LAWRENCE OF ARABIA CRUISES THE SUEZ CANAL Email sent to my friends from Istanbul, 11/21/99    Photo: Bruce Steele

Hi folks-- Come with me through the Suez Canal! Only a few of us did—30 out of the 700-odd passengers, the rest gone off to Cairo to “see the Pyramids.” I’d been signed up to go too--so what happened? Well, I’ve been to Cairo before, seen the Pyramids. I gave the "cultural pre-port" lecture for Cairo and an odd demon crept into me: I as much as told people to blow off the tour, sneak into town, and explore old medieval Cairo, as I had with so much pleasure years before. I must have been persuasive, because a dozen different people came up afterwards to tell me they were going to follow me wherever I went in Cairo! Ack! Nothing personal, but after 14 cramped and frantic days at sea all I could think was Oh no you’re not! I need a vacation! So I stayed on the ship and went through the Canal, enjoying one of the best days of the entire voyage so far.

What a blast! With our students and fellows packed off to an uncertain future on a fleet of leaky tenders, the thirty of us left on the ship were treated like royalty and had the show of all shows. We were psyched: imagine a huge ship normally packed with people, suddenly become a playground of a select few, with all the normal rules suspended. The setting was romantic; the Gulf of Suez looks a whole lot like Egypt ought to: a long line of stony cliffs to the west, the deserts of Sinai to the east, and a clutter of minarets, factories and naval cranes dead ahead. Absolutely enormous supertankers and container ships filled the harbor through the course of the day, building anticipation for the transit. That night the captain threw a surprise formal dinner for the thirty of us, our usual cafeteria stewards in tuxes, pouring wine and serving from printed menus (I had salmon). This was beginning to feel like Serious Pleasure. We spent the night in Port Suez harbor, because we needed to be fueled and put into convoys for the passage. The fuel lighter, by the way, misunderstanding 8 AM for 8 PM, was nearly repelled with hoses as a pirate when it finally pulled up that evening. Egyptian bureaucrats didn’t seem too clear on times.

Dawn was festive; My solo t’ai chi on the pool deck at sunrise turned into a farcical group effort, as we all tried to Carry Tiger to the Mountain. Eventually the daily Convoy List appeared, drawn up by the harbor authorities, from which we learned we were to be the second ship in the second convoy. This gave us ample time to study the monsters in the first, faster and more dangerous convoy as they steamed majestically into the canal entrance, space a mile or two apart: the supertankers, the container ships, the scary LPG ships, 18 in all. Apparently the harbor folks make complicated calculations based on displacement, cargo tonnage, cargo value, depth, length, and minimum cruising speed, to determine the composition of each convoy. Each ship is charged the precise amount they calculate it would take for the same ship with the same cargo to sail around Africa; the only savings are in time, and time of course is money. To arrive at this figure the authorities spend hours scrutinizing each ship's complete records. Then, rumor has it, they make two more adjustments in the order of procession: for baksheesh paid, and for Chinese ships. They’ve long ago decided that they can't deal rationally with Chinese captains, so they just let them go first. 

Finally about 10 AM we swung into line, all thirty of us lining the observation platform some eight stories above Egypt, peering down into the city's parks and alleys on the port side. Who knew that the west bank of the canal was settled the entire length? I'd been told to expect "a ditch" and a dull day. Never a dull stretch! City gave way to village, with rice paddies and banana orchards and everywhere tall palms. Minarets rising above. It was just an enchanting view, very much like my memory of the Nile delta. We learned that the fresh water for agriculture in fact is brought in by canal from the Nile. The canal itself is saltwater, of course, and devoid of locks. The banks are neatly maintained, and under reconstruction as they expand its capacity for the next generation of supertankers. Bollards, levees, guard boxes with waving, whistling soldiers, and army bases lined both sides almost the whole 280-kilometer length. On the less-settled starboard side, the Sinai desert was littered with Israeli war debris as far as one could see. I could not stop humming the Lawrence of Arabia theme. In the worst sort of way I hoped for a picture like that scene in the movie where a ship moves gracefully through sand dunes at sunset. My three sets of papers never got graded, of course. I took my folding chair here and there, reveling in the sunny quiet but fleeing swarms of local flies, some of which stayed with the ship until Istanbul, along with a pair of swallows that took up residence in a lifeboat.

I’d always wondered how the canal works. The canal is one-way only, and hence the necessity for convoys. The north-bound and south-bound pass in the middle, the Great Bitter Lake, where we halted for a spectacular barbecue lunch. A stamp buff on board told me that after the 1973 war and subsequent closing of the canal, a number of ships were trapped in the Lake for years. The crews organized their own floating civilization, and eventually even started publishing their own postage stamps! Beyond the Bitter Lakes we passed more, rather newer cities, such as Ismailia, with monuments, bridge projects and such. The cities along the way memorialized their glorious defeats with war memorials of spectacular vulgarity, most of them variations on Aida-meets-Saddam-Hussein. Apparently Ramesses II still haunts the imagination of the Egyptian military. All of this was viewed as if from a magic carpet, our ship gliding high, slowly and smoothly though the Egyptian countryside, followed and preceded by the great ships of our convoy, becoming grey silhouettes as the sun sank into the desert. Near Ismailia was a passing zone, where a southbound convoy lay moored for the night beyond a long, low island. From our angle, the ships appeared as if stranded in sand. And there, just there, the sun set behind them. I got my perfect shot of sunset, sand and ships, just like in Lawrence of Arabia.

As it turned out, our ship steamed into Port Said--a dazzling city at night, with huge illuminated mosques majestically lining the harbor approach--just as our 18-bus convoy was pulling up to the waterfront. They poured out of the buses onto the wharf, dragging their bulging backpacks, papyrus scrolls and darbouka drums. But where was a gangway? The authorities had neglected to provide one. Egypt strikes again. As hungry crowds surged onto the wharf, we heard the captain bellow down, "Isn't there something aft we can use as a gangplank?" The crowd of 670 looked desperate, hungry, sleep-deprived. The Philippine crew watching from above made wisecracks about starving refugees. We toyed with tossing down dinner rolls, but refrained for fear of starting a food riot on the wharf. Eventually, of course, our trekkers staggered back on board, thrilled to have seen the Pyramids. And we, the lucky thirty, were fat and equally happy, after the magic ride on our ship through the desert.

Cheers-------------------------------------el orans.