Transiting Suez Canal

There's more I want to tell you about the trip to Luxor, but right now, as I'm typing this, we are going through or, as us seasoned world travelers term it, transiting the Suez Canal. It will take us 12 hours, and Holland America is serving us rolls, juice and coffee on several decks with good views. We are leading our convoy -- maybe they let us go in alphabetical order -- and I can see five huge ships following us before the line disappears in the desert dust.

It's another Egyptian line between life and death. The irrigated west side is verdant with date palms and green fields, full of houses and apartment buildings and mosques. Minarets, by the way, are much more elegant during the day; at night they are lit up with white and green neon, making them look like tall, skinny Christmas trees, though probably only to American eyes.

And on the east side of the canal, desert. Sand. Bleakness and nothing whatsoever growing. Almost no buildings. Very occasionally desolate highways from nowhere to nowhere else. (Why don't they use Canal water to irrigate? Because it's sea water.)

Every so often, on the west side are stack of green boxes like shipping containers. During the Egyptian/Israel war in the 70s, Egypt sank a bunch of ships in the Canal so Israel couldn't use it. The Canal was closed for ten years as they got the damned ships back out. The green boxes are there in case they need to block it again -- easier to unblock it afterwards if you use regular-shaped objects with no breakable parts. Oh, and if you can't use the Canal, going around South Africa adds more than 3000 miles to the journey.

OK, that's your "here we are!" entry on the Suez Canal. I'm going back out on the bow for another while. If nothing else, I can wave to the soldiers posted to the frequent guardhouses. About 2/3 of them wave back, which I think shows Egyptian graciousness. I only go by once. They see ships going by all day every day.