Fun In Marsa Alam

We’ve just returned from a fortnight’s holiday in Marsa Alam and what a cracking holiday it was too!

The flights were a bit crap though. Five and a half hours with no entertainment and food you had to pay through the nose for, it ranks as one of the poorest flights I’ve been on, and I’ve flown with Easyjet!

But when we arrived we flew through customs and got to the hotel quickly and after a really efficient check in process we were in our room within minutes. The room was quite large with a king bed and two singles and a good sized bathroom with shower. Our room overlooked the largest of the two pools and had a good view of the mountains in the distance, it’s just a shame the sunset always happened behind a palm tree!

We didn’t do much for the first couple of days, just sat on the (windy) beach with a book enjoying the sunshine. We couldn’t go into the sea directly though as there is a reef right next to the beach, so the only way to get into the water is to go off the jetty. No chance of quickly walking in to cool off unfortunately!

While we were there we booked a couple of trips, one to go out snorkelling and another to head into the desert where we had a camel ride (not to anywhere exciting, just up and down a strip of sand) and had the chance to drive some quad bikes through the dunes. We looked quite cool in our sunglasses and our faces wrapped in scarves to keep the dust out. We had dinner while watching a ‘traditional dance show’ (yes as dull as it sounds) and then got to watch the sunset from a nice high peak before heading back in the dark to our hotel.

We got a couple of dives in although as we hadn’t done it for a while we had to do a refresher dive just to prove that we could do it and so had to go through our basic skills again. For some reason we both struggled with our air on one dive each and ended up buddy breathing with the instructor for the latter stages of the dive.

I’ll add some photos to the galleries page as soon as I get a chance.