Egypt Guide
Alexandria and the Mediterranean coast
For Ancient Egyptians, the Mediterranean coast marked the edge of the "Great Green", the measureless sea that formed the limits of the known world. Life and civilization meant the Nile Valley and the Delta – an outlook that still seems to linger in the country's subconscious. For, despite the white beaches, craggy headlands and turquoise sea that stretch for some five hundred kilometres, much of the Egyptian Med is eerily vacant and underpopulated.
Anywhere on the European side of the sea, package tourism would have taken hold decades ago. Here, however, partly due to a lack of fresh water, towns are few and generally small, and such tourism as exists is largely Egyptian, with no alcohol on sale and dress codes verging on the puritanical; conspicuous exceptions are resorts such as the Hilton Burg el-Arab, Porto Marina and Almaza Bay, aimed at European tourists. Aside from these, the main places worth noting are the World War II battlefield of El-Alamein, the Mediterranean Governorate capital of Mersa Matrouh (a jumping-off point for Siwa Oasis), and wreck-diving sites off Sidi Abd el-Rahman, Sidi Barrani and Sollum.
Alexandria, however, is an entirely different animal. Egypt's second city feels as Mediterranean and cosmopolitan as Athens or Marseille, its nineteenth-century architecture redolent of the colonial days immortalized by E.M. Forster, the poet Cavafy and, most famously, Lawrence Durrell. Its main sights, however, come from a different age, some dating from its time as the capital of Greco-Roman Egypt, and the seat of Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies; and others, such as the stunning modern library, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, bringing the city bang into the twenty-first century. Antiquities from all eras can be viewed in situ underwater, as well as in local museums.