Jordan and Suez

Welcome, highly navigable reader, as this week we talk about visiting the country of Jordan, and returning to Europe through the Suez Canal.

Our port of call in Jordan was Aqaba, a small somewhat scruffy port down on the Red Sea coast, where the borders of Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia all meet. From Aqaba you can easily see Eilat in Israel and Taba in Egypt on the other side of the water. We arrived early in Aqaba to find that most things were closed, what with this being Ramadan and all. We even went on a fairly involved chase around three sides of a building, down an alleyway and then up two flights of stairs to find Aqaba's Post Office, which once we got there, promised it would open at 10am.

Aqaba is the gateway to visiting things like the lost city of Petra, but it's a gateway in the same way that Birmingham International is a gateway for London: it's a 3-4 hour bus ride from here to Petra, and we decided we didn't want to do that. Instead we enjoyed all that Aqaba has to offer. There is actually quite some history here: there's a 15th Century fort, and a large square which celebrates the Arab Revolt back in 1916/7, where, egged on by Lawrence of Arabia, the folks of the Arabian peninsula rose up against their Ottoman overlords, then marched through the desert to take Aqaba. There's also a fairly large mosque.

The Jordanians seem like a nice polite bunch: there are taxi drivers everywhere in the town, beseeching you to use their services to get a tour of Petra or Wadi Rum, but it's all good natured, low key and not pushy at all. Yes, the guy in the bureau de change looked at me oddly when I wanted to change Jordanian Dinars into Euros, and actually didn't have enough Euros to give me, but that's a small issue.

From Aqaba, it's a quick jaunt via the two pointy bits at the top of the Red Sea (down the Gulf of Aqaba, up the Gulf of Suez) before preparing to transit the canal.

It was light pretty on our canal transit day (that's due to the Egyptians oddly choosing to be just two hours ahead of UTC), and as I looked out the window at 5:50am, we'd just started moving. Traffic through the canal waits at either end then proceeds in a convoy. We were at the head of the queue so we got some nice views out the front, and a good view of the convoy of 20 ships we were leading out the back.

There's still plenty to see in the Suez Canal as you glide along at 8-9 knots: first up is an electrical power line, which arches high to give the ships their required 70 metres of clearance, then something marking the place where the Ever Given ran aground and blocked the canal back in 2021, then some ferries. After an hour or so you're into the Bitter Lakes, previously a collection of salt basins, which were flooded when they built the canal. There, there were rows of ships on either side of the navigable channel, all waiting for instructions or to tag along with a convoy in one direction or the other.

Before long you're into the long central section where the canal is a "dual carriageway": the old canal is used for traffic coming South, and a new section, opened in 2015, is used by Northbound convoys. Here, there are some monuments to the folks that built the canal, before you reach the railway bridge. The bridge was built in 2001 to link the main Egyptian railways to the Sinai Peninsula, and is the largest swing bridge in the world; however, when the new bit of canal was built, the railway was cut, and now goes nowhere. However, it looks like they're in the process of building another swing bridge to go over the new bit of canal, so all is not lost.

The idea is that the Southbound convoy passes the Northbound one while we're in the "dualled" section, and that nearly worked for us; as the canal merges back into one channel, you go under the cable-stayed road bridge, and as we approached we could see a chunky container ship (the HMM Dublin; one of the very biggest in the world at 400 metres long and 60 metres wide) carefully limboing under the bridge, at the tail of the Southbound convoy. A slight pause to let the mighty Dublin pass, and we were on our way.

As you watch the convoy, and the ships therein, you can see it's not all that surprising that Ever Given got stuck. The prevailing wind here runs perpendicular to the canal. It's very, very flat here: so flat, that De Lesseps could build a 100-mile long canal between two seas with no locks in it. That means there's nothing to break the wind, and as a result it can certainly blow: as you look back down the convoy, the huge ships are all crabbing along with their noses into the wind to maintain a straight course in the canal. Get this a bit wrong, and I'm sure it's easy for the wind to take hold of the vessel and push its nose into the bank.

From the road bridge, it's a slow, straight cruise down to Port Said and the delights of the Med, roughly 10 hours after you set off. My it's chilly here!