I think that if someone did a global survey of famous monuments that people would like to visit at some point during their lives the pyramids of Egypt would appear near the top of the list. It was certainly something I'd always wanted to see. They certainly beckon contemplation and discovery. There is nothing quite like that sense of encountering something that millions of people throughout history have also seen and brooded upon. One can almost sense the tension of Napoleon Bonaparte as he must have looked at these same monuments and wondered what lay in his own future and how far he would go, feeling the weight of his decisions on his shoulders. The very dice of history, whose outcome would affect millions of people for many generations to come, were in his hands.
   That is the way that I imagined it. Quiet, relaxed contemplation. That was what I was determined to experience when, during my first trip to Egypt, I left work early and decided to embark upon a trip to see the pyramids.
My conditions for this trip were not the best. To start, I'd just left work and I wore a shirt and tie and, afraid of it getting stolen, I took my laptop with me dangling from a bag strapped to my shoulder. The first hurtle was getting to the pyramids. I could see them from my building at work, so I knew they couldn't be very far. I walked around and approached the nearest taxi driver. He stopped and I said "pyramids". He drove away. I stopped another driver. Same thing. I stopped a third one and this time I said the word while making a pyramid sign with my hands. He didn't know what I was talking about. On the fourth try I found a driver who, though he also didn't know what I meant, walked over to a large goon who acted as security for a floating restaurant on the Nile river. I said the word to him and he smiled. Then the two spoke a few sentences in Arabic, almost as if they knew each other. We left, and the goon demanded no money for any of this, which struck me as rather odd.
   I agreed that the driver would take me to the pyramids for forty pounds, and I got in. The ride took a long time, perhaps more than half an hour. My driver said nothing and he seemed to be behaving normally all the time. Then traffic stopped as we waited I was surprised by a man who came off the street, opened the taxi door and sat in the front street. What seemed all the more unusual was that my driver hardly reacted at all. I didn't know it at the time, but it's actually quite normal for strangers to share taxis in Egypt without asking for permission. However, this man was no passenger. He quickly turned around and looked at me, smiled the most tea-stained smile I've ever seen and asked me in English if I liked camel rides. Taking all this in stride I told him that maybe I do. Because this was a work day I knew that I had only an hour or two to see the pyramids, quite possibly the only chance I ever had to do so. Furthermore, I didn't know what the situation would be like once we got to the pyramids. I would not have been surprised to find them totally inaccessible. All these things put together somehow made me agree to a camel ride around the pyramids. At that moment we arrived at our destination, which the driver seemed to know. Smelling easy money, the driver tried to ask for fifty pounds for the ride instead of forty, but I gave him what we agreed on.
   I got out of the taxi and a wink later, onto a camel. The man who got into the car was there, along with three other men. One was the owner of the camel, the other man was a tour guide and the third man didn't have any ostensible function. The tea-stained taxi boarder negotiated the price with me. At this point I hadn't yet acquired any haggling savvy and I didn't know that I should have negotiated a much lower price than what I was offered. It was two hundred forty Egyptian pounds, which I know today is the equivalent of a month's wages in Egypt. I was feeling the time pressure, and I believed them when they said that the desert was closed off to pedestrian travellers at that time. The pyramids are very big and I didn't think I'd have the time to see them on foot anyway. So, fine, against my better judgement I decided to go for it.
   These men were happier with the situation than I would have liked, and my tour guide climbed the camel by stepping on its neck, something that seemed to give it excruciating pain. It produced a very deep bass sound not unlike an Australian didjeridoo. As the camel started forward another man came out of nowhere and mounted a keffiyeh on my head, smiled, and said 'sixty pounds'. I became annoyed and handed it back to him. The tour guide yelled something at him in Arabic and he ran away. We walked past some dumpsters where I noticed a the dead body of a camel lying on top of some trash. A minute later we started moving towards the entrance to the desert, which is separated from Cairo by a wall to ward off the creeping sand.
   The brightness of the sun has subsided by this time of day and I felt a certain kind of peace as we moved across the desert. That was when my tour guide pointed out that the two hundred forty I'd agreed to pay was just for the camel, and that he had his own fee of one hundred thirty pounds. I promptly declared that the deal was over and I demanded to be let off the camel, but he protested and then begrudgingly agreed to go through with the tour "for free". When we passed a set of other mounted travelers the tour guides greeted each other and then my guide angrily yelled something over to them.
   Once this passed, we embarked on our twenty minute trip to the pyramids. Aside from my annoyance at having obviously been ripped off, the trip was moderately pleasant. The sky was considerably bluer than in the city, and I appreciated the cleanliness of the desert air, even as I was being thrown through it. Sitting on a camel means being two metres off the ground, and every step this animal takes tosses the riders ten centimetres into the air and, in my case, testacles-first into my tour guide. Worse still, my spine was frequently rammed into the rear pommel of the saddle, which meant that not only did I get to see the result of thousands of people's hard labour in the form of the pyramids, but I also felt like one of the labourers who built them. My laptop was also having a tough time as it crashed into my thigh with every step.
