2015 ADVENTURE – PART 3

The more you travel, the more you learn.  There are certainly other ways to improve one’s knowledge, but seeing the world teaches so many things at once: history, geography, economics, politics, religion, etc.  All you need is an open mind.  Books, lectures and the internet all add to the picture but there’s no substitute for being there.

On this voyage we continue to ‘learn how to travel’.  This means making the most of the time we have in port and on board ship, and keeping to our budget.  Holland America offers excursions at each port.  On our first cruise in the fall of 2013, we pre-booked several, thinking they’d offer experienced guides and interesting itineraries.  While we can’t say we were disappointed, we learned from more experienced travellers that there are alternatives.

If the city we’re visiting is close to the ship and has interesting things on offer, we find a way to visit on our own.  We’ve been to six port cities so far on this trip - Lisbon, Tangier, Malaga, Valletta, Piraeus and Muscat.  We’ve walked all six cities and saw everything we wanted to see and more.

In Lisbon, we took public transportation to get to a site outside the city, and it only cost $9 for the two of us, return!  In several ports, we were able to return to the ship for lunch.  Bottom line, instead of spending $200 per day for Holland America excursions, we get by on $50.  And we’ve gotten lots of exercise and fresh air.

Our next port of call was Piraeus, Greece.  We knew we were in for a short day: only 6 hours.  What to do?  Not enough time to go into Athens.  Besides, museums are closed on Mondays.  So, we picked up a really bad city map at the information kiosk and set out on foot.  Elva had done a bit of preliminary research and noticed that there was a marina about a kilometre away.  It turned out to be a beautiful setting, with yachts rivaling those we saw in Monte Carlo.  We spent an hour or so walking around the gorgeous inner  harbour.

From there, we followed our noses and visited several beautiful Greek Orthodox churches in the downtown area.  Next, quite by accident, we came upon what we first thought was a parade.  It turned out to be a religious procession marking the Feast of the Epiphany.  We learned that this holy day is celebrated on January 19, according to the old religious calendar.  People were decked out in costumes; there were two marching bands; priests and bishops waved to the crowd and stopped to let people kiss the icons they were holding.  It was great!  And all because we didn’t have a plan.

As for life on board ship, the sea days fly by, even when it’s a little rough.  The food is great; the library is well-stocked; there are interesting lectures; we can choose from movies and live entertainment every day; there are courses on how to use the latest computer software: all free!  We only have a few news channels to choose from on TV, no internet, and no newspapers.  Who cares?  With the biggest news back home being the impending closure of the Target store, we’re not missing a hell of a lot anyway.  Besides, it’s -30 degrees C there…  For one habitually attuned to the latest happenings, I’m content in this little artificial world that is the Rotterdam.

One of the highlights of this part of the cruise was the transit through the Suez Canal.  The present Canal was opened in 1869.  But it wasn’t the first to link the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea.  Believe it or not, an Egyptian Pharaoh by the name of Senausret III undertook to build a canal in the 19^th century B.C.  Yes sir!  He rounded up all the able-bodied men drawing EI and put them to work.  And they got the job done.  Unfortunately, the ditch filled in with sand almost as fast as they could dig.

Today’s Canal is 162 km. long and handles about 20,000 ships per year.  It costs $300,000 per ship to pass through the Canal!  (Maybe Holland America gets a group rate.)  That adds up to about $6 billion a year in revenue for the Egyptian government.  Since the Canal crosses a flat expanse of desert, there’s no need for locks.  We were told that 10% of the world’s shipping passes through the Suez Canal.

The ship anchored at the northern opening of the Canal for a whole day, waiting for its turn to pass through.  In the morning I stationed myself on the pool deck with a good book: Ian McEwan’s Solar.  The sun was warm on my back, though attenuated somewhat by the haze and by nearby Cairo’s pollution.  Nearby passengers slept through the morning, farted unselfconsciously, struggled to get in and out of deck chairs.  That’ll be me someday, I thought, but not for a while yet, I hope.

