Well, the Suez Canal is nothing like the Panama Canal. Both the Mediterranean and the Red Sea are at the same level, so there are no locks. Traffic through the canal is one-way: two north-bound convoys and one south-bound convoy are allowed through each day, and they usually have to pull over at certain areas (Bitter Lakes and Al Ballah) to allow the convoy going the other way to pass. Ships line up for miles waiting to form a convoy and go through; even if they have to wait for a couple of days for passage it is more economical than sailing around Africa. Cruise ships get to go to the head of the line, so it is pretty interesting to see all the different ships waiting to go through.

Once you are in the canal, there is not much to see most of the time. Egypt effectively closed the canal for eight years after the Six Day War in 1967; now an international peace-keeping force is stationed along the canal and maintains its neutrality and the mission to allow all international ships to pass through the canal.The African side of the canal gets irrigation water from the Nile, so it is green and cultivated in a lot of places; the Asian side on the Arabian Peninsula is mostly desert, with a few small oases.

There are two bridges across the canal: a railroad bridge that swings into place to allow trains to cross and then swings to either side to allow ships to transit the canal, and a suspension bridge that is high enough to allow ships to pass under it. There are also three or four ferries across the canal; vehicles line up for miles to access these ferries, which have to dodge the canal traffic to get to the other side.


There are some ships that are too large to go through the canal. These ships often unload their cargoes onto smaller ships at one end of the canal and then load it back on to a sister ship at the other end of the canal. Silting is also a problem; dredges work constantly to keep the channel clear for shipping.

It takes between nine and fifteen hours to transit the canal. We entered it at six o'clock in the morning and sailed into the Mediterranean at about four thirty that afternoon. We had to pull over once to let the southbound ships pass in the main channel, but we cleared it pretty quickly. I have to say that the Suez Canal is much less interesting to go through than the Panama Canal because there isn’t much going on most of the time. It was more like a sea day than a port day. A good thing, really, because tomorrow is Ashdod and an excursion to Jerusalem (another tiring day, but worth it).