London to Auckland

The Suez Canal runs for 163km between Port Said on the Mediterranean to Suez on the Red Sea. It is only 60m wide and has one shipping lane with several passing areas. On a typical day, three convoys transit the canal, two southbound and one northbound. They travel at around 15km/hr and take 11 to 16 hours to transit.

It’s not just a matter of blundering through for us. There are all sorts of rules and regulations such as the rule that says all boats transiting must have a ‘pilot’ on board. So I think I’ll be exempt but poor old Phil might have an Egyptian sitting on the back all the way. Transiting the canal involves paying an agent to ‘smooth the way’. This is called backsheesh and is a nice way of saying bribery but in many countries it’s so ingrained that it’s just a cost of doing business and it’s not worth getting bothered about. All the good books recommend carrying additional backsheesh to personally hand out through this area. Initially I had planned to carry some fruit baskets and multi-vitamins for this purpose but after further reading I was forced to change this to Marlboro Red.

Once we reach Suez we would be mad not to take time out to jump in a taxi and drive the 140km to see the Great Pyramids. Come to think about it we will be mad if we do. This will be possibly the most dangerous part of the whole London-Sydney event as we risk all and brave Cairo taxis and traffic. Below is a photo of a regulation taxi in Cairo.

I have ridden a few taxis in my time. I particularly enjoyed the Bombay taxi experience where the taxis were so cheap that we used to hire one each and offer inducements to the drivers to win the race to our destination. In Bombay traffic there is only one rule and that is that you must pass the car in front of you. And when a driver waves his hand out the window you can never be exactly sure what he is going to do but one thing you can count on is that whatever he does will be dangerous and stupid. In Bombay the horn is the initial basis for the taxi purchase and everything else is an accessory.

I don’t expect the Egyptian taxi experience to be any better than Bombay’s so there’s a good chance it will rival the ‘Great Brazilian Taxi Ride’ of 1994 where we took three taxis, a death threat and 1 1/2 hours to reach a bar that turned out to be less than 300m from our hotel. This ride could be just as interesting and there’s only one thing that’s inevitable here and that’s a change of underwear after the ride.