Next day, I woke at crow piss and watched the sun rise over the Sinai, thinking of how my day might have begun on January 22, 1985, thirty years earlier.  I might have spent a sleepless night after backstopping my rec hockey team, Ray’s Handy Andy, to a midnight victory over the hated Cape Carmel Crackers.  I may have had to dig my car out of a snowbank before making my way out to Highway 2 at Day’s Corner and, from there, to my work on the Upton Road in Charlottetown, 90 kilometres distant.  As the newly-minted Director of the Forestry Division, I might have had to chair a management meeting and deal with the challenges of program funding, personnel issues, and political interference from the Minister’s Office.  Instead, I thought of the guy my age waking up in Egypt, in another world, in an uncertain time, and how lucky I am.

More than two millennia ago, a Greek visitor called Egypt “The Gift of the Nile”.  Were it not for the Nile, the Sahara Desert would stretch uninterrupted from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.

You never know who you’ll run across in your travels.  We arrived in the ugly port city of Safaga on the Red Sea.  The temperature was in the high 20s and we were excited to be going on an all-day excursion with Holland America.  There wasn’t much to see; bare mountains and desert on both sides of the road for the best part of two hours.  But, can you guess who found the only two Acadians in the group?  “Les mouches finissent toujours par trouver les Acadiens!”  Hence the old joke: “Why do they always bring a salt herring to an Acadian wedding?”  “To keep the flies off the groom!”

We passed through at least 50 checkpoints manned by machine-gun-toting soldiers and policemen before reaching our first destination, the Valley of the Kings.  Our guide explained that there is friction between Egypt’s ruling military faction and the rival Muslim Brotherhood.  We noticed dozens of idle Nile River cruise ships.  Tourism has slowed to a trickle.  (We learned that sixteen Egyptians were killed two days later in protests against the government.)

The Valley of the Kings is a big graveyard for Egyptian rulers and nobles.  To date, the tombs of 65 kings and pharaohs have been found, including that of King Tutankhamun, popularly known as King Tut.  We visited those of Ramses III and Ramses IX.  The main attractions are the frescoes and bas-reliefs on the walls and ceilings of the entrances, anterooms and burial chambers.  Over 3,000 years old, they remain very beautiful.  After visiting the Valley, we stopped briefly at the Temple of Hatshepsut, Egypt’s only female pharaoh, and the Colossi of Memnon.

Saving the best for the last, we strolled through the magnificent Luxor Temple, begun by Amenhotep III around 1,500 B.C., and expanded by other pharaohs, including Ramses II.  Luxor is part of a complex which includes the nearby Karnak Temple, the two linked by the three-kilometre-long Avenue of the Sphinxes.  The scale of these temples is impossible to imagine unless one has been there.

The famous Parthenon, the pride of Athens, was built almost 1,000 years later!  Although impressive, it pales in comparison to the Egyptian builders’ masterpiece.  And the obelisks at Luxor and Karnak make the Washington Monument look like a cheap knock-off.  We’re so glad we went.

And then there’s Ramses II, who ruled Egypt for an incredible 67 years in the thirteenth century B.C.  Not only was he an ambitious builder and statesman during the day, he was a busy old goat at night.  The man had more than 60 wives - two of them his daughters - and fathered 92 boys and 106 girls.  Just imagine the cost for Pampers and all the birthday parties he’d have to attend.  Obviously, the guy had no use for the prophylactics that would later bear his name!

As we sail through the southern half of the Red Sea and enter the Gulf of Aden, we bypass five countries whose citizens have never known the meaning of democracy: Yemen, Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia.  There, a good day means waking up and a really good day means going to bed with a full stomach.  And there are pirates in these waters.  A note from the Captain explains that the Rotterdam VI has taken security measures to protect us from pirates and that: “We are continuously being monitored by war ships of the coalition forces [the good guys!] and while you may not see them, they are not far away.”

After five long days at sea, we reach our next port of call, Muscat, the capital of Oman.  Located on the Arabian Sea, close to the Straight of Hormuz, the city has been an important trading and military outpost for thousands of years.  Oman’s economy and government are relatively stable.  Since the current sultan, Qaboos bin Said, took over in 1970, tourism has flourished.

Muscat is a beautiful city, surrounded by mountains, and featuring several well-preserved forts and palaces.  But it’s also a modern city, thanks to revenue from petroleum, and has all the fancy stores, flashy cars and decadent resorts that go with oil money.  As for the dress code, that’s a different matter.  Everyone must wear loose-fitting clothing that covers from wrists to ankles, and women must cover their heads.  Absolutely no Speedos!

Next, we’re off to Dubai!