Hurghada

So, what do you do when you've just come back from a beach holiday? You go on another beach holiday, of course! The day after we came back from Marsa Matrouh, Chiara and I took the night bus to Hurghada with the girls I lived with in the beginning: Lara, Hamida, Scarlett, Nosheen and Zubda. There were as many mosquitoes as passengers in that bus, but we reached our awesome holiday villa in Hurghada more or less in one piece.

Most of our time in Hurghada was spent going on boat trips in the Red Sea. We were tanning on the deck, enjoying the view, singing along to the cheesy music and being pretty rowdy, but it seemed the crew thought we were a nice change from the hordes of unenthusiastic Russians, and were much more attentive to us. It must be said that we did make up quite an interesting group: seven girls dressed in everything from bikinis to niqabs, representing the seven different countries of Norway, Italy, England, Jamaica, Lebanon, Pakistan and Somalia. Even so, when we walked around Hurghada we hardly attracted any comments or stares, which at least for me is a first in Egypt. I think it’s a long time since I’ve felt that relaxed.

The aim of one of the boat trips was to look for dolphins we could swim with, but we had no such luck that day. However, on another trip we saw dolphins jumping around the boat, so we weren’t too bummed out. We also saw flying fish, which I got extremely excited about, as I’ve only seen them in comic books before. They were so cool, it really seemed as though they were flying above the water.

We stopped once on the sandy island of Giftun and snorkeled and splashed around in the water, and we stopped plenty of times by different coral reefs to snorkel. The water is so clear it’s amazing: you can see straight to the sea floor 20 meters below you. The reefs were beautiful and there was really an abundance of fish in all shapes, colours and sizes. We were in the middle of the sea, but the water was as calm as in a pool – it was absolutely unbelievable. We just played around in the sea, and had a very good time. The crew were all great swimmers, especially one guy whom we only called the Dolphin. I have never seen anyone being able to move that way in the water, to go that deep and keep his breath for so long. He would literally swim down to the sea floor on 12 meters’ depth and just sit down and chill for a while before swimming up to the surface again. Half of the time I was just as amazed by watching the Dolphin swimming as by watching the actual fish. 

To sum it up: we had some really lazy days where we just enjoyed the sea and the sun. It was perfect.

The end of our super relaxing holiday was a bit less relaxing, however. We had to leave for our bus at 7 in the morning, at which point we realized that the caretaker of the villa was not around, and had to call him and get him to hurry over to give us back our deposit. When we reached the bus station we discovered that we had left our tickets behind in the villa, and the poor caretaker had to jump in a taxi and bring them to us. We did get on the bus in time, however. The actual bus journey passed by without any major incidents, and I made friends with the woman sitting next to me. I was extremely proud of myself when I managed to explain to her what my father is doing. You see, he could have chosen a straightforward job, and worked as a teacher or lawyer or engineer or geologist or whatever, but evil as he is he decided to work in a state-owned company which guarantees loans given to foreign companies in order for them to buy Norwegian technology, tools, machines and so on. Now try saying that in Arabic. It is, by the way, an ironic fact of life that whenever someone compliments my Arabic I am unable to understand them.

But back to the unfortunate incidents of that day. When we finally got home after an 11 hour bus journey, Chiara and I had to look for a place to pay our internet bill. We had never seen or heard of this bill until we got a warning that if we didn’t pay by Saturday, our internet would be cut off. As we don’t have Egyptian bank accounts we couldn’t pay online, and were told to go to a specific shop to pay it. When we went there, however, we were told that they couldn’t help us and that we had to go to another shop to pay it, and thus it continued. We were sent from place to place, and were just about to give up when we finally found a shop where we could do it. Relieved we went home and started to make dinner, and then the electric system broke down. All the electricity was gone, there was smoke coming out of the fuse box and it smelt burnt. Luckily we got an electrician to come around after not too long, and after he replaced some of the components in the fuse box everything was working alright again. Oh well, at least I learnt the Arabic word for fuse: maftouH.

It is well known that a picture says more than a thousand words, but I've played it safe and have provided you with plenty of both. Anyway, enjoy the pics from our awesome trip!

Our holiday villa

Me and Nosheen

Lara

Scarlett

Dolphins!

Zubda, Lara, Nosheen and Scarlett

Giftun Island

Chiara

The Doplhin also makes quite a good bird

 

Look how clear the water is!

 

The Dolphin chilling on the bottom of the sea

Eel!

And to top it all off: a video!