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.