Egypt: Luxor - Hurghada - Dahab
From Luxor there was a four-hour convoy to Hurghada, mostly known for being home to one of the world’s few official Ministry of Sound clubs. And we meant to go, really we did. But after our hectic week, long bus ride and massive dinner (with lots of juice), we all yawned, stretched and agreed the one thing we would like more than anything was sleep. So the rather pathetic night was henceforth known as, ‘The night we didn’t go to Ministry of Sound’. The shame.
The following morning I knocked back a few sea-sick tablets and caught the ferry over to Sharm El-Sheikh on the Sinai peninsula (which is technically in Asia, so we had crossed a continent but were still in Egypt. Cool, yes?) The memories of that ferry from Zanzibar were still a little too close for comfort, but it wasn’t too bad, and bar one of the boys who was sick anyway with a bug, we were all fine. A few hours on another bus and we arrived in Dahab, where our tour leader told us the general attitude was, ‘No problem, this is Dahab. Relax’.
A long, narrow touristy town with desert on one side, the Red Sea on the other and the red rocky mountains of Saudi Arabia on the horizon, Dahab was pretty quiet - a combination of the end of the summer season and less tourism due to tension with the Israli’s and the bombings a few years back (I hope I got that right, politics is beyond me). But it was paradise, we took a deep breath and felt like we were back on the Felucca again. It was also quite a liberal area, so the girls could finally done a bikini and shorts and not have to keep our shoulders and knees covered in the sweltering heat.
The first afternoon consisted of lunch on cushions next to the deep blue choppy waters of the Red Sea (I alwys imagined it to be dead calm, but it wasn’t. So there you go.) followed by a nap, and the most enormous, and cheapest, seafood dinner you could imagine. We ate so much we could barely lift ourselves up to go to bed, the food was so spectacular.
One in our group commented that this trip felt like we were all 5-year-old again - our whole sense of being was focused on eating, playing, complaining about minor injuries for sympathy, and not wanting to go to bed but having to because we couldn’t keep our eyes open any longer. Quite an accurate description really - we even, after listening to our tour leaders instructions, often proceeded to ask the exact question she had just answered, to which she would throw her hands in the air and exclaim, ‘Listen!’.
Ah well, most 5-year-olds had it pretty good, so I couldn’t complain. Except about my sore toe…
-Sarah
Tags: Egypt, Travel
