The Suez Canal.

After leaving Jordan we headed off down the Gulf of Aqaba and rounded the Horn Of African into the Red Sea again, heading north to The Suez Canal.

I was excited as I'd never been through there before. I was up early, leaving Alan asleep, mouth agape as usual, to see our arrival in Suez. We had cruised slowly but had expected to anchor outside Suez in order to join the first convoy heading north, but we were in good time with no need to wait so were under way by about 7.30 am. Each day there are two northbound convoys with one southbound convoy between. It's organised that way as the canal is too narrow to allow passing.

Suez is an unremarkable town so we had no regrets at not going ashore there.

The canal is not one long continuous ditch through the desert, as I'd imagined. Here and there it widens out into lakes. On the western side it is largely unattractive desert and on the eastern side there are towns, gardens and army posts. It is the dividing line between Africa and Asia which means that Egypt, being on either side of the canal, is the only country in the world that has a foot on two continents.

In places it seemed that the ship was almost touching the each side of the canal. It is lined with rock or concrete walls which, true to Egyptian form, are tumbling down in places, and every so often, there was a curious mound of sand topped with a sentry hut and manned by a soldier bearing some hefty piece of armament. There is a huge Army presence everywhere in Egypt, we were to discover later.

Egyptian workmen supposedly working but in reality just leaning around whistled shrilly as we passed and shouted queries as to where we were from. The decks were lined with passengers curious to watch our progress through the canal and they answered with the inevitable and embarrassing (to me, anyway) Aussie, Aussie, Aussie chant. The Egyptians somehow knew the appropriate response so shouts of "Oy, oy, oy' were passed along the canal until we thankfully reached another lake and were out of earshot.

As we got further north it became greener. Many mangoes are grown in the area along with corn, coconuts, bananas and other crops. Most of what we saw was unimpressive.

We reached Port Said in the late afternoon and within minutes hawkers had begun to set up their stalls and lay out their generally ghastly carpets on the dock.

We were to have two nights in Port Said and I'll swear those stalls didn't close all night.

It was still deathly hot when we went ashore at about 6pm to ramble through the stalls which had multiplied at a fearful rate. The stalls were set close together and the temperature was climbing to fainting level. Still, I did buy a dancing, singing camel and Alan bought a piece of papyrus covered with hieroglyphs from Ancient Egypt, or so the seller guaranteed. However, I preferred my camel.

Resisting other bargains and their purveyors, we fought our way back to the ship and sanity.

The next morning we were off to see the pyramids of Giza.