There’re any number of ways the scam could run when booking a tour in Egypt, and it’s too hot right now for me to come up with truly imaginative ways.

• The car might be missing essential safety equipment: it may not have seat belts. Or brakes.
• You may, without prior consent, be sharing the car that seats three with the driver’s entire extended family and all attendant livestock.
• Your “guide” may know less about the destination than you.
• And their English skills may mysteriously crumble at convenient times, say when it comes time to settle any bills.
• Even more audaciously, previously negotiated prices can change, and what can you do if you’re already there?
• Or your destination, structures that have been standing around for over 4500 years, are “closed today” (very sorry, sir), but the guide knows of an excellent papyrus (banana leaves) and alabaster (wax with stone chips) museum nearby: a special kind of museum where all the pieces are for sale.

Any or all of these could have happened to us that day, but we got taken in what turned out to be a pretty comical way — one that could only work in a baksheesh-fueled country like Egypt.

We drove through a backalley and into a courtyard 100m away from the entrance to the impressively fenced Giza compound. Our guide led us to an outfit called DI Stables, which I later figured out probably stood for “Dis-Ingenuous”. Some handwringing and 360LE later (about CAD$72), we were teetering on two horses, ready for action or serious injury. They were improbably named Mickey Mouse and Michael Jackson (he was a little splotchy).

Now the tour we’d bought ought to have included admission to the compound (already 60LE per person) plus a traipse out “behind” the Pyramids, to a hill where you can get all 9 pyramids in one shot (what I’m calling the Big Three, plus six smaller ones). With this in mind, we weren’t wondering too much when we set off decidedly away from the main compound entrance, hugging the fence and wandering through the Cairene alleys, finally emerging into the open desert.

There were a few things going on at that moment to addle our senses. Needless to say, the heat was pretty crazy. Maybe you’ve seen The Three Amigos, that scene where they’re clopping through the desert, mirage-ridden and delirious: kinda like that.

Then there was the slow, grinding, nether-regional torture that horseback riding inflicts on the uninitiated. I couldn’t even stand up in my stirrups to alleviate this because my quads were still on strike after the Red Pyramid (another story). Every horse-step was like a punch in the ass.

Finally, there was the constant threat of unwise speed from our guide-turned-menacer Sam/Moses (hereafter referred to as S&M), who insisted that later, we would “strong gallop” as it was more comfortable. Personally, I’d take ass-punching over getting dragged behind an unfettered Michael Jackson, excavating tombs with my face.

All these thoughts percolated through our brains, so we barely noticed when S&M found a hole in the fence, and we moseyed on in.