Alexandria with guide – Saturday 17 March 2007

So this morning we wake up bright and shiny and we’re in the minibus by 730am. It’s a little over 200km to Alex and because it’s a minibus its only suppose to do 90km/hour so it felt like it took about 4 days to get there… The radio cut out after the first hundred km’s so it was a long long drive.

We met the guide at the Catacombs of Kom ash-Shuqqafa. She gave us a really great spiel on how the catacombs were built and why. They are pretty impressive just for how many tombs there are – over 300 – it’s totally like a rabbit’s warren. You can’t take photos in the catacombs. I’m not sure why, there isn’t much in the way of graphics on the walls, but I guess they want to preserve what there is. It’s just a spiral staircase down into the earth with caves that are made of a mixture of stone blocks and dirt. They discovered it when a donkey fell through the top of the shaft in the spiral staircase. The donkey was just wandering along and fell through the dirt that had covered up the top of the shaft.

Next we went to Pompey’s Pillar and the Daughter Library. She talked about Pompey’s pillar explaining that a lot of what people thought it was for has been disproved based on timing. For example they thought it was created after Pompey had been killed but it’s older than that. I really liked the Daughter Library. She had two version of why the Daughter Library existed. Firstly it was the place where the public could access copies of the parchment that were in the main library and secondly it was a back up library.

After this we went to the Roman Amphitheatre – Chris and I didn’t go in last time but it was really interesting. There is a spot in the centre of the first amphitheatre that you stand on, say words in a normal voice, and they come back louder (that being the whole point of an amphitheatre – to amplify sound!) but its cool that it still works even though some of the steps are broken etc.

Back in the day they also had hot rooms near the amphitheatre. You can still seem the walls – all varying shades of black – the hotter the room the blacker the walls (from the fire heated pipes that ran underneath the rooms). Plus there were a few examples of the statues they pulled from the sea. The water has worn off all the features of the statues but the pieces that are on display still look fairly cool.

I was starting to get a little starving marvin by this point but we decided to go to Fort of Qaitbay for a look around before heading to lunch. Fort Qaitbay is on the site of the old Lighthouse of Alexandria (one of the seven wonders of the ancient world). Our guide explained what happened to the light house – I can’t remember it all but it was along the lines of some bad dude who wanted to invade Egypt by sea obviously didn’t like the light house. So he sent a guy into Egypt and got him to convince the rulers that there were massive amounts of treasure underneath – that it was the burial site of some old pharaoh or something. So they started demolishing the lighthouse so they could dig up the treasure.

After Fort Qaitbay we went to lunch. We were going to go to Fish Market like Chris and I went to last time, but the tour girl took us to another place. The food was very nice. She ordered for us – two full fish, I forget what sort, plus calamari and prawns (that’s not counting the 57 thousand flat breads we’d eaten with dip when we sat down). We were fairly full when we finished up! The fish was quite nice, but I struggle when they come out with the eyes still in. Not just the gross out factor, but also my skills at dismembering the fish need some work – I struggle to get the fish away from the skin and bones. Even still I had plenty to eat.

After lunch to guide invited us to ice cream – she wanted us to try a special sort of ice cream but the place was out of it so we just had vanilla. It was nice, but not as exciting as she claimed it would be… we assume the special flavour would have been nicer.

After ice cream we stopped at the Mosque of An-Nabi Daniel so Alana could take some pictures. She had her scarf with her so could cover up he hair so our guide took her inside to look around. She said it was pretty cool. Mike and I wandered round outside and a guy was pushing really hard to try and sell us random souvenirs. I’m saying ‘La shukran. La shukran. La shukran. La. La. La.’ Which is basically say no thank you, no thank you, then just no, no, no over and over again. It was totally pissing me off and I was saying to Mike that this is where it gets really annoying. Then this random guy in the full Saudi type head scarf came up and was laughing and seemed to be saying to the guy ‘go away, she’s going to hit you’ coz my hands were clenched when I was saying how annoying it was being pestered.

Our next stop was the Bibliotheca Alexandria – the Library of Alexandria. This was pretty cool. I hadn’t been here before – it’s not everyday you go to a library that has a viewing platform inside it! It cost millions of dollars and Egypt paid for a little over half of it (the rest was donations from other countries and organizations). It can house up to 8 million books but so far only has about 500,000. It was officially opened in Oct 2002 and it looks pretty cool. It also has a massive multi-media area that stores something like 6 terabytes of data. So much stuff!

By now we were starting to fade a bit and we’d seen pretty much everything in town. We decided to skip the museum coz Alana and Mike were going to the Cairo museum tomorrow anyway so we headed to Montaza Palace for a look around the gardens, palace and bridge. We took some photos of the replica lighthouse and some outside the palace. The palace is very pretty and we had the whole gate to ourselves so got some good pics.

Then we dropped the guide off near the middle of Alex and headed home. The return trip was much faster than the way up – it was like because the sun had mostly gone down he thought the speed camera wouldn’t be able to get him. He nearly got caught at one point but we got lucky.

We were fairly shattered by the time we got home, plus still full from lunch so we just went up to Beano and had a snack for dinner. All in all a lovely day – we got some good pics which I’ll put online soon.