I woke at 4am to witness our entering the Suez Canal. Quite unintentionally actually as I also woke up at midnight and 3am but since I was awake I got up for a looksee. Dark, as one would expect at 4am, and we were just inching southwards. At 4:50am we entered as seen above, and just as we did the call to prayer from a distant mosque started up, a lone voice evocatively chanting through the darkness. Other mosques soon joined in with their prayers and it became a cacophony of sound welcoming us to Egypt.

6:45am I sprung out of bed, camera in hand, to see what I could see. It was surprisingly chilly and consequently very hazy. The canal is quite narrow, only 180’ wide for much of the top and bottom sections, widening to two lanes of traffic only in the middle. Therefore, not only is traffic reduced to one way a time, the bank of the Egyptian mainland is pretty much right outside my balcony. (I’m on the starboard side of the ship, the port side faces the Sinai bank).

This particular northern part is industrial, residential, agricultural and frankly a bit smelly. I ended up spending most of the morning just doing laps around the top deck as every time I went inside there was something outside I couldn’t miss seeing. Ended up walking 5.5 miles of circles by 11am.

Ships pass through the Canal in a convoy, northbound first (which is probably why we had to wait overnight) then southbound. We’re being followed by a huge Evergreen container ship. You can see in the pic below that the canal has curves and if the wind is really howling I can easily imagine such a big ship being pushed sideways. In the middle bit it widens into two canals and there are cut-thrus where the tugs can help other ships in the convoy go around the grounded ship and not block transit completely.

At 1pm we were just leaving the Great Bitter Lake which surprised me as that means we’re really close to our exit in Suez. Alison the lecturer had said it would take 20 hours to transit and it’s looking like we’ll be through in less than 10. Apparently ships often have to wait in one of the lakes for the opposite traffic to come thru but we made the whole transit nonstop.

99% of my photos have been of the mainland side of the canal. It has farmland, villages & cities, distant mountains, mosques, and lots of interesting things to look at.

At 2:32pm we exited the canal and just like when we entered this morning we were bon voyaged by the Islamic Call to Prayer.

Now we slowly chug south to our next port: Safaga.