*insert witty tagline here*
*cue the music*
Having been inspired by a 10km race we saw in Sutton Park yesterday, Hanne and I finally got around to going for a run there! We even found a nice little circuit to follow. Once we’re in a bit better shape we’ll make it a bit longer.
It’s been a while since I went skiing with Nikolai in the Italian resort of Sauze D’Oulx (the accepted pronunciation of which, we eventually discovered, is something like “Sawzh Dooks” or sometimes “Sawzeh Ducks”), so it’s about time I wrote a little more about our trip.
We arrived the week before the 2006 Winter Olympics kicked off. Everywhere we went was buzzing with activity as various officials ran to-and-fro, carrying out last-minute checks and preparations (and giving the airport a fresh coat of paint). Once the bus got us from Turin airport up into the mountains everything seemed a bit more peaceful. I guess most of the tourists had decided the week would be so busy prior to the olympics.
Normally Sauze is part of what’s known as la vialattea (the “Milky Way”), a massive ski area spanning several mountains and ski resorts. Unfortunately, since several of the resorts were hosting Olympic events, much of this area was closed. Sauze D’Oulx was hosting the freestyle skiing event, however this was on a seperate slope from the main ones so our skiing wasn’t affected too much in that area.
On the Monday and Tuesday of our week there we were also graced by the presence of Top of the Pops, who happened to be filming their latest show in the resort that very week. Bands on the show that week included West Life, Craig David, and Nizlopi (who we actually had dinner in the same restaurant as that same night, although we didn’t realise who they were until later on). Well, it would have been exciting if we were about 10 years younger and female.
So anyway after a good week of skiing we returned to England the day after the Olympic opening ceremony. Photos are in the gallery! Oh yeah! Looking at that gallery reminded me of one other thing. We got to the airport on our way out to Italy when I decided I should check to make sure I have a spare video tape, in order to record our adventure. So I got the camera out and turned it on, and NOTHING HAPPENED! Argh! So I wasn’t able to record anything all week. I had a look on the Internet when I got back, and it turns out that Sony had produced a faulty batch of C.C.D.s around the time I bought the camera. Thankfully they were all too happy to repair the camera free of charge! Yay 4 Sony! Once again they have shown me that, despite some mistakes in the past, they are a pretty decent company (then again, they’re also a VERY large company, so I doubt this feeling of goodwill would apply to every division…). So I now have my camera back and in working order.
All’s well that ends well!
And so, after 7 days of sun, sand, sea and stuff, it was time to head on back to the (undoubtedly) freezing, rainy, dull grey weather of pre-springtime England. A word of warning to any would-be travellers to Sharm: if you think the arrivals area of the airport was hectic, you haven’t seen anything yet! First, when our bus pulled up to the airport, it was swarmed by locals desperate to unload our bags (and thus demand money for their services), except some of them don’t even bother unloading the bags before they demand some money, and even those that do unload a bag for you usually don’t pay attention to which bag you’re actually pointing at and just hand you the first bag they can grab (and still expect something for it). Because there were groups heading back to all different areas of the UK on various different flights the bus had to drop us off at the airport a good 4 hours before our flight to BHX, giving us lots of time to stew in the waiting area with several hundred other passengers in similar predicaments. There’s only one place to get water / snacks in the airport, and this monopoly means they’re able to charge ridiculous prices for everything, even by western-prices. For example, a small bottle of water cost nearly £2! And, unlike any other shop in Egypt, you can’t even haggle the price down… not that i’m very good at haggling anyway, as I discovered over the course of the holiday (details of which shall remain unpublished!). Let’s just say that Hanne and I definitely don’t take after our mothers in that department.
Eventually our flight boarded, we returned safely home (where it was indeed around freezing temperature), and as quickly as it had begun our holiday was all over.
Now I have but a few days left to take as holiday between now and the end of December. It’s gonna be a long summer…
Interesting side note for those of you not familiar with Mr. T. E. Lawrence: he was actually born in the same Welsh village in which my grandparents live(d)! When my brother and I were younger we even attended an “adventure camp” type thing, organised by the local church, based in the very same building in which he was born (well, maybe it was just the same site as the original building. I guess it’s probably been renovated a few times over the past century).
Today we got up bright and early to ride the camels of the 21st century (i.e. quadbikes) and head off into the desert towards the Sinai mountains! After wrapping up in our durka-durka head gear to protect us from flying sand, we mounted our trusty steeds and set off. The proceedings were quite restrained, despite the best efforts by some of us to leave the long caravan of bikes and do some real off-roading, but because the whole area is a protected national park we had to stay under control at all times. We eventually reached a blue lagoon where we stopped for a nice swim to cool off, a friendly game of desert football, followed by delicious BBQ lunch. We then got back on our bikes and drove back to the base-camp, where a bus took us back to our hotel in the early hours of the afternoon, giving us a few hours to relax on the beach and enjoy some more snorkeling.
