Day 10: Alexandria (Part 1)

Hi Everyone,

We’re currently in Barcelona, our cruise finished up today, and I’m in the process of writing up the rest of our ports of call.  In the next 48 hours I should cover off the four remaining days – Alexandria, Malta and two days at sea.  Sorry about the out-of-order postings – I’m also trying to keep up to date with our current adventures ashore in Spain.  Now, on with the show..

Day 10 – Giza to Alexandra (Part 1)

We awoke early-ish, around 6:30am to pack and say goodbye to our expansive room.  The hotel was truly 5 star (except for the elevator which ‘ate’ people, and was tiny) and contained a suite in which once Winston Churchill had resided briefly (which we got to see).  The funny thing is it contained roughly the same brand – and age – fridge that my parents have in the laundry back home.. funny!  Also, someone please remind me to talk about the tipping incident at the hotel when we checked in.. quite a story.

Incidentally, despite being in Pyramid view rooms, the day began predictably with heavy fog and the Khufu pyramid (which we could sort of make out the previous night from our balcony) could not been seen; for all we knew it disappeared just as amazingly as it had been revealed to us the previous day.

Moving on.. we scrambled over to the main building after I took us both on a crazy “detour” through a construction site. You should have seen the look on the guard’s faces when we walked *from* the construction zone (they didn’t say anything).

Breakfast was interesting, held in one of the restaurants on the first floor of the main building, in plush surrounds.  They had western options mixed with more standard Egyptian fare – unfortunately I can’t recall exactly what those options where – (hey.. it was early, O.K!?) but I do recall cereal, hibiscus juice(?) and lots and lots of fresh fruit.

1. There are Pyramids out there..somewhere

We met Islam and our driver Hassan in the lobby at 7:30am where we checked out of the hotel.  No incidents here, and everything went smoothly, we even didn’t have to walk through the metal detectors on the way out – bonus!  We had a new security guy for the Alexandria trip, I didn’t catch his name,  but he smiled a lot.  We’re pretty sure he was also armed with a semi-automatic, and had a nice suit on like his predecessor, Ramadan.

Our itinerary had us returning to Alexandria as the first stop, so we bid adieu to Giza and Cairo and drove directly to a service station near the tollway on the desert highway.  This served a dual purpose; a bathroom and coffee break for us tourists, and a convenient location to wait until the road was clear (in case it had been closed due to the dreaded fog).

After dodging some mandatory tipping, and pulling about 400 Egyptian pounds out of an ATM (at 5.5:1 AUD, pretty cheap) we eventually saddled back into the mini bus and continued our trip in bound.

2. One of the many dining rooms

Toni fell asleep on the return leg, but myself and a number of people were engrossed in a lengthy discussion with Islam on a variety of interesting topics, from Alexander the Great to the worship of Islam (the religion, not our guide!).  It was a very interesting journey, and I actually learned quite a lot that I’d not known before, including the five pillars of Islam.

3. So early, you could sleep standing up.

Before midday, we returned to the famous port city, and passing the big new shopping malls, made our way to the Catacombs of Alexandria.  The Catacombs are all that remains of an underground temple of worship; a mixture of Greek and Egyptian architecture dating back to pre-Christian times, roughly 1st or 2nd century AD.

The streets of Alexandria

Found entirely by accident (a donkey caused the roof to collapse a little bit, way back around the early 1900s), this subterranean temple had apparently originally four levels including an above ground structure, which was destroyed long ago.  Alike much of Alexandria, the modern city sits atop the old Alexandria but in this case (being amongst the necropolis) and so the area had not been disturbed for many centuries.

Unfortunately for us, two other cruise ships were in port on our second day, so the catacombs were quite literally filled with hundreds of tourists.  The main problem was that they were all down in the catacombs, which we were heading towards.  No matter, we descended down a set of spiral stairs glancing through windows looking down three stories to where the bottom level remains flooded.

Even Mary-Alice, a grand lady from St Louis, Missouri made the journey despite the physical obstructions and the mass of other people.  We navigated to the second level where the most ornate carvings could be observed.  We were not allowed to take cameras into the catacombs, so as a result I can’t post any pictures (which would have saved me some typing, to be honest) but we did buy a book on it later on.

Aside from the temple section, most of the catacombs were bare and contained ante rooms with burial shelves.  The main attraction was the hand crafted temple area, in a subsection of the second level.  Here we found a mixture of Greek writing and hieroglyphs , as well as a number of gorgeous statues carved into the side of the walls.  We traversed this section in a loop, and observed carvings of the god Anubis and Osiris amongst others.

It’s hard to describe the details, but needless to say, it was quite impressive – and undoubtedly roomier than some of the apartments modern day Egyptians live in above ground.

4. The Principal Tomb of the Catacombs

Alexandria will be covered more in Part 2 coming soon!