Balloon Juice - On The Road - arrieve

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arrieve

Apologies in advance for the long introduction:

I have always wanted to sail through the Suez Canal—maybe I’ve just watched Lawrence of Arabia too many times but if I kept a list of really cool things I wasn’t likely ever to do, transiting the Suez Canal would definitely have been on it.

I wanted to take a trip over Christmas and finally use up all of the miles and points and credits that I’ve accumulated, many of them from trips I had to cancel in 2020. And I found a cruise from Athens to Aqaba, Jordan that not only went through the canal, but also had several stops in Egypt, including the Valley of the Kings. It was a lot of money, but I decided it would be my post-pandemic splurge. I tacked on several days in Jerusalem at the King David hotel after the cruise, and a business class flight home, all for free. I was really excited.

Then the war started. Jerusalem was no longer an option. The itinerary changed to remove the stop in the Sinai. Then Alexandria and the Valley of the Kings were cancelled. And then the Houthis started lobbing missiles at ships in the Red Sea.

I assumed that the cruise would be cancelled. It had to be cancelled, right? It was not. It turns out that travel insurance policies exclude war and civil disturbance as valid reasons for cancelling a trip; it was not something I had ever had to think about before. So while I could of course choose not to go on the trip, I would not get any of my money back.

It was not just the money, or concerns about safety. It honestly felt a little obscene to be taking a vacation anywhere near the horrific situation in Gaza. But the cruise was not cancelled, and despite a couple of suitcases worth of misgivings, I went.

And it was mostly lovely. There was a recent thread where people were expressing some strong opinions about cruising. I had not been on a cruise ship in at least a dozen years (not counting the less than luxurious expedition ships in Antarctica and the Galapagos), but I did always like that whole “unpack once” thing. And I always got a room with a balcony so I could sit and read and watch the waves and avoid my fellow passengers as much as I wanted. I wasn’t planning to ever go on a cruise again, but the itinerary—at least the original itinerary—was irresistible. I actually loved life on the ship. It was a smaller ship, and half-empty, so there were about 250 passengers. And though I am very much a “I’d rather do it myself, thanks” type of person, it was fun to be waited on and to be able to have pretty much anything I wanted whenever I wanted it.

The final itinerary was kind of a Mediterranean hopscotch, having to make up for the three stops in Egypt that were cancelled. We went to Crete, then Nafplio on the mainland, then Ephesus in Türkiye (with the clocks turned ahead an hour) then Rhodes (with the clocks turned back again), then back to Crete. And on New Year’s Eve, we transited the Suez Canal.

On The Road - arrieve - The Suez Canal part 1 9

Suez Canal, EgyptDecember 31, 2023

The captain had announced that we would arrive at the canal at 3:30 in the morning, so I thought that we’d already be in it by the time I woke up. But we didn’t start the actual transit until it was light, so I got to see sunrise over the waters around Port Said.