Pharoah 'Nuff

So Cairo, biggest city in Africa; one of the biggest cities in the world.  And it looks big, anytime you get up above the building line the barrage of ugly, beige, half-built blocks stretches further than you can see. After the bigness - in fact, well before the bigness - you notice that the temperature here is a whole heap more balmy than that sub zero nonsense back in Blighty.  It's just about the first time I could classify the ambient temperature as "not cold" since leaving Latin America last year.

Cairo is pretty much empty of tourists at the moment due to the old civil unrest thing.  Not certain whether this (the emptiness) is good or bad. On the plus side you do get the big sights - like King Tut's mask - almost to yourself; conversely the millions of people that rely on tourism are all trying to sell you a statue of a cat anytime you do anything.

So yeah, been doing the cliches. Perhaps not in the order we intended, again due to politics (FYI avoid "the Garden City district on a Saturday" is a bit like saying avoid the Trafalgar Square area, it takes a bit of a dent out of the 'stuff what you can see').

Saw the museum and the Tutankhamun stuff. Not meaning to belittle him, but he wasn't one of the big Pharoahs, what with dying when he was still a kid, and if his tomb was so chock full of trinkets the important Pharoahs - your Ramses and whoever - must have been, well, quite shiny.

Staying in Giza, so can see the Pyramids from the roof, which is a bit surreal. Just been out there for a spot of Sphinx watching. Only saw one, poor show.