Sinai?… More like Si-Denied….
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008After we spent a day or so in Luxor, the plan was to travel by bus to Hurgada, take the ferry to Sharm El Shiek (in Sinai) and then travel to Dahab. Once in Dahab, we could hang on the beach, go snorkling, see supposed actual “Burning Bush”, climb Mt. Sinai, etc, etc… sounds fun, right? Wrong. Not meant to be I guess. We know that it’s not best to pay to far ahead when dealing with travel agents… the reason being that you may want to change your plan, or simply that you don’t want to pay too much up front before the quality of service has been proven. We generally don’t… ever. But the lure of this one was too much. The agent (which we highly DO NOT recommend) was Montasser. He was recommended in Lonely Planet so we decided to give it a try and let him plan our travels from Luxor to Dahab. The plan quickly started to go south when, after we fronted the money, we found out the ferry actually isn’t running. Weather was the reason. We checked the weather and it seemed fine so we were confused. When we arrived in Hurgada, we found out that the ferry had not been running for 2 weeks and would not run again for anther 3 weeks due to maintenance. We worked out an amount that we would refunded from Montasser. When contacting him, he was combative but eventually relented and said he would refund a certain amount. After more talk, he raised the amount he would refund to about 10% less than what we wanted. Better than nothing, though, so we agreed. The next problem was how to deliver the money as Montasser was in Aswan. In the end, after all was said and done, the money arrived via a friend of a friend and we had enough time to get to our flight to Turkey (that we booked ourselves 😉 ).
So… off to Istanbul!
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