Alexandria, Cairo, & Giza, Egypt
We arrived in Alexandria, Egypt ,at 7 a.m. on Saturday, April 21, for a 1-day visit. Alexandria, a city founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE, sits at the mouth of Egypt's Nile River on the Mediterranean Sea. Over time this historic port grew into a center of education and became the second most powerful city in the world after Rome. It remained the capital of Roman and Byzantine Egypt for a millennium. Its library was the largest in the ancient world and international scholars flocked there. Today it boasts a stunning modern library that rises dramatically from the shore. Much of ancient Alexandria now lies under water, making it a remarkable time capsule of a goneby era.
When we pushed back our curtains and surveyed the port we were in, we saw evidence for the first time of Egypt's navy. (Click on any photo to enlarge it.)
Alexandria being Egypt's second largest city, and it's biggest one on the Mediterranean, it's no surprise that it has a very large industrial port.
One could also catch a glimpse of Alexandria's skyline from our docking position.
The gangway was in place
and the buses were lined up for the day's excursions.
Janis and I had signed up for a 12-hour excursion titled "Giza Pyramids & Cairo Museum." This involved an initial 3-hour drive on a desert highway to Cairo and Giza.
On the drive through a part of Alexandria on our way to the highway we passed a number of monuments and mosques.
Even the occasional elegant facade looked grimey and neglected.
Our guide explained that Egypt's laws grant outsized rights to the occupants of buildings, often including the right to live in them for next to no rent (a system considerably beyond "rent control" as we know it), with the consequence that property owners do not invest in the upkeep of these buildings.
There is an impressive, even if neglected, grand corniche that runs along the shoreline in downtown Alexandria. I wasn't able to take any photos of it because I was on the wrong side of the bus as we were driving out of town and it was dark out when we drove along it on our return at the end of the day.
We did notice massive, modern housing projects just on the outskirts of the city, but don't know anything about them.
As soon as we left the city we seemed to be in farm and grazing country.
We also passed some very nice looking individual homes, and a few not-so-nice ones.
Everywhere we went we saw images of Egypt's president, some of them billboard size.
When we left the highway we were in the city of Giza, Egypt's third largest city. Again, the buildings were shabby and poorly maintained.
Giza is on the west bank of the Nile. As soon as we crossed over to the other side we were in Cairo. We knew we had quite an elaborate security detail accompanying all of Viking's tours, but were still surprised to see the extent of it. When we entered Cairo, in preparation for our first stop at the Cairo Museum, our convoy of buses regrouped and traffic was stopped to give way to the buses.
As we crossed one of the bridges, our guide pointed out a building behind a floating restaurant on the Nile that he said had been King Farouk's palace. I wasn't able to get a very good shot of it.
The Cairo Museum sits just off a main street across from a portion of Tahrir Square, most notably known as the gathering place for tens of thousands of Egyptians in 2011 who were protesting the regime of President Hosni Mubarak, leading to his resignation. The center of the square is a large traffic circle.
The museum building is huge with dramatic proportions and an imposing main entrance.
The museum's formal name is the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities and it houses the world's most important collection of antiquities spanning some 3,000 years. Here are some photos of the building's interior spaces. A new museum building is currently under construction on the Giza side of the Nile. It promises to be the largest museum building in the world.
The vastness and significance of the collection made the total of an hour and a half allocated to this visit a cruel tease. I took many more photos of items in the collection than I could possibly impose on the viewer, but here's a sample. (And, of course, there wasn't adequate time for notetaking but Janis did some sketching.)
From the museum we were driven back across the Nile for lunch at a Hilton hotel in Giza. Again, security was ever-present.
The lunch itself was set up buffet style in a huge ballroom. There were hundreds of us there at the same time. It was chaotic, but we got through it and it wasn't about fine dining anyway.
Next stop was the Pyramids of Giza. These three famous pyramids sit on a plateau looking down on the city. They certainly are impressive. What was very distracting were the incredibly aggressive vendors who don't leave you alone. Even though our Egyptian guide spent several minutes preparing us for what we could expect, together with suggestions on how best to deal with them, it was still a challenge. We overheard one of our new friends tell a vendor that he was leaving her no choice than to get back on the bus to get away from him. Anyway, here are some photos of the pyramids, now more than 4,500 years old. There's even a photo of Janis and me, and one of her alone, in this group.
What made this desert scene colorful were the many camels here with their handlers hawking rides.
Here's that view from the pyramids plateau looking down on the city. I think most of us have been under the impression that they're located in some remote, undeveloped area far from any urban center. Not so.
Back on the bus. Our next, and final, stop was just a short distance from and below the pyramids themselves: the Sphinx at Giza, a limestone statue of a reclining sphinx carved in the bedrock of the plateau about 2,500 BCE. It's a mythical creature with the head of a human and the body of a lion facing directly west to east. As you can see, the nose is missing. Quite a monumental sight nevertheless.
We now headed back to Alexandria and our ship. On the way out of the city I snapped several photos of rubbish piles that are everywhere. It continues to amaze us that people live like this and don't seem to care. Cultural differences can be very marked.
We had police escorts all the way back. Here's what provided security looked like from inside the bus.
Needless to say, we napped for awhile on the drive back. By the time we got to downtown Alexandria, it was dark out but the number of people out on the streets was striking. It was, after all, Saturday night. Hard to take adequate photos of a fast moving scene in very low light, but here's a sample of what it looked like.
Finally, we passed through the gates of the port
and into an immigration building where we had to pass through security, and then outside to a warm greeting from a troupe of Egyptian dancers and several of the Viking Sun's crew.
It was a good day. Hectic and long, but we were glad we did it. We were tired but also hungry and, so, we headed to the informal cafe that remained open to accommodate all these groups that were out on long excursions.
We are now done with Egypt, at least for purposes of this trip. We are at sea today and are scheduled to arrive in Valletta, Malta, early tomorrow morning. We'll spend more time there than originally planned because our daylong visit to Tunisia on the 25th has been canceled for security reasons. I was particularly disappointed at this news since we had made arrangements for a taxi driver I met there on previous visits to drive us around all day so I could take Janis to the several sites I've been to that I wanted her to see. And also because I had made plans with one of the Tunisian judges I've become friendly with to meet him and his wife for lunch. We're in the dark as to the particulars that drove this decision, but I hope to find out more.
Our next blog will be from Malta.
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