Day 9 Alexandria

We checked out of Zoser after breakfast and our bus began driving us towards what I was anticipating to be the perfect end to ten days in Egypt. A three-hour drive from Cairo to the north west Mediterranean coast to Alexandria. Eight-lanes eased us on through a jungle of high hoardings mostly advertising telecom, cars and milk, through a handful of dusty hamlets (we stopped at a cafe-pump for a smoke, coffee and strange self-illuminating yoyo things) and fifteen minutes before you pull into Alexandria (Al-Iskandariya in Arabic, which in my opinion sounds much slicker) you drive through miles of open mall and factory outlet promenade -- this part is strikingly like the US, only a little smaller. We cross a pair of tram tracks with a blue waiting tram and burst upon the city's huge 20-km marine drive, stretching from both ends of the city, with a depth of just 3.5 kilometres, and cruise down the gradiented, gently banked highway along the rich Med blue to our hotel, Plaza, an ancient and cheerless place, with unhappy staff and a peculiar string of guests, including two Arab businessmen who appear and sound like they're waiting for a particular rival to walk through the hotel door so they can take him to a corner and give him "some talking to". It doesn't really matter -- we've got an ocean facing room with a balcony, all hours for less than 24 hours and room service.

From the balcony, the city arches along like two flanks on either side, a grey strip of road separating building from sea. Founded arguably in 342 BC by Alexander, this city became the seat of Ptolemeic rule in Egypt until Islamic rulers founded Cairo and laid Alexandria to waste, rendering it a mere fishing village according to one account. Now Egypt's second-largest city and largest commercial port, it is still the ultimate holiday destination even for Cairenes, which is a little pathetic, though if the Med exploding onto you could hold its surprise each time, it would be worth the beautiful three-hour drive. Our guide, anyway, pulled us along to two of the most boring sites I have ever visited, at the expense of a city just sitting there and begging to be discovered.

I think everyone on the group agreed then as they do now that Pompay's Pillar ("If it was not built by Pompay and had nothing to do with him, why was it called Pompay's pillar?" someone asked our guide) and the Roman theatre were both highly missable. This is not once to say that they were not beautiful or important -- they indubitably were -- but with just a handful of hours in hand, it would have made infinitely better sense to snake into Alex's souks and markets and melt into the seafood bazaars. For lunch, we were taken to a stylish place opposite a boat dock, where we were inefficiently served magnificent grilled mackarel, friend red mullet and batter-fried calamari. This was followed by a sojourn to a fruitseller on the same sidestreet, from whom we bought profusions of oranges, bananas, persemons and strawberries.

My best time in Alexandria sprung, as always, from crisis. On our way to the Monteza gardens, our driver, a quiet Copt called Rimon, took us a little too cleverly into inner Alex with the intention of beating the highway rush hour. The result -- we were nice and stranded and it was getting dark. I and my uncle decided to jump ship and walk it back. We did it in forty minutes, about 3.5-km, all along the magnificent and darkening sea-face pavement, its profusion of dog-sized cats, sea air and speeding cars to our left, finally turning a bend on the Four Seasons to find our hapless little hotel and nobody back yet, not even the bus. It was a long evening, ended and rounded off well with whisky and all that fruit we bought, and the dulled sound of cars from the street below as we basked in the company of fellow travellers. The sound of the sea hadn't a chance of getting into our room through all of that.