Amazon EC2 is pretty cool. However, I have noticed that it doesn't seem to be able to find the shortest route when using Amazon elastic IPs (static IPs) from with in the Amazon network. From my experience, a 30-hop route can be reduced to something in the ballpark of 4-hops! The solution I came up has been to add the hostname associated with an elastic IP to map to their internal network IP. This can be done by making the appropriate changes to your /etc/hosts file. Something like this:

10.124.16.23 something.example.com something

The idea is to avoid using an elastic IP when you are within the Amazon network. If you know a better solution, let me know.