Underwater entertainment

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As you may recall, I metioned fate stepping in and helping out in my last blog, and it did it again today twice! I was on my way to Pompey's Pillar, which is quite a ways from the city centre (and more importantly, off the Lonely Planet map), and got myself completely lost. I then saw the guy walking in front of me with a branded jacket with the logo "Catch Pillar", so I thought, well that must a good omen, so I followed him, and two streets later, there I am staring up at the Pillar. Very eerie.

The second was more of a good samaritan act, but I again I got myself lost walking back ( you would think I would learn, wouldn't you?) but it got noticed by a Coptic Christian guy, who offered me a lift back to my hotel free of charge. And in Egypt, that is a rare thing. But I also got a bit of a Middle Eastern perspective on Islam, and that was that it means destruction of anything that is beautiful. He apologised for the city saying it was much better 50-60 years ago, but Islam had destroyed that. Very interesting fellow.

The rest of my day, was spent diving. As you may have guessed from the title, it didn't go especially smoothly. All the equipment was either faulty, old and/or dusty. At least my dive buddys were good fun, 2 guys from Norway, Magnus and Joe, and one guy from England, James. They were all down from Cairo where they are studying. So after being fairly certain this was going to be the last dives we ever did, we headed out. This was made even more likely when we were chucked in and the guides had almost no idea of where to go! Never a dull moment here. 😊

But once we were underwater, it was alot of fun. The visibility was especially poor for the first dive, but improved for the second, but we still got to see huge amphoras (wine vases), red marble columns and even a WW2 plane lying on the bottom of the ocean floor. Photos of these will be uploaded when they get sent through by Magnus.

So that's it from Alexandria. Tomorrow morning I head into Cairo, where the traffic is supposedly worse. Now that should be entertaining! But on the bright side, there might be some fellow travellers there as well!

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Photos

Pompey's Pillar and two cute little sphinxes
There's really no marker to show how big this is, but I would come up to about halfway of on of the sphinxes. Incredible that they had that sort of technology back then.