Los viajes del cambio de siglo | Amazon en español | leer libros gratis | libros baratos amazon | viajes | guías | planificar viaje|Egipto | El Cairo | Nilo
The travels at the turn of the century
This book is about five accounts of journeys filled with much humour and irony. They are five reports at a time in which travellers didn’t have a digital camera with them able to contain thousands of pictures and not even a mobile phone with a lot of functions in order to solve any unforeseen event. The reader will plunge into an initiatory journey, explore purely adventurous landscapes and will remember an unprecedented historical event that happened at the same time as one of these travels. All these episodes happened at the end of the 20th century as we were starting to live a radical change leading to such an extreme use of technology which changed our way of travelling. While we were reaching this point, we kept looking at the map, there was no GPS and we called home from a phone booth. Get ready to relive all those feelings through these travels; after all, “travelling is worth the money”, isn’t it?
TRAVEL TO EGYPT
On that day we did one of the visits we had most longed for: the Giza Pyramids. We went through Cairo on one of its greatest roads and entered the funerary complex. We could see policemen on camels and the city in the background. Before arriving at Cheops, trinket sellers came around you and if you didn’t mind, they adopted the following strategy:
—Here you are. It’s a present. It’s a present —they said trying to give you a scarab made of stone or a postcard. I think that if we had taken it they couldn’t leave you till you would have bought another thing.
CHEOPS! It was huge. Our guide told us that we couldn’t try to go around it because we didn’t have so much time. We jumped to the third level, from the entrance. We tried to look at its pinnacle, but it was dangerous: you could fall backwards. Once on the ground, everyone on his side did what he could: Luisito for instance ran at one thousand kilometres to try to take a picture where the entire pyramid could be seen. Peix and I reached some temples around where there were blacks telling stories in return for a tip. From there Kephren was visible in all its splendour.
But although we were trying to see other things, we always looked back at the pyramid, as it was hypnotic. When it’s close to you, you can’t stop looking at it, the same happens when looking at the Eiffel tower or at the Matterhorn in the Swiss alps. And when it’s far, you glance around for it.
Pepe asked me to take a picture of him up the pyramid. As there was little time left, I did it quickly, but pharahoh Cheops’s curse, sick of such revelry around his grave, had a grudge against our mate and suddenly I couldn’t see him anymore. Then he popped up again. He had run so fast, falling on the ground at the pharaoh’s feet.
Though amazed by the monument’s greatness, the little bus took us to a hill from which you could see the three pyramids.
—Pepe, make a record —Luisito said to him who had a camera and said solemnly—: We have 42 centuries of history in front of us.
And so he was recorded while saying that for the newcomers, because surely Napoleon said something similar —except a little time difference— but we have an image and sound proof, whether French don’t.
We went to visit Mykerinos. You can visit that pyramid without standing in queue for hours (as for Cheops). We spent 10 pounds for the entrance and desecrated the pharaoh’s grave, with a dozen of tourists. It was quite hot, but it wasn’t so untolerable as they’d told us. We arrived at the place where they left us, that is, at the burial chamber and then we went visiting the chamber upstairs where there’s a sort of fake roof with huge oblique slabs. Having visited one of the seven wonders of the ancient world was an unforgettable experience. When you finally go out and see the light, you know that you did something that has to be done in this world.
Then we visited the Chefren Sphynx. As we had been notified, we weren’t surprised by its tiny dimension. In spite of that, it is a prodigious sculpture and you can take lots of beautiful pictures. I tried to take one from behind, trying to show what Chefren has stared at, in its leonine shape, for so long. It didn’t come out very well but to satisfy the reader’s unquenchable curiosity, I say that what I stared at on that day was a fast food restaurant KFC.