Traveler Stories
Four Thousand Years in One Day: Dalia and Aziz in Giza, Saqqara and Memphis
Giza, the Grand Egyptian Museum, Saqqara, Memphis, and a photoshoot to close it. For Dalia Varde, who has Egyptian heritage alongside Filipino roots, it was not only sightseeing.
Dalia Varde is Miss Cosmo International, and she came to Egypt in September 2026 with Aziz. She has Filipino roots and Egyptian heritage, which puts her in an unusual position at the pyramids: a visitor, and not entirely a visitor.
The route they took is worth describing on its own, because it is one of the better ways to see this part of Egypt and most itineraries get the order wrong.
Giza first
They started at the pyramids. There is an argument for saving them until last, and it is wrong. Giza is the thing everyone has already seen in photographs, and standing under it early resets the scale for everything that follows. Nothing later in the day is diminished by it. Several things are improved.
Il Grande Museo Egizio
Then the GEM, which is a few minutes from the plateau and is the natural second stop. It holds the objects that came out of the ground the sites are made of, in a building finished in this decade. That contrast is the point of visiting it on the same day as the pyramids rather than on a different one.
Saqqara, and then Memphis
Saqqara is where pyramid-building was worked out. The Step Pyramid of Djoser predates the ones at Giza, and it looks like what it is: an early attempt at a problem nobody had solved yet, by people who then solved it. Seeing it after Giza rather than before turns it from a lesser pyramid into a first draft, which is far more interesting.
Memphis closes the sequence. It was the capital when all of this was being built, and what survives is fragmentary. After a day of monuments that are overwhelmingly intact, a capital city reduced to pieces lands differently.
On the route
Giza, the GEM, Saqqara and Memphis are close enough to combine in one day with a private car, and far enough apart that doing it by taxi means negotiating four times. The order matters more than most people expect: oldest-last reads as anticlimax, oldest-second reads as origin story.
Ending with the photoshoot
The day finished with a professional photoshoot. Booking the photography at the end rather than the start is deliberate and we recommend it: by then you have seen the places, you know which backdrop you actually want, and you have stopped being self-conscious about the camera.
For a traveller with a family connection to the country, the photographs are doing something a little different from holiday pictures. We will leave what that means to Dalia.
The same route, privately
Giza, the Grand Egyptian Museum, Saqqara and Memphis in one day, with a photoshoot if you want one.
See Giza and Saqqara toursContinua a esplorare
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