Grand Tour of Egypt: Siwa to Alexandria

We were eating breakfast at 6 am and I have to say I was not very hungry, but feeling fine. One of the donkey carts collecting our luggage did not arrive so one poor little donkey had to stagger along hauling an immense load.
The bus from Siwa to Alexandria stopped for toilets and refreshments about every two hours, with the desert beside the road looking like the flat rubbly variety we had seen in parts of the Sinai.

We passed El Alemain, the site of a battle which took the lives of many, including Australians, in the 2nd World War, and where the Italians and Germans were defeated and turned back. Now in a more fertile part of Egypt, there were many farms, mostly growing figs.

We couldn't separate the sheep from the goats for this picture.

The desert seems to be used as a rubbish tip here as well as in many parts of Egypt.

There was an English family on the bus and it turned out that they lived the winters in Siwa and the summers in Rumania, and that they were good friends of Fathi Malim. There are photographs in Fathi’s book but, since no Siwan woman is allowed to be photographed for the public to see, the mother and girls in the English family had been the models, wearing traditional Siwan clothes that completely covered their faces.
After nine hours we arrived at the bus station, which is out of town. Heavy traffic slowed down the micro van we took next, so eventually we arrived at our hotel at about 6 o’clock.
Alexandria is on the Mediterranean, with a beautiful Corniche running right along 20 kilometres of the coast. After dinner we went for a walk, but the cold winds drove us back for an early night.
Next morning we explored the Corniche to the East and noted that it was nearly all hotels, coffee houses and restaurants. The day before we had seen kilometres of high-rise hotels and apartment buildings newly built along the coast leading to Alexandria. The signs in different languages, the mix of clothing and the relaxed behaviour of the young people confirmed what Mamdoh had told us – that Alexandria is the most modern and cosmopolitan of Egypt’s cities.