Yours truely posing with (what’s left of) an ancient Greek amphora.
Diving Pharos Island, Alexandria, March 2006
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Monthly Archives: March 2006
The Tao of Egyptian streets
I have posted before about the mind-boggling beauty of man-machine coexistence on the streets of Cairo. Here is another example of such fantastic equilibrium, this time in Egypt’s second largest city.
This is a picture of a one lane street in a local market area in Alexandria. Tram tracks go down the middle of the street, but before the tram actually passes you wouldn’t even notice them. Street vendors set up their stands on the tracks. When the tram is passing, they casually lift their stuff off the tracks, then replace with such enviable ease.
Wet history
Despite worries of freezing water, poor visibility and unhappy weather gods, Mike and I managed to go under in Alexandria last weekend on a two-day trip planned since last fall. But make no mistake, the water was freezing and visibility was near zero. We spent almost all of the 90 minute downtime (on 2 dives) focusing more on not losing sight of the divematser’s bright yellow fins in the silt-saturated waters off Alexandria’s Eastern Harbour. The rest of the downtime was a lesson in identifying sunken ancient ruins by touch. Mike has posted an account of our “Ultimate Ancient Piles of Rocks” trip. Well, it might have not been the ultimate, but it was probably as much of ancient ruin sight-seeing as you can cram into a 48-hours period, on land and under the sea.
I am spoiled by Red Sea diving: warm waters, crystal clear visibility, vibrant marine life, etc. The Med is a totally different story. I didn’t see a single fish on both dives, the only thing alive around was the other divers. Did I say the water was freezing? But hey, how many times do you get to see a submerged algea-covered sphinx? There was a bunch of Greek amphoras, broken columns and a Pharonic hieroglyphs plaque. Supposedly, there was more stuff to see on the dive site, but the just fact that we were able to see anything at all in this kind of visibility conditions was amazing. Anyway, it was good to get wet again.
On a side note, the dive center we booked with is probably the only one in Alexandria. Through some pre-trip web recon I did, I came accross this report written by a British diver about a particularly bad diving experience with them. I thought they were alright in general, but (again, I might be too pampered by diving the Red Sea) I wasn’t too impressed with the dive master’s briefing (although he’s navigation ability in such visibility was something!). Also, he made too fast an ascent (in my opinion) on the first dive (it was a rather shallow no-decompression dive, but rather be safe than sorry….right?).
To my shame, I initially incorrectly assembled my dive gear. Mike wouldnt’ let me live that one down for the rest of the day. But he was the one giving me the “go up” signal instead of the “I am OK” signal last year in Jeddah, so we’re pretty much square on that..okay?
