In Cairo our primary objectives were to see the Pyramids, the Egyptian Antiquties Museum, and the transit of Venus.

The Pyramids emerging from the Giza smog.

We went inside the Great Pyramid of Cheops, which primarily consisted of crawling through a claustrophobic passage to a large plain room with a sarcophagus. Our guide says that Hitler recreated the sarcophagus room as his personal green room under Nurnberg Stadium -- I can't verify this, can the next person to go to Nuremberg check it out?

Looking up the great pyramid. Sorry the sky was so smoggy.

Inside the tomb of Imhotep, the architect of the Great Pyramids.

Inside another tomb near the Pyramids. Officially, you weren't supposed to take pictures inside the tombs, but the guards were always happy to let you do so anyway for a small contribution.

The Sphinx.

The Sphinx from another angle.

The Sphinx from yet another angle.

A seller of Sphinxes.

Giza as seen from the base of the pyramids.

The pyramids are very large -- we are quite a distance from them in order to be in a place where you can see all three.

Pictures of the beginning of the transit of Venus, taken by holding my little Canon S45 up to the eyepiece of Frank's Questar telescope. The bite out of the sun is Venus. All of the other blemishes are dust on the eyepiece, not sunspots.

This was at a greater magnification but it's still just a dot.

A picture about three hours into the transit, or about halfway, showing the closest Venus got to being in front of the center of the sun.

Pictures taken as Venus was ending the transit.

For the end of the transit, we set up Frank's telescope near the outdoor restaurants of the Cairo Marriott where we were staying. By this point many people had seen the news reports on Al-Jazeera, so they were much more interested than they'd been when we'd set the scope up hours earlier.

The section of the hotel where we stayed was in the form of a semicircle, and each room faced a different direction. So they had stickers letting you know exactly which way Mecca was.

The outside of the Egyptian Antiquities Museum, which would take weeks to see all of. Most of the contents of Tutankhamen's tomb, especially the gold, are kept here.

The outside of another wing of our hotel -- apparently they didn't pick a good concrete contractor. A man ran up to us and told us not to take pictures. Obviously we were casing the joint for a terrorist attack, as if one were needed.

The inside of a nearby restaurant "El Cid", with really cool light in the bar. And they had molukhiyya.

A rock held up by a rope in a garden outside the stunning Museum of Islamic Ceramics next to our hotel. The ceramics were nice, and the museum building itself, a palace from the early twentieth century, was very impressive.

On to Ireland