Personal Travel Narrative \'I Can\'t

Personal Travel Narrative

'I can't believe I'm really here!"

'Me neither," said my friend, who took her seat on the bus next to me. "I mean, that IS the Great Pyramid, right there!"

The two of us stared at the silhouette of Cheops' masterpiece, which was made far more entrancing by the post-dawn rosy glow in the Egyptian sky. I had dreamed of coming to the land of the Pharaohs since I first read about the pyramids in children's storybooks. On a fluke, my friend's family happened to be visiting their Greek relatives this summer and with my parent's permission they took us both with them to visit the vineyard and estate in Crete. It would have been silly to have us come all that way and not take a short trip to Egypt, so my friend's mother accompanied the two of us on a simple three-day tour. Our itinerary included roaming the bazaars of Cairo, the ruins of Alexandria, and of course, Giza, where we were headed today and from where the Great Pyramid peeked at me on this warm, dusty morning.

The bus trip from Cairo to Giza was short and when we arrived I was not surprised to notice that ours was only one of about a hundred other similarly shaped, sized, and colored tour buses. With strict instructions on how to find our way back to our bus, the driver gave us an hour to roam about the plateau that housed some of the most remarkable edifices in the entire history of humanity.

The first stop for our gang was the Sphinx, where we used up about half of our cameras' battery power, and then we trekked toward the conglomerate of three pyramids. The first thing I noticed was their sheer size: I was expecting large but these structures were enormous.

'I wouldn't doubt if the aliens did build these things," I commented to my friend, who stood equally as transfixed as I. Her mother explained that the pyramids were once painted white and that their tips shone with the glimmer of pure gold. She reminded us of their multiple purposes as mausoleums and as rudimentary yet uncannily accurate cosmological maps.

Like all the other eager tourists, we headed on inside the big pyramid, where visitors can climb through the confining passageway leading to one of the inner chambers. Not even a bit claustrophobic, I relished having to crouch down and almost crawl my way through like an ant, but my friend's mom began to panic.

'I don't know about this," her worried voice echoed in the dry air. Yet she knew perfectly well that backtracking wasn't possible so we forged ahead, sticking together. Our disappointment at the meager fixings of the inner chamber was alleviated by our eventual emergence into the sunlight, from where we could once again appreciate the grandeur and stature of the mighty pyramids.

Having plenty of time left until we were to meet back with the group and driver, my friend exclaimed, "Oh let's ride a camel!"

She pointed to an area where local men offered tourists rides on the classic desert creature. Her mother took the lead and asked one of the men how much the rides cost.

'Free to go, madam. Special for you."

"How much does it cost?" she reiterated, suspiciously aware that nothing in life is ever free.

"Free, free, you get on!" The man almost shouted at her but smiled gently at the same time.

She shrugged her shoulders, watching a couple of other tourists looking giddily happy on board their beasts of burden. Everyone seemed happy. Maybe this was just one of those nice gestures governments do to promote tourism, lik 'Alright," she said, for all three of us. She gestured to me and my friend.

"Yes, yes, come along."

The man hoisted us, one at a time, on our very own camels. Two of his friends rushed over to help. The dromedaries were huge, much larger than they seemed in the photographs I had seen, just as the pyramids surpassed my expectations. Their hides were rough like beaten up burlap sacks, and they had no tenderness to them, no soft spots, only a convenient hump to hold on to while they swaggered around. The camels moved sarcastically, as if they had roamed this very circle for years, performed these acts for silly humans because they simply had no choice. But it was fun; it was a capstone on our Giza experience, and what would a trip to the Saharan desert be without a ride on a camel's back?