6th April
SUEZ CANAL, EGYPT
The last 5 days at sea have been very restful and we’ve had great weather. Yesterday, as we cruised up to the beginning of the Canal the wind really got up and even though it was 28degrees the wind felt quite chilly in the shade. Luckily though we found a lovely sheltered spot to sit in! Last night we dropped anchor at just after 9pm, joining lots of other ships doing the same, to wait for the morning to form a convoy to go through.
This morning at just after 4am we pulled our anchor up and started our journey with us being second ( after a war ship) and a Costa cruise ship behind us then lots of cargo ships behind them. The morning started off quite overcast with no sunshine at all so that made it feel a bit chilly outside but soon the sun started to burn through and it was quite hot by midday.
After going through a large lake we started to enter the new canal which runs alongside the old one so that ships can pass each other easily and not wait for one convoy going north before the other could go south. On one side of the canal it’s fertile irrigated land which has farms, grass, trees and many buildings but on the other side it’s mostly sand for as far as the eye can see. About half way through though a whole city has sprung up from nowhere in the sand with roads, hundreds of housing blocks and ferry points all along the canal. It’s absolutely huge and all built in the sand. All along the canal are armed guards at various intervals, with one group getting together to take a selfie of themselves with our ship in the background !!!
It’s very peaceful and eerily quiet cruising through with the only sounds being that of the tug beside us sounding it’s hooter every so often and the occasional car beeping at us. Looking through the binoculars you can see there’s lots of poverty there which we’ve seen in other parts of the world too, but the rubbish and waste you just wouldn’t know where to start to try to clear it all. Everywhere is quite unbelievable. There’s huge mounds of everything from cans, bottles, paper, boxes, household waste.. everything you can think of just chucked out anywhere and left.
We came out into the Mediterranean at just gone 3pm and turned right heading towards Haifa in Israel.