Hurghada, Egypt

Our first stop in Egypt took us to Hurghada on the Red Sea, which is home to some of the best diving in the world, though we like to call it “Here I rob ya.” Our adventure started at 11pm when we boarded our flight to Cairo. We arrived at 1 am and were “greeted” by a swarm of taxi drivers waiting for their next “agnobi” prey. Just so you know, you are not their friend AND they do have a “special price for you”, and it is usually 2-3 times more than you should pay! After many “La Shokrans” (No, thank you in Arabic) we found the domestic departures terminal for our flight to Hurghada, which left at 6 am.

We arrived at Waves Hotel around 8am, which we had booked and paid for 5 nights. It seemed as though we were a burden to the hotel staff and short of giving a tip just to get some information about our room we wouldn’t have known what to do. Long story short they didn’t have our reservation, then they did, then they “lost” it and needed us to pay again because they never received payment. We were not informed of this last part until 1pm (check in time). We managed to get a refund from the online site and found another hotel, which ripped us off too, but after 30+ hours of sleep deprivation we didn’t care. Even the guy at Burger King, BURGER KING, tried to charge us almost twice the price, and things are labeled! We were just about to buy a flight out of Egypt but the next couple days were significantly better. We stayed at the Golden Rose Hotel, which had an extremely helpful and friendly staff who taught us some Arabic.

We’re glad we stuck around because some of the nicest people we have met thus far have been in Egypt. It is a bizarre spectrum the Egyptian people make up from the most hospitable person who would walk you to the ends of the Earth to help you find what you need to the money sucking, rip you off street vendor who could care less. Unfortunately as a foreigner, you seem to encounter the latter more often; however, the others you met defiantly make up for it. We meet a couple other Americans on the boat. One was studying Arabic in Hurghada for a couple of months and helped us around the city, helped us with Arabic, and invited us over to his house for a home cooked meal. We are so thankful we met him, because he gave us a completely different perspective on Egypt.

So about the diving, Deep-Divers.com is a great dive shop. We only did 8 dives in four days because our dive times were 60+ minutes each, with our longest dive being 74minutes. We saw a little bit of everything underwater from nudibranchs to Clown Fish to even a Crocodile Fish. The vast number of marine life kind of makes the Caribbean look like the Wal-mart fish section. Everything was so vibrant and healthy with schools everywhere. We didn’t get to see any dolphins or rays underwater; however, dolphins would periodically swim near the boat. Jenny’s favorite part was the cleaning stations, those fish had their work cut out for them! The dive days were long with the boat departing around 9am and returning to port at 5pm, but we already miss the water and will come back to the Red Sea one day. Now we’re off to explore the Valley of the Kings and the Temple of Karnack in Luxor!