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Day 75: This was it. The big day. The day we were off to see the Pyramids.

We accepted the offer from our hotel to organise a visit to the pyramids near Cairo in chronological order of their construction. This turned out to be extremely useful way of developing an understanding of how the pyramid builders came to produce these monuments of such monumentally proportions.

First stop was the so-called Step Pyramid at Saqqara. The oldest of the pyramids, it’s quite evident that the architects and builders here were trying out their techniques to see whether the megatonnes of stone, piled on top of each other, would hold fast without structural problems emerging.

Thousands of years later, the step pyramid is still standing. Emboldened by this success, the architects of ancient Egypt moved on to smoother, less tiered, structures.

Next we saw (from a distance and beyond a no-go military zone) the Bent Pyramid. Nice try. Originally building the sides at an ambitious angle of 54 degrees, it became evident that the structure would not safely stay together if they kept building to the top. Midway, the original design had to be aborted and the upper levels were completed on a less precipitous (43 degree) angle. It’s unclear whether the architect kept his job, or his life.

Having learned this difficult lesson, the Red Pyramid was the first pyramid of classic proportions. The pyramid gets its name from the colour of the stone that was used; considerably redder than the ones down the road at Giza. It’s also a one-camel pyramid: sufficiently secluded from the main tourist route that it’s plied by a lone camel, whose handler who kept trying to move between me and the pyramid to be in a better position to request payment. We hiked up the side and down the 130 steps to the bare tomb within the pyramid, but didn’t stick around in the musty and oppressive air down there.

Finally, we could delay no longer - it was back towards Cairo to visit the Pyramids of Giza, the largest and therefore arguably the most impressive of all. At 146 metres, the Pyramid of Cheops is the largest; the middle Pyramid of Khafre (main picture above) is about 10 metres shorter but on first glance no less impressive.

Of course, when you stop to think about it, if you’re building a pyramid 10 metres higher, it’s actually the bottom 10 metres that you are adding, so the extra 10 metres translates into millions of tonnes of extra rock.

Needless to say, the Pyramids of Giza were a huge circus, with all manner of vendors, touts and handlers hustling hard for their livelihoods. Yet it wasn’t too hard to get away to a quieter spot to get a more solitary view of these most magnificent of human achievements.