There were a lot of really long tours today that visited the Valley of the Kings and the Karnak Temple. The tours ranged in length from 11-1/2 to 13-1/2 hours. I visited these sites in 1992, long before I started a travel blog! Jeff wasn’t interested in doing those tours so we chose the Red Sea resort getaway instead and were hopeful that we would be able to snorkel from the beach.
The first pictures show the extremely long lines to go through Egyptian immigration and metal detectors before our fellow cruisers could board their buses. The buses finally left at around 8, about ½ hour late. They were told they would have a police escort but none was seen at the port.
Our tour didn’t leave until 9:30. Our immigration line was a lot shorter! It took about 30 – 45 minutes to get to our location which turned out to be the Sheraton at Soma Bay. The Sheraton is just one of the hotels in the complex which was originally opened in 1991. The area was developed by a private corporation and contains 2500 acres on the Red Sea where access is controlled by a single entry gate. It is to become a self contained community. We saw a child development center, a water park, a golf course, condos on the beach and around the golf course and other housing. It looked like they could build for another 20 years and still not complete the area. It took us 15 minutes to get from the entry gate to the hotel.
At the hotel they collected our passports. There was a huge pool and numerous covered areas on the beach. We started at the beach and the first thing we did was don our snorkel gear. The water was a bit chill went we first got in which felt good since it was fast warming up. It didn’t take long to figure out that this wasn’t a prime snorkeling spot. The visibility wasn’t very good, there was very little coral and what was there was covered with a fine layer of white sand which was also suspended in the water. We snorkeled from one end to the other and returned to our lounge chairs. We rinsed off our snorkel gear and got the salt water out of our hair and then moved to the pool area.
At 12:15 they opened the buffet and we picked out items to eat that we could identify … lol … along with a few interesting items to try. I think we sampled all of the desserts, the best being something that looked like baklava but wasn’t as sweet.
We spent the reminder of the day people watching by the pool. There was an entertainment group that lead a very aerobic water exercise in the pool and later entertained us with dancing. Unfortuntely, I haven’t figured out how to upload videos to my blog … I’ll work on it for future entries.
Because so many of our fellow cruisers were on really long excursions today, we are celebrating Halloween tomorrow.
NOTE: I will post for Halloween tomorrow but then we will have 3 more sea days before we reach our next stop, which was added because of the cancellation of the Petra overnight stop, The new stop is Salalah Oman. So, look for Halloween post tomorrow and then I’ll go silent for a few days. I did notice some hired security on board today and fairly certain that they will be with us until we get past Somalia based on info from Mary who has been through this area on a previous cruise.
