour of the site including a detailed walk-thru of how the rugs are made. In spite of the fact that the tour is mostly done as a sales mechanism, we really enjoyed it.
We managed to see a dozen or so of the 108 pyramids in Egypt. We walked (duck-walked) inside one of the step pyramids, laid inside a sarcophagus, held the Giza pyramids in our hands, and roamed the Egyptian museum containing 250,000 (yes, I counted) pyramid artifacts, including King Tut. Two days of pyramids left us reflecting on a monarchy that took the wealth of its people and buried it in the ground. Maybe you can’t take it with you when you go, but with a bit of luck and large stones, you can stop anyone else from having it.
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