Our drive home took us back across the Sinai plateau to the Suez Canal. We stayed on the east side of the canal, turning north toward the Mediterranean and my Egyptian home in Damietta. The scenery was still the Sinai desert on the right but periodically there were green farms on the left, between the road and the canal.
We crossed the canal on the Peace Bridge, given as a gift to Egypt by Japan after Egypt regained it's lost Sinai province in the 1970s. The bridge is a '70s era segmental concrete cable-stayed bridge and is an awsome sight. My photos do not do it justice.
The Suez Canal always looks to me completely mis-matched to its surroundings. It is so grand amidst the low-tech farms with their old tractors, donkey carts, water buffalo and cows and men working in the field rows of green leaves with wooden handled hoes as their only tool. The canal sits high above the surrounding ground level. The twice-as-high container ships and oil tankers move majestically above banks of the canal. Viewed from the highway, running parallel, the ships seem so improbably long and wide and tall and completely dissassociated from the land around that they seem to be hallucinations or a video projection by a conceptual artist.
Image:
Click on the image to continue the journey
Click the image at left to go to DAHAB - Ras El Barr on the Med where the journey ENDS.
All images and text copyright Marsha Bailey 2005-2009. All rights reserved.
