Birtles and the Bean: Waiting for our precious cargo in Alexandria

The war in Gaza has delayed the arrival of the Bean to Alexandria, leaving our intrepid travellers stranded. But in true pioneering form, they used the time to go exploring.

If you are stuck in a holding pattern, Alexandria is not entirely a bad place to be.

As we continue our epic journey from London to Melbourne in the Bean open-top sports car, we arrive at the Port of Alexandria in Egypt in the hopes of taking delivery of the 100-year-old car from the city’s docks.

In 1927 Australian adventurer Francis Birtles shipped his Bean car from Athens to Alexandria aboard the Mytilus, an old, steam-belching fuel tanker built in 1916.

Almost a century later our experience is almost identical.

Transporting the car between Piraeus, Greece and Alexandria, two of the busiest sea ports in the world, has the same degree of uncertainty and nervousness as to when the precious cargo might actually arrive.

Warren Brown with a WWII allied truck from the 1942 Battle of El Alamein.

Visiting the El Alamein war cemetery was an emotional experience for Warren Brown.

In the meantime, The Daily Telegraph editor-at-large Matthew Benns, team mechanic Tony Jordan, Simon Walliss and I are now ensconced within this ancient crowded city waiting for the cargo ship to arrive.

Across from the balcony from where I’m writing is the mouth of Alexandria’s iridescent turquoise harbour, where two long isthmuses stretching from west to east almost touch.

On the left stands a stone fortress constructed in the 1300s from the ruins of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, along with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Colossus of Rhodes — one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Our plan once we take delivery of the cars is to then head directly south to Cairo, then east for the port of Safaga on the Red Sea, but shipping in the Mediterranean has been thrown into chaos due to the war taking place in Gaza to the north.

The busy main road around the harbour in Alexandria, Egypt.

Of course Alexandria has had phenomenally important military connections with Australia through two world wars.

On December 3, 1914, Australian troops first disembarked here and moved to training camps near Cairo and then to Gallipoli.

On a personal note, my own grandad, Private Harry Brown, did the same in 1915, disembarking in Alexandria, sending a postcard home to his sister from Cairo depicting the pyramids and describing his adventures in the very foreign Egypt for a boy from Sydney’s suburbs.

During a day of waiting we headed to the Commonwealth War Cemetery at El Alamein, some 100km away, the site of one of WWII’s most decisive battles where in 1942 Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s PanzerArmee Afrika was defeated by Allied forces – the Australian 9th Division proving one of the best fighting forces in the world.

And yet, to walk among the desert-bleached headstones citing the names of so many young Australians lying in this stony cemetery so far from home is beyond rattling – these knockabout blokes who once would have caught the ferry to Manly or a train to Spencer Street Station are buried side-by-side in a truly God-forsaken desolate stretch of earth that was once a battlefield.

It’s a privilege to visit their resting place.

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Originally published as Birtles and the Bean: Waiting for our precious cargo in Alexandria