Cultural Landmarks of Egypt and India Days 9 to 12

I know we are all relieved Teddy has made it onto the cruise and here he is positioned in bed by the room maid reading

Day 9

Time is flying by, and Brian is worried about getting institutionalised, but I'm quite enjoying it.

Yesterday was our second formal night, where I think people were more glitzy than the first one. I had maximum glitzed on that one though I still had plenty of sequins.

Jackies finished cat

I finished my cat, we went to the cookery demonstration. We learnt a new sequence dance, I did Pilates while Brian went to a talk on the Suez canal which he said was interesting, but he has not tried to educate me, so I can't really comment. He dashed in late, just in time for the circuits class. Not often I do more exercise than him. Not sure it did me much good, I've got a bit of a cold and it did seem to knock the stuffing out of me.

One of the daily cookery demonstrations in the Auditorium

Day 10

Another sea day today, lectures on the Egyptian Ports and a strange nostalgia trip of adverts and all sorts. Obviously the 60's were a bit before my time, but the 70's and 80's were good.

Another formal night and another outfit

We went to lunch in the waiter service restaurant where we have dinner. It's a lovely place for lunch, quieter and with a view. Met a nice couple and got chatting so we missed the end of the ballroom class, not that Brian wanted to go to the tango lesson, he just wanted to know what figures she'd taught. We also missed name that tune but that's the nice thing I guess. If you meet interesting people you can stay and chat, and if you want to get away you always have somewhere to go!

Dinner suit for Brian

Tomorrow is Alexandria and our first organised tour. We'll see how that goes 

Day 11

The City of Alexandria was somewhere Brian had felt was missing from our Egypt trip last year, so he was very pleased that it was on this itinerary. In truth though, there weren't many sites to see. It would have been a slog through walk between them though so we did our first tour.

Inside the fort at Qait Bay on the site of the Pharos lighthouse. Originally built in 1477-9 by Muhammad Ali Pasha, restored in 1805 after the British bombed it with cannon almost to rubble and restored again in 1984

First stop was the Fort of Qait Bay, a 15th century fort, overlooking the entrance to the eastern harbour which was built on the foundations of the Pharos lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It was an interesting enough building, but we've seen forts before and there was not a lot of information which actually was probably as well, as if Brian had had stuff to read we would have taken longer than our allotted 25 minutes. There were some good views as we walked around the walls though.

View from the fort over the harbour at Alexandria. The white sloping building on the right is the much talked about library

Second stop was the Roman Amphitheatre, recently discovered while the ground was being prepared for a new tower block. It's not a big amphitheatre but is just a small part of the excavations that include baths, mosaics and other buildings.

Cat break

The third stop was the library, a new building that they are obviously very proud of. Interesting architecture, a few displays of pottery, crafts, art and a museum on Anwar Sadat underneath the lovely reading room, but it was, in truth, a library!

Alexandria traffic and parking. All those cars on the right are 'parked'

Traffic was normal for Egypt, so we didn't get back to the ship till just before 14.30, the end of lunch, we rushed to get upstairs, but as there was our bus, and three other full tour buses all also late, they were serving lunch late. They must hate that as they still had to do afternoon tea at 15.45 and the normal dinner sittings.

A drive by of an attractive mosque in Alexandria

There were no standout cats, but i did get a cat fix, so it was a good Day.

The Roman amphitheatre in Alexandria

Day12

Port Said, right on the very start of the Suez Canal was our stop for today. Despite being the start of the Canal it has little else to offer for itself. The long day here is mainly for the four hour each way trip to see the pyramids, which fortunately we didn't have to do, having only seen them last year! If we hadn't seen them we'd probably feel duty bound, but as it is we don't. We did go out for a couple of hours, along the beach, a few mosques, some very grubby streets. Lots of hassle from taxi drivers, though we did leave them behind quite quickly, and a couple of friendly cats. We did our steps and got a cat fix, but I'm not sure there is much more to be said about Port Said. See our short Relive video of our short walk here: click here

Apparently some of these relics by Jackie were part of the destroyed Pharos lighthouse recovered from the sea. The lighthouse was built shortly after Alexander The Great founded the city in 331BC

WiFi sadly was not available anywhere we could find, yesterday or today, so we've bought another 24 hours. Hopefully this will all work as we are not sure you can use three devices and we need both phones and the laptop to get everything together!

Remains of the old Roman baths at Alexandria

This is a model of the library. Its constructed on the site of the ancient library destroyed by fire and is a cutting edge design opened in 2002. Apparently the first translation of the Bible from Hebrew was made on this site

Inside the library. Its on 11 floors of which 4 are below ground. The windows in the roof are supposed to look like eyes and there are eyelashes partially covering the outside!

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Looking the other way those are the top floors up there

This must be where all the Ladas remaining in the world go to die and here they are all taxis

Here's our current position in Port Said at the mouth of the Suez canal ready for our transit through tonight and tomorrow

In Port Said and there's our ship moored behind that statue

Port Said is a fairly scruffy town with little to interest the tourist, having been constructed only during the building of the Suez Canal in 1869, but there are a few lovely buildings like this one, the Al Salam Masjid

And this one, The Bank of Egypt

But a lot of it is like this one, really quite tatty and sad

A walk along the beach wasn't much better

But it did have some friendly cats

And this was favourite cat of the day looking lovingly into Jackies eyes

This little kitten wouldn't allow Jackie anywhere near

A Hoopoo scavenging through rubbish

The lighthouse of Port Said, built by François Coignet in 19th century and featuring a time ball on the top

We walking a long way through scruffy streets with few pavements and lots of traffic to see this. Its the railway station of Port Said, pleasant enough but not sure it was worth the effort

In amongst the many mosques were a few Christian Churches like this one

Back on our ship I wanted to take a few photos of our position at the entrance to the Suez Canal. This one is looking out to the Mediterranean Sea and you can see the breakwaters stretching out

This is from the forecastle on the ship looking down the first section of the canal 

And this is Jackie doing her 'Titanic Pose' at the pointy end

Looking from the ship back over the town and you can just see the statue from which we took the photo of the ship from earlier

This is a photo from the ship looking down towards the gangplank. You can see the little welcoming party with wet towels for cleaning our hands and drinks on the little table. With cheery smiles from the staff it's a nice touch

We arrived at Port Said at 6:00am this morning and won't be leaving until 9:00pm tonight. It was to allow for tours to be made to the pyramids at Giza. Its a 12 hour day for them so they set off at 6:55am this morning. Glad we saw them last year, its a long day of driving from here. It does mean that the first section of the canal will be in the dark and while we sleep tonight, but we'll have a full day through tomorrow with commentary from our on-board expert. Looking forward to that