Contact Admin. T he sky is bright blue, the sand bright white, the sea perfect, and there's not a soul on the beach. The only other visitors are a couple of young goatherds in fluttering white gowns or djellabas , and football shirts, who pose for me as they lead their blank-eyed charges to freshwater wells.
Could this really be the Mediterranean? Um el donya , the mother of the world, as the Egyptians call their country, has an embarrassment of attractions and sites that the world visits en masse, yet beyond the pyramids and tombs, Cairo and Luxor, glitzy Sharm el-Sheikh and the other diving and cruise hotspots on the Red Sea, there still remain superb areas that tourists are only just beginning to discover.
Some of the more adventurous independent travellers may take 4x4 rides into the desert, or explore the quieter hippy beaches of the Sinai, but now tour operators are also beginning to offer a different side of Egypt, and explore beaches that until now have been the preserve of the Egyptians. Somehow, tourists have tended to overlook Egypt's other strip of coastline, along the Mediterranean, which stretches km from its borders with Gaza in the east and Libya to the west.
Alexandria, km north-west of Cairo, is undoubtedly the jewel of the Egyptian Med, and typically the one place tourists venture to on the coast. It's easy to see why, with its quaint colonial hotels and tea rooms such as Cafe de la Paix, the Cecil, the Cleopatra and Portofino revealing its history.
There is also the 20km promenade running along the seafront, crowned by the New Bibliotheca Alexandrina , a commemoration of the original Library of Alexandria, the biggest library in antiquity. This joint venture between the Egyptian government and Unesco, which opened its doors in , is a super-modern architectural gem shaped as a round disk that represents the sun.
