‘I have not earned my spurs as a travel writer until I see Giza’

Jonathan Bastable just missed seeing the fabled tombs of the pharaohs last year. He hopes he’ll get another chance

For a travel writer, I am not very well travelled. I’ve never been to India or south-east Asia and North and South America are mostly an unopened book. Closer to home, I get no tick for Edinburgh, the Peak District or Stratford-on-Avon.

But the pyramids, there’s the omission that troubles me. It’s because they are locus classicus of the professional traveller: Napoleon and the admirable Gertrude Bell were there; so was Mark Twain, who went literally everywhere.

I’ve often written about the pyramids – in libraries or at my desk. I love the fact that our biblically minded forebears wondered if these might be “the granaries of Joseph”, and I never cease to marvel that the

I never cease to marvel that the Great Pyramid was, for 4,000 years, Earth’s tallest structure

Great Pyramid was, for 4,000 years, the tallest structure on Earth!

I almost made it to Egypt last autumn – a couple of months before Covid-19 hit, did I but know it. It was a press trip, and I usually avoid them.

I can’t be doing with the bonhomie and the braggadocio (“Paragliding in the Dolomites after this, then off to review new spas in Luang Prabang…”). I’d have borne the pack to gaze on those three hoary tetrahedrons just once in my life, to have sailed upstream to the broken pillars of Karnak, but I had a job booked in and couldn’t move it.

Another chance may come my way, who knows. In the meantime, I’ll feel I haven’t quite earned my travel-writing spurs. I’ll be a fraud abroad, a geezer who’s not clapped eyes on Giza.