World Cruise - Day 103 - Apr 24 - At Sea/Suez Canal

Sunrise over the Suez Canal:

Technically, we’re not yet into the Suez Canal, we’re just in the staging area where we enter the Suez Canal.  There is a lineup of ships behind us:

Snapped this photo a few minutes after sunrise as we approached the entrance to the Suez Canal:

There are fisherman here in the area where the Red Sea comes to an end and the Suez Canal begins:

These guys are either line fishing or pulling in the last part of their nets:

Fishermen pulling in their nets:

We are now entering the beginning of the Suez Canal.  You can see the Costa ship that was in port with us a couple days ago out in front of us in the canal:

Every mile or so, there is an army outpost usually with just one guard standing watch, although this one had two:

There are also larger military buildings every few mile along the way:

Note the guard tower by the military building has two men in it and a gun in the right window pointed away from the canal (i.e. to the east, toward the Sinai Peninsula and Israel):

Julie, I usually take the photos of people from far away, then zoom in and/or crop in to get the final photo that you see on the blog.  By doing this, people don’t typically know that I am photographing them.  But there are some times where I am closer up and it’s clear to the people I am photographing that I am taking a picture of them, such as in Aqaba with the boys on the pier and the kids on the beach.  In that case, I had my small pocket camera.  Interesting, few people seem to get bothered about being photographed with that camera.  It’s the DSLR that sometimes will be people waving no pictures.  Not sure why, they both take photos, I guess the DSLR looks more like a professional photographer camera and the pocket camera is smaller, more hidden?  I’ve gotten pretty good at pointing the DSLR without looking through the viewfinder and snapping the picture, so it isn’t as obvious that I’m taking a picture, especially if I’m walking down a street or we are driving by something that I want to take quickly and discreetly.

A couple of stories from the ship that some may find interesting.  Both have to do with nudity onboard (or at least partial nudity), so if you’re reading this blog as a bedtime story to your kids, skip this part.

The first one is about two guys (who will go unnamed) that were drinking a little bit too much one day.  They went into the men’s steam bath wearing only a towel, then came out onto the front deck (which is private, you’re supposed to have a pass to go there or getting a spa treatment that day, they technically should not have been out there) to lay out in the sun.  One guy fell asleep in the sun and apparently his towel came unraveled while he was sleeping, exposing him to everyone on the front deck.  The other guy tried waking him up and was unsuccessful, so he just left him lying there, exposed to the world.  They apparently got reported and now their drinking privileges onboard have been revoked (which is a pretty serious thing for the cruise ship to do, since they are losing all of that revenue from two people who would otherwise be their best customers).

The other story is about a woman (who will also go unnamed) who was up on deck 11 (the top deck) sunbathing topless.  Sometimes the top deck on cruise ships (especially those in the Mediterranean) will have an area designated for topless sunbathing.  On a past cruise, one guy even told Krissie that there was a group of nudists onboard and it would be OK to sunbathe in the nude on the top deck.  Anyway, I digress. In this case, it was an older woman from Europe and it was kinda like seeing grandma sunbathing topless.  She was letting it all hang out when one of the teenage boys onboard came up to deck 11 (which is where shuffleboard and the golf net are located, among other things).  She tried to cover up as quickly as possible.  Anyway, that probably provided quite a sight there.

Interesting things that happen onboard…

Two nights ago, there was a phone call to our room at 2:30a.  I got up, thinking it was my wakeup call (I use the phone for my morning wakeup call) and answered it, half asleep.  There was an automated message that went something like this:  “Attention, a fire alarm has been activated and your cabin is to be immediately evacuated.  Please report to your muster station.”  Um, I will admit that I was not very awake, so my 2:30a logic was to look outside the balcony window, sniff for smoke, look for fire, none detected, so I crawled back into bed and went to sleep.  Probably not the best human defense system in the case of an actual fire, but I was tired and sleepy and it seemed logical to me at the time.  I found out late yesterday that apparently someone had activated a fire alarm on our deck and it sends out that automated call to all of the cabins near the fire alarm.  Several other people went out into the hallway and said there were several security people out there trying to determine why someone had activated the fire alarm (not yet willing to call it a false alarm until they had fully checked out the situation).  Anyway, it was a false alarm and everyone eventually went back to sleep.  Krissie slept through the whole thing.

