Consequently, to make the most of the last few days, we hopped on the shuttle bus to take us into Sharm-el-Sheikh after breakfast. This port, at the southern tip of the Sinai, juts out sort of midway across the Red Sea between the Egyptian mainland and the Saudi Arabian Coast.
Well, other than having the potential of being quite a nice beach resort, this is not a place I would rush back to. I must admit our experience was limited to what we saw through the bus windows on the way to the Duty Free (and Bargain Free) tourist zone, and the Duty Free Zone itself.
One gets the feeling of one of those small Natal South Coast resorts on a larger scale – cheap shops with gaudy beach stuff like buckets and spades and belly boards and rubbishy trinkets made in the East, a few shops printing slogans on T shirts while you wait, shops selling junk watches and so on.
There was a Hard Rock Café, Pizzaland, KFC, McDonalds, every fast food chain you could dream up, as well as an Irish Pub, and Fish and Chip joints. Along the main walking street in the Duty Free Zone was a mile of “Bedouin Eateries” – a string of carpeted, cushioned and canopied road islands that must buzz at nights with tourists, I suppose, but wandering around at 10:30 in the bright daylight of morning as we were, it was a creepy, dirty place, no resemblance at all to the Bedouin camp at which we had dinner in the desert near Dubai (which I suppose in turn also has no resemblance to a real camp as well …)
Prices were outrageous, shopkeepers were rude or at the best surly and unwelcoming (on one tourist shop window was a bold sign “NO to contempt religions! We worship Allah!”) I have the greatest respect for all religions and beliefs but this made me feel very unwelcome indeed.
What little we saw of the beaches looked great – like Mauritius, but much narrower – and the sea is clear and turquoise, very pretty. I think as long as you avoid the town, and stay at your resort, it would be quite a nice holiday. But I think I will stick with Mauritius – or even Umhlanga for that matter!
That night we set sail, again with the Silver Shadow with us – and headed up the Red Sea towards the Suez.
I was up at dawn’s crack to monitor the progress. We had dropped anchor at 2 am in the anchorage just before the start of the canal – very noisy that was too I can tell you, with us being at the front of the ship – and all
around us in the morning light I could see scores of ships waiting for their individual pilots to be taken on and for the transit to start. The whole queue of about 35 of us set off at around 6:30 am, all at a steady pace of about 11 kph or 8 knots – I stand to be corrected on these numbers, they are from memory – the slow speeds are so the wake does not erode the canal banks. We were about 12th in the line, the Silver Shadow right behind us. Here you see us starting off, and the small image you see left of our wake is the Silver ShadowThe canal is narrow, and two ships cannot pass, except in certain designated passing points (lakes off to the side) – so what happens is that convoys set off from either end (North and South), and they are timed so that when the sole North bound convoy reaches the first of the two daily South bound convoys, it has already stopped at one of the passing points (Great Bitter Lakes) and we could serenely pass it by.
It takes 11 hours in all to get from the Southern end to the exit into the Med, so it was almost supper time by then. All along the way, specialist pilots are loaded and unloaded for each section, one for each ship – so there must be several hundred of them in all to handle the three daily convoys. This picture shows us leaving the canal behind the queue of 11 ships in front of us.The following day at sea (our last full day on the ship) allowed us to relax, partake in our daily activities and that evening we were called to cash in our “prize points”. Now this is something to see!
Activities take place all day at various places on the ship – bridge, golf putting, shuffleboard, trivia quizzes and many more. I took part daily in the putting, and Rose and I both took part in the Team Trivia. Winners (top three) get prize point cards –and I didn’t have a clue until the final day that these could be cashed in for various items. We ended up with 72 points, enough to get a T Shirt! Other items were things like wine openers, bottle stoppers, and silly little trinkets like that, nice mementoes but of almost zero intrinsic value.
The most surreal thing I saw on the trip was multi-millionaires from all counties – people
paying up to $10,000 per person for the trip, queuing eagerly for a cheap worthless trinket. What is it that motivates this type of behavior – the thrill of getting something (anything) for nothing? The thrill of being recognized as a winner? It astounded me. Some of these people could probably buy SA Breweries or Old Mutual or both – what on earth do they want with a $10 T-shirt or a $5 corkscrew – why on earth stand in a queue for one?And before you ask - yes, of course I was there in the queue as well!
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