Thursday – October 16 – At Sea

This is truly our last day on the ship.  We dock early at Civitavecchia (port for Rome) and will leave the ship about 7:00am.  At this point we still don’t know if American will find seats for us to fly home on Friday.  If not, we will be forced to spend the weekend in Italy, oh darn.  This morning we attended the Executive Chef’s cooking demonstration.  They do a bit of cooking of foods that are served on the ship, but mostly the Executive Chef and the Maître’d share quips and jokes.  About noon, the ship passed through the Straits of Messina, the narrow waterway between Italy and Sicily.     On the map it has always looked to me like a sizeable passage, in reality it is very narrow, less than two miles.  Since there is a turn right at the mouth of the opening, from not very far away the view is of solid land.  You sure hoped the Capitan knew where he was headed.  As you can tell by the way Maxine is bundled up, it was very windy.  Not surprisingly, for a strait this narrow, there is a castle right at the mouth.  In the afternoon, the wind died and the sea went totally flat.  As far as the eye could see, it was as smooth as a mirror.

Now we have to enjoy the beautiful sunshine and try to not think about returning to reality.

Wednesday – October 15 – At Sea

Since leaving Alexandria last evening, we have been sailing through calm seas at a constant 20+ knots.  We have over 1,000 miles from Alexandria to Rome and it takes two days at sea.  Today, we spent doing nothing.  We woke late, had a leisurely breakfast and the sat in the sun and read our books.  This evening was the formal dinner so we dug out the fancy duds and got cleaned up.

Tomorrow is the last full day so we will spend it packing and getting ready to leave this lovely ship.

Tuesday – October 14 - Alexandria

Last night was a very short sail, only 120 miles from Port Said to Alexandria, so we left late and arrived early.  I’m sure this town has had many names, but the one that has stuck for 2000 years is the one given it by Alexander the Great after he conquered Egypt.  Since we had been on the very tiring full day tour to Cairo, we chose to do the half day tour of Alexandria in the afternoon.  So we slept in and had a leisurely breakfast.  The tour of Alexandria had only three stops, one old, one modern and one sort of in the middle, since in Egypt the year 1500 is recent.

Our first stop was the middle site, the Fortress of Qait Bey.  Qait Bey isn’t a local bay of the Med, but rather the name of the Pasha who was in charge at the time it was built.  It was built on the site of the famous Pharos Lighthouse (one of the original Seven Wonders of the World) and used many of the stones from that fallen marvel.  I don’t  know how completely it might have decayed, but a restoration done in the 1980s has it looking almost brand new.   It has over 300 rooms and each looks absolutely perfect.  On the  ground floor is the remains of the mosque built to serve the inhabitants of the fort.  All that is left is a very typical Moslem mosaic floor.  Beautiful geometrics, but nothing representational.

From Qait Bey we then bused to the Roman Amphitheatre.  Alexandria traffic may be even worse than Cairo.  Short drives between sites were taking over 30 minutes.  Since no one would pay attention anyway, there appear to be almost no traffic signals in Alexandria.  Combined with no traffic police, it makes for a totally hellish environment.  The Roman theatre was discovered while digging the foundations for a new hotel in the last 20 years.  Once they found a few artifacts, they kept digging and discovered a complete amphitheatre, a Roman baths and several surrounding buildings.  Needless to say, the hotel didn’t get built.  This theatre is quite small by the standards of some we have seen on this cruise, seating only about 800, but they have restored it to the point where you could picture modern concerts being held there, but they’re not.  They have also used the site to display some of the artifacts that they are removing from the sea.  Similar to the location I dove in Naples, in the last 20 or 30 years they have discovered an entire ancient site in about 30 feet of water just off of Qait Bey.  Wish I could have arranged a dive here too.

The third stop on the trip and our final tour location of the entire cruise was the New Library of Alexandria.  The Egyptians recently decided to rebuild the library of Alexandria and return the city to the center of learning it once was.  To this end they have constructed a very modern library and conference center.  Designed to contain up to eight million books, the real focus is on a digital collection, rather than shelves of paper.  There are carrels for over 400 computers placed around the building.   They have placed all of their books (except where recent copyrights got in the way) on line and are accessible to the world at www.bibalex.org.   The building itself is quite beautiful, having been built to the designs of the winner of a competition.   The outside facade is granite from the upper Nile area inscribed with characters from all the worlds known written languages.

This effectively concludes our cruise.  We leave Alexandria shortly for two days at sea before our arrival back into Rome.  Hope you have enjoyed our travelogue.

Monday – October 13 – Port Said (for Cairo)

What an early morning, and this is supposed to be a vacation.  The alarm went off at 4:50am so we could be up, breakfasted and at the meeting place by 6:15.  The reason for the early start was that today was the all day trip to Cairo.  It appeared that everyone on  the ship was going on the same tour, there were 27 full bus loads.  All of the buses grouped up and caravanned from Port Said to Cairo, a drive of about three and a half hours.  The reason for the caravan was security.  We had an armed guard on our bus and several trucks with armed guards circulating among the buses.  Traffic was halted as our convoy drove out of Port Said-a good thing since driving in Egypt makes Naples look fairly calm. 

