The Egypt Chronicles - Day 3

There was a constant drizzle all of the second day, from when we left for Ahmed's (Achmed's?), to the time we went to the library, to the time we went to Selsela, to the time we came back to the hotel, pretty much until we had dinner. The wee-hour walk to Selsela was ok, but it was still damp and cloudy the next morning.

RA had booked us a local mini-bus to take us around Alexandria. Our itinerary for today was the Al-Montaza Palace, Pompey's pillar, the catacombs, the Roman amphitheatre and the Qait Bay Citadel. SK opted out to take a 'rest day'.

The drive to Al-Montaza was uneventful, and relatively short, but when we reached there, we learnt the palace was not open to the public. We chose not to go around the park and the palace gardens, instead walked down the water-sports gate. All of us had not even reached the water's edge that it started raining again, and we had to run for cover. We did get some pictures before we were all drenched, though. We gathered back in the mini-bus and voted to move to the catacombs. But since we would pass it on the way, we decided to stop at the Library so that the people who'd joined us last night could tick that off their lists :)

It was mid morning by this time, and we were sure to get into some traffic. Sleep deprived, as I was, I chose to catch some rest while the others invested their time in something more useful - numbers. The girls (I think) floated the idea of learning numbers and went wahed, itnen, taleta... (arabic for 1, 2, 3 ... the whole set is wahed, itnen, taletta, arba, khamsa, sitta, sabaa, tamaniya, tissa and ashara. Note how sitta and tissa are syllablic antigrams, just like the Roman numerals they represent are symbolic antigrams 9 and 6). Then they started reading the number plates of the cars ahead of us, while SP and I dozed off at the back.

We spent the next hour or so in traffic and rain, and finally stopped at the Library. A couple of the gang went inside, while the rest did most of the photography from the outside. After the brief stopover there, our next destination was the catacombs.

The catacombs are a collection of underground tombs, accidentally found when a donkey fell into a pit at the excavation site. The site has a circular stairwell into the catacombs itself, and a lot of the excavated relics in the general area surrounding the catacomb. They were all marked with numbers, which I thought were probably the numbers for listening to their history, via the audio guidebooks.

Personally, the catacomb reminded me of the Volkswagen automated car park, where you have cars elevated via a lift, and rotated to their slots and rolled into place. It was very primitive, but the same concept - lower the mummies via a central shaft, roll the coffin and push them into the slot. I also thought this must have been a mass tomb for the general public, for the noblemen and the priests would have had a site near a temple or the Pyramid of the Pharaohs.

After the Catacombs, we went to visit Pompey's pillar. The clouds cleared here and we got some awesome weather. The main edifice was the pillar itself, and legend has it that 22 people had dinner on its capitol in its day. The pillar was surrounded by sun-dials and a nilometer to measure the flood, and there was also a sanctuary for Serapis, the bull-God. From the entrance, the pillar and the sphinx ahead of it presented a regal sight, but once you reached the vicinity of the pillar to cross over to the other side, you could see these monuments against a polluted old-city background. Some would like to think of it as an old Egypt co-existing with the new, but I thought it was plain eyesore.

It was lunchtime. Lunch was had at Gad, which is a chain darshini similar to say, Sukh Sagar of Bangalore. Here's a video of some Gad staff slitting Pitta bread.

We drove to the Roman Amphitheatre after lunch, but it did not entice me to step inside, so I stayed out with most of the others and looked through the barricades. I could see the remnants of a Roman bath, and a few other ruins of Roman architecture, but it was not incentive enough.

The next stop for us would be the Qait Bay Citadel. The Citadel is built on the edge of the Corniche and houses an Oceanography Institute and a small museum outside. We bought tickets for the museum and just a few steps later, realised this was not worth it. There were hardly enough marine life to catch your interest, let alone hold it. SP and I exited double quick to spend some time near the water.

We walked around the Citadel to see if there was an entrance, but there was none. Towards the back, there was a route in, but military guards stopped us from entering or taking photographs in the area. I thought it was unnecessary since there was a shooting club next door and anyone with a decent telephoto lens could zoom into the place.

We walked back to the group, snapped some photos, and soon it was time to go back! The day has been wet, windy and the weather had so dampened my spirits, that combined with the Al-Montaza closure, the ride in traffic and the disinteresting marine museum, I thought it wasn't a great day of covering the tourist sights. I loved Pompeii's pillar though, must have been the sun!

Back at the hotel by 5 PM, we had about 3 hours to go before our train, so we sat down at the coffee house for some Turkish coffee and shisha. SK, having made a great decision of staying in, was well-rested. We all sat down at the coffee house, while taking turns to visit the hotel, have a change of clothes and get our bags down to go to the railway station.

With time to kill, we decided to be local and play some board games. But how? We did not know the game, nor understood the language. We did the next best thing - make up our own game. So like silly schoolboys with nothing to do, I and SK tried to play carrom-football (score a goal by making your striker rebound and go through a stack of coins), and destroy-fort (destroy the opponent's stack of coins so none of them lies on top of the other). SP looked on, wondering incredulously, how lame we could get. Eventually he left to make some calls, and we got bored of making up games, so we called the waiter over to teach us a proper game. The waiter could only understand we wanted to play, so he went and brought us a pair of dice. Then he found us a German who spoke very little English, but was able to explain to us the basic premise of the game. And so it came to pass that on the night we left Alexandria, SK beat me in a game of newly-learnt towlah (or backgammon, I guess, as far as the similarity of the board goes).

We went back to Ahmed's (Achmed's?) for some falafel and omelettes, and then hired a cab to the railway station. Our next stop - Luxor!!