Krissie is walking on the 10^th deck (left side of the track), I took this pic from the 11^th deck.  She is the fastest walker on the ship.  One guy (“Stretch”) who thought he was the fastest walker got lapped by Krissie a couple times about a week ago and so he stopped walking on deck 10, he walked on deck 9 instead (so he wouldn’t be passed again by a girl).  Stretch is the person turning the corner behind Krissie on the left.

We are entering the Great Bitter Lake, which is one of two major lakes in the Suez Canal.  You can see the Costa ship on the left and the container ship that is directly in front of us on the right:

The west side of the canal is more developed than the west (which is part of the Sinai Peninsula).  I’m not sure what the half pyramid buildings are in the background by the water tower, but when I did a closeup, they look like either storage buildings or some type of military building:

There was a felucca sailing on the canal, one of very few smaller boats once we entered the canal:

Closeup of the felucca:

Great Bitter Lake is one of the areas that are passing zones (most of the narrower parts of the canal are one way traffic) and also staging areas.  The two ships in front of us are out in the middle part of the photo, with other ships staging to the left and right:

There are several container ships that we passed as we went through Great Bitter Lake:

This one is stacked especially high (eight levels above the deck):

This ship is carrying other, smaller boats through the canal:

To give you a size perspective, our boat is about the size of the smallest of the three boats in the middle (to the two behind it are pretty large):

There were several small villages and interesting buildings along the banks of the Suez Canal, yet not as interesting as the Panama Canal:

We got 11½ out of 18 in trivia this morning, 13½ won it.  Questions we missed:  The name dinosaur comes from two Greek words which mean what?  Terrible lizard (we said giant lizard).  What word derives from New York and London?  Nylon (we said yankee).  What is a group of frogs called?  An army (we said a pod).  What country can you walk across in one day?  Monaco (we said Vatican City, which you can also walk across in less than a day, but that’s what the answer said).  Where was the toothbrush invented?  China (we said Egypt).  What was a gladiator armed with in addition to a dagger and a spear?  A net (we said a shield).  What Princess ships were the inspiration for the original Love Boat TV series?  Pacific Princess and Island Princess (we said Pacific Princess and Sun Princess, ½ point).  Other interesting questions we got correct:  What is the usual occupation of the leprechaun of legend?  Cobbler.  What is Barbie’s full name?  Barbara Millicent Roberts.  What song shares the same tune as A-B-C-D?  Twinkle, twinkle, little star.  Tigers have a unique characteristic regarding their skin, what is it?  The stripes are on the skin, not the fur.

At lunch, I saw one of the waiters with one of the electronic fly zappers.  They really work.  All you need to do is get close to the fly and it zaps it midflight:

Not sure if I told you Krissie’s theory on the flies of Egypt?  She thinks they are direct descendants from the plagues.  They are nasty, very ill-mannered and generally unpleasant.  They need to take some lessons from flies back home on how to leave you alone when you shoo them.

As we got into the center part of the canal, there were more small boats fishing:

I also got this pic of a couple of tanks/armored vehicles parked along the side of the canal:

Not sure what this building is, but it looks like some type of amphitheater?

These guys were fishing with a net, two guys in the water and one guy in the boat:

Not sure what this statue represents, but we were guessing that it is the end of a rifle with the bayonet extended?

Here is another view of the monument, you can see some soldiers on the pier:

This graphic was on one side of the canal:

Four armored cars with machine guns mounted in traffic on one side of the canal:

Welcome to Egypt?  I’m not so sure (see the next two photos):

Look closely at these six army guys.  All of them have rifles.  The third one is actually sighting his rifle directly at me on the cruise ship:

Same guy, this time he’s giving me (or us) the finger.  I didn’t feel very welcome:

Another small town along the canal.  There are several ferries that cross the canal at various points, this being one of them:

We finally exited the canal at about 3p.  We are now in the Mediterranean heading west toward Alexandria, our destination tomorrow (and our gateway to Cairo and the pyramids).

The show tonight was James Campbell, the lead male vocalist onboard as part of the Pacific Princess Singers and Dancers, doing his own solo show:

I had a voicemail from passenger services about the emergency call that came a couple nights ago in the middle of the night instructing us to evacuate the cabin and go to the muster station.  Apparently they determined that it was not a system malfunction, that someone manually pulled the fire alarm in the hallway outside our door at approximately 2:30a.  So now our neighbors are all guessing who might be the guilty party.  We have some ideas and have it narrowed down to two people who are known to: a) stay up late; b) drink a lot; and c) do wild and crazy things.

Tomorrow is Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt.  It will be a long day, starting at 7a and not getting back until close to 8p.