   We stopped at the older and smaller pyramid of Menkaure. In the distance were tour groups on horseback who'd paid about twenty pounds for their trips. I photographed both them and the pyramids. My guide then revealed the extend of his erudite knowledge of the pyramids by treating me to some "free" historical background, which went something like this:
"There was once a pharaoh who said to his people 'build something to remember me by', and so they built him the little pyramid."
   His mumbly discussion of the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre was similar, except he also mentioned some vandalism that had been done by the evil Napoleonic army. When I asked about a sign discussing a tomb of some kind he quickly changed the subject saying that it was unimportant. It was then that I realized that he was one of only a few people to have managed to learn English as a second language without ever being able to read or write in any language.
   As we approached the sphinx the camel was forced to descend around some valleys. The steep drop made it nervous and it emitted that didjeridoo sound again. It made me think that considering the price I was paying for this abominable experience the camel was the most sensible of the three of us. The guide coerced the poor animal into descending the hills and after a few hundred collisions of my poor testes with my guide's back and my poor spine with the rock hard pommel we got to within a hundred metres of the sphinx. My guide then (mendaciously) told me that this was as far as we could legally go. I took some pictures of the sphinx's head and the twelvefold zoom did actually give me a hint of what it looked like, even if being there did not. My guide then asked me if I wanted to go to the hillside to take some pictures. I did.
   We climbed up to the top of some hills from which both the city and the pyramids are clearly visible. In the distance I could see clouds of sand stir from armed Egyptian police riding on camels. Then my guide told me something I didn't expect.
   "To tell you the truth, people come here to fuck."
   Yes, the hills at that point were high enough above the city to hide whatever happened on them.
   "Men and women come here to have fun. Men fuck men here. Have you ever had fun with a man?"
   "No."
   It was at this point that I realized that my testicular landings may have given him ideas. I looked at the police in the distance. Their weapons only have a range of a few hundred metres. If I could survive the leap down from the camel onto the ground and make a dash towards the city while dodging Kalashnikov fire and an irate tour guide I stood a 50% chance of surviving my escape. All in all that seemed pretty good given the conditions, but the look of that city wall was a bit discouraging, and so the native hue of resolution was sicklied over with the pale cast of thought. I stayed on the camel.
   We went on a slow trip back to the city, and the guide started mumbling something about having a family to feed and about the camel owner being a nasty man who would take the entire two hundred forty pounds. Stupidly, I agreed to give him thirty pounds, which came to about a pound per word of guiding, and I could have told him more about those pyramids than vice versa. He was very disappointed with such a small sum.
When we reached the final part of my tour I got off the camel and followed the camel gang into a perfume store. I proclaimed that I wouldn't buy anything, but the owner kept on talking about his wares for five minutes anyway. When the camel owner returned I explained that I'd need to exchange my money because I didn't have enough Egyptian pounds. Of course, they knew a lot of reasons why I needed to do that with them. The banks were closed, there wasn't one nearby, and so on. So, they exchanged my money, and of course it was at a rate that vastly favoured them.
   Looking at my guide, I could tell that he was at the bottom of the pecking order of this gang, and I pitied him. After I paid, he offered to buy me tea, which is a normal thing to do in Egypt. I felt exhausted, and admitted he was right in his cliché about "walking like an Egyptian" after having been on a camel. When we sat down I asked him what I'd always wanted to ask an Egyptian, and that was what he thought of Israel. His answer, so far as I could understand it, went something like this:
   "In 1968 they rucked us, and then in 1973 we rucked them back."
   He then went on to tell me that in addition to Islam he also believed in some local gods, and then he told me that Egypt has freedom under Hosni Mubarak, whose meaty face adorns state buildings all over the country.
I quickly left and decided to find a taxi on my own. The outskirts of Cairo are a poor and run-down place, but I found a dark hovel-like dwelling where a boy sold flatbread and bought some for one pound. It wasn't great, but it was good value for such a small price. I walked along a road that was divided in the middle by a canal. I saw a few boys riding camels, and the full moon come out behind the trees. The evening prayers were broadcast through the streets and I felt as if everything was floating, like smoke.
   I finally found a taxi. It was being washed by an old man and two small boys, about five years of age. The two five year old boys were thrilled with my braces, which they found hilarious. I indicated that I wanted a taxi, and the old man managed to find a local teenager who spoke enough English to translate what my hotel was and that they wanted a price. I took a stick and wrote a sum in the sand using Arabic digits: forty pounds. The old man tacitly agreed.
   I was amazed to discover that, though it was very far, the old man knew precisely where my obscure little hotel was. He was also a very good driver, and in that sense he gave me a disservice, because after that ride I started trusting Egyptian taxi drivers to be sensible people. In reality they couldn't be a more varied lot.