Returning to Giza
// April 16th, 2009 // Travel
There are few moments from my travels that live as vividly in my mind as camel riding around the Pyramids of Giza in the spring of 2005. To ride, wide-eyed, around this wonder of creation, to feel completely immersed in an ancient experience that is at once utterly exotic and intensely familiar. For we already know the Pyramids intimately, such is their penetration into the culture of history and modernity. We know their immense size, their definitive shape and structures, their dominance of the landscape, their mystery- yet it is indescribably shocking to witness them for these same factors. To see the Pyramids for the first time is to see a myth made real, to see a color that you have only ever heard described, and in this awe you are in sweet communion with myriad generations.
Last weekend I took my family to see these grand monuments of Pharaohnic Egypt. It was my parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary and my sister had joined us from Istanbul. We ventured to Giza and found camels and horses with which to cross over to the Giza plateau, and thus come across the Pyramids from some empty desert- to taste more fully this feeling of discovery that so many have reveled within. Watching these three people I care deeply about, who were a world away in the months I lived here, now ride wide-eyed around the Wonder, to see their minds ignite in realisation of their experience and this intimate and overwhelming connection to an ancient story- this was a truly joyous and fulfilling moment and one that will live indelibly in my mind forever.
