We flew from Luxor back to Cairo on this morning. We had a free afternoon once we got to our hotel. It was our last full day in Egypt. We arrived at our hotel at 11:30 am. We had no plans for the day at that point, but we put one together and quick. By 12:00 we were in a taxi cab headed across Cairo. Now what do you suppose our plan was?

Yep, we decided that we wanted to see some more pyramids before we left Egypt.

We were on the east side of Cairo and had to cross the whole city and then cross the Nile into Giza. At that point, we turned south and drove to Dahshur. We got to see the Giza pyramids as we drove past on our way south. The whole drive took us about 75 minutes.

The pyramids at Dahshur were in a military zone until 1996 and parts of the area are still off limits. Two of the five pyramids at Dahshur had access out of the original eleven pyramids that were there. The two pyramids with access happen to be the two largest and best pyramids by far in this group. They are the Red Pyramid and the Bent Pyramid. Both of these pyramids were built by Pharaoh Sneferu who reined from 2612 to 2589 BC. Both pyramids are the same height and as such, both are the third highest pyramids in Egypt. Sneferu was also the father of Khufu, who built the Great Pyramid at Giza.

The Red Pyramid is the world’s oldest true pyramid. It used to be called the North Pyramid. It has very little of its limestone casing left, but I still didn’t see why it’s called the Red Pyramid, as it didn’t look red to me. Both pyramids are 345 feet tall. You can see a close-up of the Red Pyramid in the first photo.

The next two photos will just be closer up photos of the Red Pyramid. The first one will be of a rough section and the second photo of a section that still has some “face plating” stones.

We waited for the small handful of tourists here to leave and then we had the Red Pyramid all to ourselves – except for the guards of course. We also decided to climb inside it. It was 125 steps to get up to the entrance to the pyramid. You can see the entrance in the next photo.

The last photo was taken as we stood next to the entrance up on the side of the Red Pyramid.

The passageway into the pyramid was a little over a yard square. We followed the passageway in about 200 feet. There were two antechambers offset, one on each side, from the passageway. These chambers appeared to be red granite and some extremely large stones. Some stones were ten to twelve feet wide and just as tall and who knows how deep. The rooms were about 35 feet by 50 feet with a corbelled ceiling about 40 feet tall. The burial chamber came next and it was a large room with a 50 foot high ceiling. The burial chamber stone was not as nice as the stone in the antechambers. The burial chamber also smelled like ammonia. We enjoyed having the whole pyramid and tomb to ourselves, but it was still very hot and stuffy inside. It felt wonderful to get back outside of the pyramid.