It's been a long time since I've dived on a 2000-year-old shipwreck. Okay, okay: I've NEVER dived on a 2000-year-old shipwreck before this weekend. I've never even dived on *ANY* shipwreck. But it has been a long time (like 10 years) since I've put on SCUBA gear at all... however perhaps we should back up a couple of days.

Willeke surprised everyone on Thursday morning by announcing we would have two days in a row off, because of a national holiday. There wasn't much time to adjust plans from just going to visit the pyramids for a day but we did. Of course, we could have just hung around Cairo for two days, but why not take advantage of the longer time and go further afield? After all, Cairo and the pyramids will still be there next week. I came up with the idea of going to Alexandria (Al-Iskandariyyah), which was founded by Alexander the Great in 323, B.C., on the extreme northwest of the Nile delta. A couple of the trench supervisors named John and Louise decided to join me on this trip.

So we set off in a minivan packed with 18 people to get us from base camp to Giza, where we would catch another one of these vans to the north. Our van was hired for our people, but these vans are like giant taxis running all around the Middle East. Here they are called service (pronounced sir-veece') and come pretty cheap: the fare for the two-hour drive to Alexander cost us each LE 10 (ten pounds Egyptian -- which is about US $2.50) but at the cost of comfort (no leg room, smoking). We didn't end up where we expected, so we had to take another van to the hotel, which took an entire hour, but cost us only LE 1 so no big deal. We got the feeling the first driver just kind of dumped us.

We still had to walk quite a ways to find our hotel, which was in the old European section of town along the waterfront of the great bay. It was definitely low-budget, but not too bad. It occupied the 5th floor of a building, which had a cotten export company on the first floor and apparently various different businesses on other floors. For a double we paid LE 50 a night, so again, no big outlay for this trip so far.

Now, when we originally decided to visit this place, we had in mind a couple of things: a Graeco-Roman museum, some catacombs, a small Roman amphitheatre and just the ocean front so we could set eyes on the Mediterranean. But on the drive up, John found a page in his travel book about this company that ran tourist dives of antiquities located in the bay and just outside it. Immediately after checking in to our hotel, we found an Internet cafe and accessed the web site of Alexandra Dive to learn more. It still looked like fun, so he and I decided to give it a try as soon as we could (Louise has never dived, so she wasn't interested.)


Alexandria from our hotel lobby, looking west; much the same looking to the east

First thing next morning, we hoofed it down the street along the wide curving bay to find the place. We lucked out on the timing, and talked them into letting us join the boat for a couple of dives even though I did not have my dive card (and hadn't dived in 10 years although we didn't say *that*, just that I done underwater archaeology) and John didn't have his card and has just been certified. They seemed hesitant to let us join, but we showed them the cash and all was well. They rented us full kits and so on, but that didn't go smoothly. Their web site claims they can outfit 50 people, but they seemed rather stretched to get just 7 of us properly geared up. We had to sign for a minimum of two dives and were supposed to be back about 3 pm, and lunch was included. Full cost LE 600, which is about $130.


Zoom shot of the area we'll be diving -- out past the fort -- seen from hotel lobby

Right. First dive: out past the breakwater on an ancient Greek ship in about 15m (50 feet) of water. But the ocean swell of some 2-3m plus a pretty good chop made things very difficult for all concerned. It took them a while to mark the site with a rope for us to descend on, and by then people were getting sick. We had 3 Egyptian guys, 1 Japanese woman, 1 Australian woman, John and me diving in addition to a few from the crew. John was sicker than a dog, and ended up not diving even though he tried. Two or three of the Egyptian guys got really sick too, and I think one didn't go down. The remainder of us were fine. They gave out Dramamine before we left the dock and I took some, but don't know whether that made the difference. We hadn't eaten anything for breakky despite our intentions so that was just as well.


Our diving boat and their very inefficient docking system

So what's it like? Well... I must say *VERY COOL* to be looking upon a shipwreck that's some 2,000+ years old. Visibility was poor so there was no way to see the thing as a whole, but there were a bunch of amphorae (the plastic two-liter bottle of the day) down there, many still recognizable despite the accumulated concretions of the years. So there wasn't much to actually see that you cannot see better in a museum, but the coolness factor made it worthwhile, no doubt about it. Plus there were some angel fish or some such down there with us. We weren't deep enough to escape the swell, so that stirred up a lot of silt and banged me into things a little and made for some cuts and scrapes, and I used my air too fast, but it was sweet.

Our second dive was supposed to be outside the breaker as well, but by the time everyone was back aboard, it was 2:30 pm, so they drove the boat back to their dock and put us ashore for a decent lunch. They made the decision that the second dive would just be out in the harbor and we'd see a WW II plane and "Cleopatra's Table" and some columns from her palace that fell down in an earthquake ages ago. Only five of us went out the second time, including John, who did get to dive on this one (they gave him a coupon for a free dive at some later date).

The visibility on the second dive was inches, because the depth was only 5m and the bottom was all stirred up by the waves. They had to guide us until faces smacked into what they wanted to show to us, so this dive left much to be desired. Apparently the first thing they showed us was a bit of wing from the plane, then they showed us some pieces of granite columns and some more amphorae. We went to the surface, swam for a bit, then went down again on to large polished slab of red granite that they say was Cleopatra's table, on Lover's Island where she and Marc Anthony killed themselves. How sweet. How unbelievable.

We got back to the dock around 6:30 pm, just as the sun set, so we had a full day's adventure on this diving trip. Let's hope these various cuts and scrapes don't let in anything bad, and that none crawled in through my mouth either. The bay ain't pristine -- let me put it that way. I have no good photos to show for this day because I left my camera ashore for the first trip out, and their rental charges for underwater cameras started around $50 (and would have been useless today in any case).

As you may recall, Alexandrians built and operated the Pharos (a giant lighthouse), one of the ancient wonders of the world. An earthquake or two knocked it down long ago, but recently archaeologists have found large blocks of stone in water that may have belonged to it. You can dive on them if you like as well. For a second web page discussing more about the underwater sights and sites of the area, see "Ancient Secrets in Dirty Water."