Trip report: Hurghada Egypt, September 2005
by Amy
Posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 at 8:58 pm CET
Saturday 24 September
We took a cab in the morning to El Dahar, the oldest part of Hurghada. We intended to walk around and take in the sights, but what we saw of the old town was mostly just run down and there wasn’t much to see. After about a half hour of exploring and poking our heads into a few shops, we took a cab back into Sekala. We bought some souvenirs and t-shirts, and had a drink on the terrace of an Italian restaurant. We wanted to order food, but at 11:30 it was too early. About a half hour later we found ourselves in front of KFC and couldn�t resist the lure of real coleslaw. So we had our last meal in Egypt at the KFC in Sekala.
El Dahar, HurghadaWe had to hustle back to the hotel to make it in time to catch our bus back to the airport at 13:30. We stumbled into the lobby, sweaty and panting, at 13:20, to find our travel mates were already boarding the bus. Our timing was eerily perfect. We got our bags onto the bus and found two seats near the front. At the airport we checked in our bags and found a place to sit. Prices of food and drinks and even the toilets were about 5 times more expensive than in town, it was incredible. We each changed into fresh clothes and waited for our gate to be named.
Fake Lidl store and Big Brother (?) store in El DahaBoarding was a bit late but otherwise things moved smoothly and the flight back was pretty good. We were in a newer plane which did not require as much encouragement as the one we had on the flight into Hurghada one week earlier. Again as there was no entertainment we kept ourselves amused with the P-2000, Game Boy, magazines, and books. I read about 100 pages of “A Walk in the Woods” by Bill Bryson. The meal was the same as on the first flight.
At Schiphol we had a half hour delay deplaning, as they had a problem getting the walkway connected to the plane. Our luggage arrived fairly quickly and we headed for the trains. Unfortunately there was construction work on the tracks between Schiphol and Leiden, so we had to take a bus into Leiden. At the Leiden train station we picked up some pizzas to heat up at home and some Coke, and found ourselves a cab to bring us home.
Saturday 24 September
We took a cab in the morning to El Dahar, the oldest part of Hurghada. We intended to walk around and take in the sights, but what we saw of the old town was mostly just run down and there wasn’t much to see. After about a half hour of exploring and poking our heads into a few shops, we took a cab back into Sekala. We bought some souvenirs and t-shirts, and had a drink on the terrace of an Italian restaurant. We wanted to order food, but at 11:30 it was too early. About a half hour later we found ourselves in front of KFC and couldn�t resist the lure of real coleslaw. So we had our last meal in Egypt at the KFC in Sekala.
El Dahar, Hurghada
We had to hustle back to the hotel to make it in time to catch our bus back to the airport at 13:30. We stumbled into the lobby, sweaty and panting, at 13:20, to find our travel mates were already boarding the bus. Our timing was eerily perfect. We got our bags onto the bus and found two seats near the front. At the airport we checked in our bags and found a place to sit. Prices of food and drinks and even the toilets were about 5 times more expensive than in town, it was incredible. We each changed into fresh clothes and waited for our gate to be named.
Fake Lidl store and Big Brother (?) store in El Daha
Boarding was a bit late but otherwise things moved smoothly and the flight back was pretty good. We were in a newer plane which did not require as much encouragement as the one we had on the flight into Hurghada one week earlier. Again as there was no entertainment we kept ourselves amused with the P-2000, Game Boy, magazines, and books. I read about 100 pages of “A Walk in the Woods” by Bill Bryson. The meal was the same as on the first flight.
At Schiphol we had a half hour delay deplaning, as they had a problem getting the walkway connected to the plane. Our luggage arrived fairly quickly and we headed for the trains. Unfortunately there was construction work on the tracks between Schiphol and Leiden, so we had to take a bus into Leiden. At the Leiden train station we picked up some pizzas to heat up at home and some Coke, and found ourselves a cab to bring us home.
[...] Today we had a practice dive in the Oostvoornse Meer, here in the Netherlands. We hadn’t dived since Hurghada in September 2005, except for Nemo 33 in Brussels two weeks ago. The visibility was 3 to 5 meters, which was better than when we did our PADI Open Water dives in this same water in July last year. [...]
[...] Last week we had our second excellent experience with Colona Divers, this time in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. Colona is a Scandinavian dive operator with shops in Hurghada (where we first dived with them in 2005) and El Gouna in addition to Sharm. We did dives 22-30 with Colona from October 10-15. We should have started our diving on the 8th but I was feeling ill (heat exhaustion) on the evening of the 7th so we decided to join Colona as snorkelers for our first day. Unfortunately there was some miscommunication between the dive shop and the dive masters on our boat. We enjoyed our first snorkeling stop but the next two stops were for drift dives (we were the only snorkelers on the boat) and we were not informed of this - in fact the dive briefing indicated the boat would remain stationary. At the second stop, after swimming around a bit, we noticed the boat had moved quite far away - to the other side of the reef! Alarmed, we quickly aborted our snorkeling and swam quickly to the boat. The divers had a third dive but we stayed on the boat. In retrospect we could have also probably cleared up the confusion at the time but we were spooked and actually not too happy with Colona after that day. [...]