JOURNEY TO NOSTOS

Week 14 — Sidon to Alexandria

From Phoenician coast to the Delta of knowledge

Route
Sidon → Tyre → Acre / Haifa → Caesarea → Jaffa / Tel Aviv → El Arish → Port Said → Alexandria

Endpoint: Alexandria
(This arrival sets up the Egyptian coast and the Delta in the following week.)

7 days • 3 bases • connective week • ports-and-corridors

At a glance

Bases
Haifa (2) • Jaffa / Tel Aviv (2) • Alexandria (3)

Hellenic anchors

Tyre • Caesarea Maritima • Jaffa • Alexandria

How to use this week

Begin here, or arrive from Sidon.
This week is about movement, not depth at every stop.
Ports matter more than ruins; corridors more than cities.

Prologue — The Long Shore

This coast has always been travelled more than it has been settled.

Phoenician sailors, Greek merchants, Roman administrators, pilgrims, and scholars all moved along this shoreline with purpose.
The cities here are pauses in a longer motion—supply points, exchange nodes, staging grounds.

As you move south, the Hellenic world stretches again, no longer as colony or city-state, but as method: geometry, harbour logic, language, record-keeping.

Alexandria waits—not as conquest, but as synthesis.

Route logic

Linear southward movement • selective stops • no doubling back • energy conserved for arrival

Day by day

Day 1 — Sidon → Tyre (pause) → Acre / Haifa

Overnight: Haifa

Focus
Leaving the Phoenician core.

Hellenic layer
Tyre reminds us that Greek maritime expansion followed older routes already perfected.

Do one thing properly
Short Tyre pause only.
Arrive Haifa before evening.

Day 2 — Haifa → Caesarea → Haifa

Overnight: Haifa

Focus
Imperial harbour.

Hellenic layer
Caesarea Maritima shows Greek and Roman harbour engineering scaled for empire.

Do one thing properly
One harbour circuit.
Skip inland ruins.

Day 3 — Haifa → Jaffa / Tel Aviv

Overnight: Jaffa / Tel Aviv

Focus
The ancient landing place.

Hellenic layer
Jaffa functions as arrival—mythic, practical, repetitive.

Do one thing properly
Old port walk.
Evening sit by the water.

Day 4 — Jaffa / Tel Aviv

Overnight: Jaffa / Tel Aviv

Focus
Living coast.

Hellenic layer
Continuity matters more than preservation here.
Ports endure by use.

Do one thing properly
Repeat the harbour walk at a different hour.

Day 5 — Jaffa → El Arish

Overnight: El Arish

Focus
The desert edge.

Hellenic layer
This is transit territory—routes matter more than cities.

Do one thing properly
Drive steadily.
Arrive before dark.

Day 6 — El Arish → Port Said

Overnight: Port Said

Focus
Canal logic.

Hellenic layer
Port Said represents a modern echo of ancient ambition: controlling passage.

Do one thing properly
Canal-side walk only.

Day 7 — Port Said → Alexandria

Overnight: Alexandria

Focus
Arrival by intention.

Hellenic layer
Alexandria gathers what has been moving—knowledge, language, record.

Do one thing properly
Sea-edge arrival walk.
No museum yet.

Navigation

← Previous Week — Down the Levant
Next Week → Egypt’s Coast and the Delta
Back to The Levant — Weeks 13–14

Optional: the long-form read

In the manuscript, this week becomes a study in corridors—how coastlines shape knowledge by enabling movement rather than settlement. (Paid)