Our guide was very informative during the whole trip, talking about the people of Egypt and some of both its ancient as well as more recent history. The road to Cairo parallels the Suez Canal for the first several miles.  Driving through the desert with a large ship a few yards away is a bit strange.  Our first stop was in Giza,  to see the pyramid of Cheops.  This particular pyramid is the largest in Egypt and one of the early ones.  In the area there are three large pyramids and six smaller ones.  The smaller ones were for the women, queens and princesses  of course.  One of the more interesting things were all the camel tenders trying to make a living by having tourists ride their animals.  The going price was $1 to sit on the camel and $3 for a short ride.  We chose just to take a few pictures.  A short distance from the pyramids is the Sphinx, where we had only a few minutes to take pictures.  One surprise was that the pyramids are larger than you would expect and that the Sphinx is smaller than one would think. 

Lunch was at the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Cairo, where we sat with about 1,100 other tour-goers and enjoyed a delicious buffet.  This part of Cairo is very different from Giza, where the pyramids reside.  It is sophisticated and cosmopolitan, full of lovely buildings, parks and gardens.  Afterwards, we went to the Egyptian Museum.  Unfortunately there are no pictures as they are very serious about keeping cameras out.  It has the most incredible collection of early Egyptian artifacts, including the entire Tutankhamen collection.  Maxine was particularly pleased to see that the famous golden mask was there (they don’t let it travel any longer even though we did have the opportunity to see it in Los Angeles years ago).

On the way home, we drove along the Nile and observed a very beautiful sunset.   I am not sure if the feluccas (traditional Egyptian sailboats) were actually being used for commerce or just for sport, but they were interesting to see on the Nile.   On the road home, we saw some of the new construction of major housing blocks being built near  Cairo.  Though not as huge as the construction we saw near Shanghai a few years ago, this is still very  impressive.  In spite of the improvements, Egypt is still clearly a Third World country.  Poverty is widespread, and we saw several places where horse drawn carts are still being used for commerce.

Our drive back to the ship took another three hours, and when we finally arrived, it was 8:30pm, the end of a very exhilarating yet exhausting day.

 

 

Sunday – October 12 – At Sea

Today is a scheduled sea day, not like the impromptu one we had yesterday.  Outside there is mostly just ocean, with an occasional rock breaking the  surface.  These seem fairly large, but they  are really just rocks and not islands.  They probably lack water supplies and are therefore not inhabited. Since there is nothing much happening on board, we slept in and then ordered breakfast to the cabin.  The weather outside is  perfect, warm, sunny with a bit of a breeze so dining on the balcony was ideal.

Saturday – October 11 - Mykonos

Oh goodie, a Greek island!  The port lecturer warned us to expect topless sun bathing at the beach.  Oh Dear!  Unfortunately, just before we pulled into the harbor channel, the captain came on the PA system to warn everyone that the approach might be rough and that everyone should either remain seated or make sure to hold on.  Shortly thereafter, he came on again to announce that they had boarded the pilot and after discussions had decided that the winds and seas were too strong to permit a safe anchoring. (He said the wind speed was approaching 60mph!)  We could not dock because of the size of the ship, and using tenders from anchor would have been very dangerous.  So he backed out of the harbor and we are now on our way to Egypt.  This is the second time in two cruises this has happened to us, we also missed Grand Cayman on our March cruise.  If you look at the picture, you have now seen as much of Mykonos as we did.   (Footnote for Dan and Lily:  We won the morning trivia)

Friday – October 10 - Istanbul

Just before dawn, we pulled into the Bosporus and made our way to the dock.   The city of Istanbul is the only one in the world that spans two continents.  The older part is in Europe, the newer part is on the other side of the channel and is in Asia.  There are frequent ferries across as well as a modern bridge. 

We left on the tour about 8:30am and went at once (at least as fast as the very heavy traffic would allow) to the Hippodrome.  There  aren’t any horses there today, but in Roman times it was the site of the chariot races and similar events.  There was seating for 100,000, fully one quarter of the total population.  Today, it is the site of several obelisks, stolen of course from Egypt.  

From the Hippodrome we walked to the Blue Mosque.    Just as cities in the Christian world each tried to build a bigger cathedral, the Moslem rulers each tried to build a bigger Mosque.  This was one of the largest and most elaborate in the world.  There are almost 30,000 blue tiles lining the interior walls.

From the Blue Mosque, another  short walk took us to the Saint Sophia.  Originally a church, it was converted to a Mosque when the Moslems took over the city.  Fortunately, they didn’t destroy the mosaics, they just covered them over.  Therefore in the 1930s when it became a museum, they were able to remove the covering and put them back on display.  

Another short walk and we were at the Topkapi Palace.  Once again, it is now a museum since the seat of government moved away with the end of the Sultanate.  Made famous by the movie of the same name, it is much more than just the collection of rare and precious artifacts.  Our first visit was to the area of the Harem.  Yes, there was a harem.  The Sultan had as many as 250 concubines with appropriate numbers of eunuchs to care for them.  It was also the home for the Queen Mother who acted as the house mother for the entire harem.  There were areas for living, areas for eating, relaxation and for bathing.  The bathing area had three separate baths, hot, warm and cold.  There was also a full bath tub for when the Sultan wished to use the baths.  We also did visit the treasury where the famous Topkapi dagger is kept (well locked) as well as a diamond of over 80 carats that had been presented to the Sultan.  (Sorry, no pictures permitted).

After the Topkapi, as short bus ride took us to the Grand Bazaar.  This is the original Bazaar and has over 4,000 shops under one roof.   You can get almost anything you would want there.  In fact, we were strongly warned to avoid purchasing any special herbs.

After avoiding most of the merchants we took the bus back to the ship and relaxed with is nice snack.