If you were to spend one minute with each item in the Egyptian Museum, day and night, you'd spend nine months seeing all the catalogued exhibits. So we breezed through it in 60 minutes today.

We hired a driver, Hassan, for the day, who spoke English well, and knew the area. Given our short timetable, we thought this would be more efficient than a bus tour, and the price was right: 360 Egyptian Pounds (before "baksheesh"). On our own schedule, he took us wherever we said we wanted to go (and to a couple of places that probably offered him kickbacks).

It was a whirlwind tour of the Egyptian Museum, but we did see some of the treasures of King Tutankhamen, including his golden portrait mask from 1340BC; dozens of intricately carved sarcophagi (stone caskets); giant stone hieroglyphic tablets; and hundreds of stone sculptures. The museum is massive, and it's bursting at the seams with exhibits spanning 4500 years of history. Today, it was also bursting at the seams with people; we think all 20 million Cairenes decided to check it out today.

From there, we visited the Mosque of Sultan Hassan, built around 1348. The main minaret is 81 meters high -- the tallest in Cairo. The mosque also includes two tombs, for the sultan and his son. We got there just as the call went out for midday prayers. Muslims pray five times daily, a local resident explained, and on Fridays (the holy day of the week) everyone attends prayer services at a mosque and hears an Imam preach a message from the Koran.

From there it was on to the Pyramids at Giza (with intervening stops at a papyrus factory and an aromatic oils shop...we talked our driver Hassan out of the carpet factory). On viewing the pyramids, you cannot fathom how they were built several thousand years before Christ. The Great Pyramid comprises 3 million limestone blocks, each of which averages 2.5 tons, and stands 140 meters tall. And it's not just rocks piled on top of each other; each one is so carefully fitted that you cannot slip even a piece of paper between them.

A short distance from the Pyramids is the Great Sphinx, with the body of a lion and the head of a man. We were not allowed to park near the Sphinx, but Hassan let me jump out of the car and take a couple of pictures before a policeman on a camel came to chase us off.

Not that we were breaking any posted traffic rules. There appear to be no rules to break. Hassan told us that he cannot drive without his horn, even though it is against the law to blow it. As in Beijing, and to some extent in Paris, the painted traffic lanes and signs were a waste of money. Everybody just points their car where they want to go, and then they start honking and step on the accelerator. Cars coexist on the road with pedestrians, camels, donkeys and horses -- with amazingly few collisions.

It was hot here today, in the 90s. Especially compared to the rainy cool 50s of Paris on Friday, it's quite a contrast. A constant warm breeze off the Sahara makes the temperature bearable.

In the span of five days, we've climbed both the Great Wall of China and the Great Pyramid at Giza. Tomorrow, we'll do some more climbing; it's on to Athens where we'll explore the Acropolis.