Black Sea adventurers plan reed boat trip to Egypt

Adventurers are getting ready to set off on a 3,000-km (1,900-mile) voyage in a reed boat to test a theory that ancient Egyptian merchants used such vessels to travel as far as the Black Sea. A crew led by German explorer Dominique Goеrlitz is planning to leave the Black Sea port of Varna next month, then try to island-hop around the Aegean and across the Mediterranean to Alexandria.

The boat Abora IV is still being built in the nearby town of Beloslav, with the help of two members of the Aymara ethnic group from Bolivia - Fermin Limachi and his son Yuri who have flown in to share their expertise using the fragile material. Goеrlitz said the Ancient Greek historian Heroditus had cited even older sources suggesting Egyptians "sailed into the Black Sea, to get precious materials they could not find in the Eastern Mediterranean".

The accounts were supported, he said, by the discovery of Egyptian remains around the Black Sea. Other members of the Aymara group, who live on Lake Titicaca high in the Andes, were involved in earlier Abora expeditions to other destinations and helped Norwegian writer Thor Heyerdahl, who crossed the Pacific in the "Kon-Tiki" balsa-reed raft in 1947.