Full Day in Alexandria Fills History Gaps in My American Education

Day 102, 2025 Grand World Voyage

Wednesday, April 16, 2025; Alexandria, Egypt.

I’ve been to Alexandria, Egypt, twice before, both times making the three-hour bus trip to Cairo and Giza, where I stayed overnight. Today, the Zuiderdam is only here for one long day (6 a.m. until almost midnight), but that didn’t stop hundreds of passengers and almost a third of the crew from making the long trip to see the pyramids.

I love that Holland America makes these opportunities to see major world sites available for a much-reduced price for crew members, regardless of level or department.

It was time for me to see something of Alexandria, an important historic port on the Mediterranean Sea. I turned to the local tour agency I’ve used since 2013, Alex City Travel, to arrange a customized private tour for nine of us.

Alex City Travel always draws rave reviews, whether half-day tours or overnights, in Alexandria, Cairo and even Luxor. I wrote about its excellent multi-degreed Egyptology guides in a cruise flashback post about my 2013 visit to Luxor.

One thing travel has taught me is that my view of world history is stuck in the 1970s. We learned about current countries almost as if they existed in current political forms throughout history. But of course, countries change. My knowledge of Egyptian history consisted of the pharaohs. Today, I expanded my knowledge.

Much of the physical record of Alexandria’s history is gone. The famous lighthouse, or Pharos of Alexandria, stood 330 feet tall when built around 240 BC and for centuries was one of the tallest man-made structures on earth. No surprise it is one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World. Today any remains of it and the surrounding area are under the sea, destroyed by a series of earthquakes over centuries. We saw the citadel that sits where the lighthouse once stood while we ate a delicious lunch of fresh fish on the shore of Alexander’s eastern bay.

Alexandria’s position on the Mediterranean made it a great city of its time — an intellectual, cultural and commercial hub. So the Great Library of Alexandria was one of the largest of the ancient world, with an estimated 400,000 scrolls. All of that, too, is gone, destroyed by fires. But today, a stunning replacement sits along the bay – the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

A library docent gave us a tour of the new facility, which opened in 2002. Eleven levels cascade down through the main reading room, each filled with students, computer terminals, stacks of books and historical items. There is enough shelf space for eight million books. The glass-paneled roof of the circular building tilts toward the sea like a sundial, with slits that let in light but never direct sun. Carved into the outer granite walls are writings from 120 scripts, or individual writing systems covering the ages. The effect is stunning, but almost impossible to capture with a camera from ground level.

We started our tour at the Catacombs of Kom El Shoqafa, considered one of the seven wonders of the Middle Ages. The name means mound of shards, based on the mounds of broken terra cotta jars left by visitors to the underground tombs, who broke food and wine containers brought for meals during their visits. Unlike other catacombs I’ve visited, this one had no bones or skulls, but lots of chambers where bodies were once entombed between the 2^nd and 4^th centuries.

Not far away are the ruins of an ancient Roman theater. Large groups of school students were visiting while we were there, and the girls in particular were interested in enthusiastically saying hi and delighted in taking selfies with us.

We probably should have started rather than finished our day at the Greco Roman Museum, which filled in our history gaps for the period after the pharaohs but before Islamic and modern-day Egypt. First Greece and then Rome ruled Egypt for centuries, with the era of Cleopatra and Mark Antony perhaps the only one I knew anything about (and precious little about it). By the day’s end we were all pretty tired, so I didn’t absorb as much from the museum as I would have liked. It’s a good reason to return some day.

Back on the ship, the hotel and culinary teams had decorated the Lido area in a Bedouin theme, with food stations featuring flatbreads with shredded lamb or spinach and feta, falafels, shawarma and paella, plus desserts. I think Captain Frank passed unrecognized through the late crowd arriving from a long day at the pyramids.