Saturday, June 20, 2009

Egypt Travelogue-6: Sight seeing trips: Day 3-Sharm-el-Shiekh: Naama Bay


Sharm-el-Shiekh is our destination for the next seven days

We arrived at the bus stop in Sharm-el-Shiekh at around 7:00 AM in the morning. We took a taxi for 30 EGP(we knew it was a bit expensive) to reach our resort, situated in Naama Bay. After some inital hitch, we checked in at 8 AM. We had reservation for 7 days stay in the resort. The resort was quite nice with all amenities.. TV, telephone, air conditioner, kitchenette to name a few. The room was clean and house keeping personnel cleaned the room almost daily and changed the beds every alternate days. It was situated in a very posh area of Sharm-el-Shiekh called the naama bay where some of the famous diving schools are located. The whole area is nested with a lot of resorts and clubs.
Each resort has it own private beach(around 200 to 300 metres stretch for each resort or sometimes more than one resort shares the small stretch of the beach)Our resort was around 200 metres from the beach. We had to take a pass for the beach from the manager at the resort(thankfully, entry to the beach was free of cost) and provide the pass to an attendant at the entrance to the beach. Once you enter the beach, you can just walk/swim/snorkel the whole stretch. There are some man made partitions, but you are free to go wherever you want.
In the evening we went to the ticket office to get the tickets back to Cairo. The gentleman at the counter was very friendly and helpful. We emquired him about services to Mt Catherines, but came to know that we need to arrange for the trip through tour operators only, especially the tourists
To be continued...