Transiting the Suez Canal

We spent a rather uninteresting day transiting the Suez Canal.

The Suez Canal, unlike the engineered wonder that is the Panama Canal, is basically a ditch connecting the Red Sea with the Mediterranean Sea. There are no locks, no grand engineering, no jungle, villages, or other points of interest lining the route. There is sand and occasional guard towers. There is ongoing dredging and maintenance activities. There is one place where several monuments and commemorative pieces have been erected; however, these pass quickly and are forgotten almost as quickly.

The Canal has been upgraded recently. They added about 72 kilometers of parallel canal and canal connections so that traffic can now flow two ways. Up to this point, traffic had to flow one way from either Port Said in the north or Suez in the south, then wait in Great Bitter Lake for the opposite segment of canal to clear, then continue either north or south.

All traffic had to convoy, so there was, apparently, a lot of jockeying for positions in a convoy. They still convoy, but all northbound traffic including the Silver Whisper, begins a convoy at Suez around 4:00 AM and starts to move northerly. All southbound traffic in a convoy does the same at Port Said. Both convoys can move at all times and there is no more need for one or the other to wait in the lake for traffic to clear. We made the passage in about 12 hours, compared to the old average of 18-20 hours.

The new canal works were built in about a year at a cost of about US$8 billion. There is a great deal of speculation regarding whether or not they will earn back the cost via passage revenues in a reasonable time frame. I have no information on how it was financed, but I suspect that the World Bank had a hand in it.

If you are interested in learning more about the canal – old and new – here is a link to follow: http://www.suezcanal.gov.eg/

I did manage to get a few pictures.

 Sand and dunes for about 10 hours.

 We led the convoy.

 From one side to the other - nothing much more than more sand...

 Every now and then a monument or commemorative structure.



A memorial to the workers.

The largest monument at about midway between Suez and Port Said.

Check out the Panama Canal pix and compare them to what we saw all day long in Suez. After the initial look, it was a good day to just relax, read, and play bridge.

Our next port is Ashdod in Israel. We will be taking a day trip to Masada and the Dead Sea. Stay tuned…