For ancient Egyptians, the Mediterranean coast marked the edge of the "Great Green", the measureless sea that formed the limits of the known world. Life and civilization meant the Nile Valley and the Delta - an outlook that still seems to linger in the country's subconscious. For, despite the white beaches, craggy headlands and turquoise sea that stretch for some five hundred kilometres, the Egyptian Med is eerily vacant and underpopulated.

 

Egypt's 500-kilometre-long Mediterranean coast has beautiful beaches and sparkling sea all the way to Libya. However, many stretches are still mined from World War II or off limits due to military bases, or simply hard to reach - while all the most accessible sites have been colonized by holiday villages. Unlike in Sinai and Hurghada, these cater exclusively to Egyptians, whose beach culture is significantly different from Westerners'.

Most foreign travellers heading this way are aiming for Siwa Oasis rather than the resort town of Mersa Matrouh . Aside from the beaches near Matrouh, other coastal sites are awkward to reach (or leave) without private transport, though you may consider it worth making the effort to get to the famous World War II battlefield of El-Alamein , or the swanky resort at Sidi Abd el-Rahman . In general, though, even the sea can seem reclusive here, hidden from sight of the "coastal" highway by holiday villages or barren ridges, while the B-road and railway along which many of the region's villages are located run still further inland.

Anywhere on the European side of the sea, mass tourism would have taken hold years ago. Here, though, in part due to a lack of fresh-water sources, towns are few and generally small, and far outnumbered by military bases. Such tourism as exists is largely domestic and overwhelmingly male; there is virtually no alcohol on sale and standards of dress verge on the puritanical. Foreign women, especially, could well find that the hassles far outweigh any pleasure to be gained here - in contrast to the much more relaxed beaches in the Sinai. If you explore nonetheless, the best resorts are Mersa Matrouh (a jumping-off point for the Siwa Oasis) and Sidi Abd el-Rahman , while historical interest focuses chiefly on the World War II battlefield of El-Alamein .

Alexandria , however, at the east end of the coast, is an entirely different animal. Egypt's second city feels as Mediterranean and cosmopolitan as Athens or Marseille, its nineteenth-century architecture redolent of the colonial days immortalized by E.M. Forster, the poet Cavafy and, most famously, Lawrence Durrell. But its sights belong to an earlier age, when it was the capital of Greco-Roman Egypt, and the seat of Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies.

Finally, a word about the weather : Egypt's Med coast gets hotter and drier the further west you travel, but Alexandria can be cold and windy in the winter, with torrential downpours and waves crashing over the Corniche for days on end. Should you happen to be there over New Year, beware of the blizzard of crockery that Alexandrians throw out of their windows at midnight.