Suppose you are in southern Egypt - Aswan, say. You need to get to Bergen, in Norway, as fast as possible. But airplanes are not an option for some reason. How do you do it?
At a guess: Drive to Alexandria, Hydroplane to Italy, drive to denmark, across, the bridge, and drive.
You might do better with some high-speed trains, but the TGV isn't outside of france, and I can't imagine the Italian/German/Danish train system is quite the same.
The Germans have their own high-speed trains, I know (the ICE system) but I have no idea what the situation is like in Italy.
The hop from Alexandria across the Mediterranean is the one I was really wondering about. Ocean voyaging is, after all, slow; where's the optimal tradeoff between overall shortening of route and minimizing time on boats?
Is there an actual commercial hydroplane service between Alexandria and some point in Europe, though? It's not nearly as interesting an exercise if one can charter surface transport between arbitrary locations.
The excellent German bahn.de website is useful for some of the journey, perhaps -- you can determine that it's much quicker to go through Italy (I tried Catania, e.g. 56 hours 42 minutes with 7 connections) than via Istanbul (e.g. 81 hours 57 minutes with 6 connections: you'd presumably have to get some sort of boat to Istanbul from the Egyptian coast, though I've got no idea if that's possible). I didn't try many other combinations, so there might be better alternatives. It doesn't seem to know about Egyptian trains, unfortunately :-)
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Date: 2007-04-12 06:07 pm (UTC)Drive to Alexandria, Hydroplane to Italy, drive to denmark, across, the bridge, and drive.
You might do better with some high-speed trains, but the TGV isn't outside of france, and I can't imagine the Italian/German/Danish train system is quite the same.
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Date: 2007-04-12 07:23 pm (UTC)The hop from Alexandria across the Mediterranean is the one I was really wondering about. Ocean voyaging is, after all, slow; where's the optimal tradeoff between overall shortening of route and minimizing time on boats?
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Date: 2007-04-12 07:28 pm (UTC)Safely, closer to 200mph.
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Date: 2007-04-13 04:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-13 04:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-13 04:53 am (UTC)Is there an actual commercial hydroplane service between Alexandria and some point in Europe, though? It's not nearly as interesting an exercise if one can charter surface transport between arbitrary locations.
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Date: 2007-04-14 07:59 pm (UTC)