DAY 12 SUEZ CANAL

The ship started into the Suez Canal at 2:00 AM. I woke at 4:45 AM, just before sunrise, (our stateroom is on the port side, so as we are going south through the canal we face east, toward the rising sun) and watched the banks of the Sinai Peninsula move past our balcony. Sand everywhere. Some areas are hardened sandy flat spots with rock outcroppings here and there, some areas are sand dunes with the wind-carved ripples that look like waves (not huge Lawrence of Arabia dunes, but dunes nonetheless). Every so often there is a military outpost with tanks and soldiers with weapons over their shoulders patrolling the roadway along the bank -- most likely Egyptian. More sand, sand as far a you can see. Frequent sightings of discarded and wrecked equipment -- vehicles and other unidentifiable things, sometimes tanks. Most likely the result of fighting over the past decades. We have the Sinai on our port side and Egypt mainland on our starboard.

The canal itself consists of a straight cut south from Port Said (which is on the eastern edge of the Nile delta, on the Mediterranean), then it goes in a gentle curve as it enters the Bitter Lakes, then pretty much another straight cut south out of the lakes past the city of Suez, which is at the north tip of the Gulf of Suez, that runs along the lower half of the western bank of the Sinai, and into the top of the Red Sea. Our ship paid a fee of $880,000 for the privilege of going through the canal. Our Egyptian guide in Alexandria said that the Egyptian people have recently learned that former President Mubarak personally pocketed all the fees collected from the Suez Canal over the decades he was in power. The new government is trying now to locate Mubarak’s money. That’s a lot of money.

OK, there’s only so many photos a person can take of sand, so after sitting in our bathrobes on our balcony, we decided we really needed breakfast. At some point in the evening, the ship reached the southern tip of the Sinai, which marks the end of the Gulf of Suez, and then started up the eastern side of the Sinai, into the Gulf of Aqaba.

Side note on shipboard life. The ship staff takes every precaution it can to prevent outbreaks of intestinal distress. These kind of things can run like wildfire through the passengers on a cruise ship and can make life miserable. So before you enter any eating area, you must get a squirt of Purell to disinfect your hands. Same before you enter the theater, before you board the ship after a tour, and every time you get back on the bus during a tour. It seems to be working.

In general, the passengers are mostly Australians, British, Americans, and some Germans and Chinese, in that order. We learned from an Aussie the other day that they were traveling on a special package that was a 55-day tour that flew they to Los Angeles for a couple of days, then Las Vegas for a couple of day, then New Orleans for a couple of days, then they boarded this ship and they are sailing on 3 cruises, back to back, all the way to Singapore and then flying home. Wow, what a trip.