was happening. It was one of the weirdest experiences of my life. I lay there, as still as I could, in a 4,000-year-old coffin while two strangers chanted over me. I was in there for about five minutes in all, and then Seija and Andrew pulled me out so that Seija could have a go.
Before we left, Seija asked if I felt any cosmic powers. I wanted to say yes, but I hadn’t, so I decided to be honest with her. She seemed disappointed by this news.
As weird as it all was, it was an amazing final experience, and it did make my trip to Egypt and the Pyramids all worthwhile. How many people can say they’ve lain in a candle-lit coffin in the middle of the King’s Chamber in one of the Great Pyramids?
It was also the only time I had been in Egypt when I couldn’t hear the call to prayer or beeping of car horns or even, as Ahmed would say, any sort of tintinnabulation.
There are actually 118 pyramids in Egypt, not just the three everyone talks about.
The ‘Great Pyramid’ is built from about 2.3 million stone blocks, weighing an average of 2.5 to 15 tonnes each. It’s estimated that the workers would have had to set a block every two and a half minutes.
The Great Pyramids now stand a full three miles south of the spot where they were originally built owing to the amount that the Earth’s surface has shifted in the last 4,500 years.
Even the builders had tombs. When an American woman was thrown from her horse in Giza, the stumbling block turned out to be the tip of an enormous builders’ necropolis, containing over 600 tombs.
Contrary to popular belief, not a single mummy has been found inside the pyramids. Mummies have mostly been found in the Valley of the Kings.
Debunking another popular myth, there are no hieroglyphics, or any form of writing, in the Great Pyramid.
The heat as we left the airport this afternoon was mental. I never normally sweat on my head but today I was dripping. Even my ears were sweating. Ricky and Stephen told me that all this travelling was going to bring me new experiences, but sweaty ears were not on my list.
As we drove in the sunshine past the golden sands of Ipanema beach I was doing a bit to camera about how much I thought I was going to enjoy my time in Rio. Then I got to my destination, Hostel Piratas de Ipanema, and my heart sank.
‘The rules of the hostel are to clean the kitchen after you’ve used it,’ said Fredericko, the owner, before I’d even put my bags down.
‘You’d best go through the rules again with the bloke who used it last then,’ I said.
The place was well minging. Half-empty coffee cups, crushed lager cans, unwashed cutlery and half-eaten yoghurts whose friendly bacteria had no doubt been battered by the unfriendly bacteria in this place.
Fredericko was a 46-year-old hippy who was popular with the kids who were hanging around. He had a constant grin on his face, smoked self-rolled fags, and wore bleached jeans which had been cut down into shorts. Shame he couldn’t have used some of the bleach in the kitchen rather than on his pants.
He led me on a long, winding walk to where I would be sleeping. We set off down a dark corridor with just one electric fan that was missing its safety guard and was plugged into the wall with bare wires which buzzed dangerously. It reminded me of a previous trip to Alcatraz. Young people in surf shorts and bikinis wandered by. We continued up some dodgy stairs and across a balcony that wobbled until we finally reached my dormitory. It was a dark room with 20 or so beds in it and looked like something out of the film Annie. More young people came and went. I am too old to be here, I thought to myself. The last time I felt like this was when I finally got round to having swimming lessons at the age of 14. Most of the other kids were a lot younger than me – seven or eight. They thought I was the swimming instructor.
Fredericko stopped at a bunk bed near the window. ‘This is the best bed in the hostel,’ he told me proudly. I couldn’t work out why, until I met a lad from Hull who explained that if you needed to empty your bladder in the night you could use the window instead of having to walk to the toilets. Not exactly en suite, but I suppose I shouldn’t moan.
The mattress was badly stained. Mine looked worse than the others due to the fact that I had daylight showing up stains that you couldn’t see on the others. Someone’s underpants hung on the end of the bedpost. I was going to move them then I thought they might attract the flies away from me so I left them.
I asked Christian, the show’s director, how much it cost to stay here. He said £4 a night. And then Christian said goodbye and left with the rest of the crew to check in to their rented house on Rua Saint Roman.
I decided to try to get an early night. I nodded off to the sound of a kid who looked about nine years old strumming away on a guitar on another bunk bed.
I was woken by Christian pointing a camera in my face. It must have been about 7 a.m. I had slept quite well. All the beds now had people in them. Bare legs dangled from the bunks and the odd bollock was hanging out, waiting for any bed bug that was ready for a bit of breakfast in bed. I went to have a wash. The toilets were in