Following our last dinner at the hotel at the peaceful sea-front Grille restaurant, we took a walk along the beach and down the jetty, where we saw several lion fish for the first time in the holiday! I’d been watching out for these all week, but hadn’t seen any until now. The “feathers” on these beautiful fish are highly poisonous. They probably wouldn’t kill a normal, healthy person but it would be a very nasty experience. Apparently the fastest way to get the poison out is to dip the affected area under very hot water for around 90 minutes. Yikes! But it was nice to see them again before we left (I used to see them all over the place while snorkeling here when I was young).
And so ended our last full day of holiday in Egypt.
After the excitement of the past couple of days we decided to have a restful day today. After a long lie in bed and a light breakfast we made our way over one of the hotel’s many pools where we managed to find a couple of empty sunbeds (and an umbrella to give me some shade. I’m still quite burnt in a couple of places) and there we stayed for most of the day, dipping in the pool every now and then. After dinner we sat at the shisha bar, watched some more belly dancing and filled out some postcards (a few of which I subsequently ended up sending to the wrong addresses. damn!), and just generally took it easy.
Darling, it’s better,
Down where it’s wetter,
Under da sea!
Today we went on our Scuba diving course. Because it was such a beautiful day and we had a fairly small group, after a briefing on the various hand signals and a runthrough of the equipment the instructors took us straight on to the beach and in to the sea. We spent the first 20 minutes in shallow water, getting used to breathing pressurised air (a very strange sensation at first), and practicing a few techniques like what to do if the regulator comes out while we’re down under. Unfortunately Hanne couldn’t get used to the whole thing, so she decided to retire to the beach and not hold us back. The rest of us then proceeded into deeper water, to swim around the reef a few meters futher down. We got down to around 9m under and had a good swim around the rocks, but the sealife was nowhere near as abundant nor varied as at Ras Mohamed, nor even as at the reef next to our hotel. But it was still a great experience. I definitely want to get scuba certification before the next time I come here, in order to be able to “dive straight in” (nyuck nyuck nyuck).
In the evening Hanne and I took a taxi over to Naama Bay, which is the centre of all nightlife in the area now. Western influence is more apparent than ever here. Recently opened in the area is a KFC, McDonalds, Pizza Hut and even a Hard Rock Cafe. The point was driven home as we were perusing a local gift shop, which had some arabic music playing out of speakers placed around the building, when all of a sudden the song stopped and Trick Daddy - Let’s Go (a rather raucous rap song) started blaring out at full volume. lol. So we continued down the beachfront, stopping at a restaurant for some dessert and to watch a belly-dancing show, before heading back to the hotel.
… er… except this time I’m referring to the sea, rather than the sky.
Today was our excursion to the Ras Mohamed national park. The captain and his crew were great fun and very informative as we swam around the reefs, pointing out varieties of fish, coral, and other sea-life that we might not otherwise have noticed. It was just like swimming around in those giant fish tanks at aquariums. On the journey back to the port after the day was through we came across a pod of dolphins. Unfortunately I can’t remember what species the crew told us the dolphins were (possibly spinner dolphins?). We also went past a MASSIVE (probably about 1.5m in length) napoleon fish (AKA a humphead wrasse) which had come to the surface for some reason or another. It came and went too quickly for me to get a photo, though.
After dinner we spent the evening wandering around the stalls lining the street near the hotel, fending off the local’s attempts to get us in to their shops (”come, sign my guest book!”, “have some tea!”, “I give you 20 camels for your wife!”, etc… I was almost tempted by that last one. j/k ;-)).
What a great day!
Obviously even sunscreen of S.P.F. 15 isn’t enough to protect my pasty-white English self. I’m quite badly burnt in several random places, where I didn’t layer the cream on quite enough. Great. So I spent the whole day reading under the protective shade of the umbrella, while Hanne was getting nice and brown. Bah! Not fair.
Dinner was a lot better than the usual generic stuff, tonight. They put out an “oriental” (i.e. middle eastern) buffet, with chefs cooking chicken, shawarma and kofta kebabs, with salad, pita bread, and various sauces. Yum yum yum. The evening entertainment was also an improvement, with various styles of “traditional” dancing. That guy in the first picture was spinning constantly for at least 10 minutes, balancing up to 6 of those disc things on him as he went. Neat party trick!
There’s just not enough time in a day anymore, so in order to get these day-by-day holiday accounts finished this year I’ll make ‘em a bit less detailed.
Today we sorted out our which excursions we go on while we’re here in Egypt. Thomson has quite a few different things on offer, so in the end we narrowed our choices down to:a boat trip to the protected reefs of the Ras Mohamed national park, a one-day scuba diving lesson, and a quad-bike excursion into the desert followed by a BBQ next to a “blue lagoon”. Yehaw.
Once we had all that sorted we decided to head out and buy a pair of masks and snorkels. Although you can rent them at the hotel, it’ll definitely be cheaper in the long run to buy these now. Once these had been acquired we headed on down to the hotel’s beach, which has a jetty running out over the reef so you can jump right in to do some fish-watching! People aren’t supposed to swim out to the reef from the beach in case they damage the coral. The reef there is very impressive, with a huge number and variety of fish swimming all around. Had I planned a bit more thoughtfully, I would have purchased a waterproof casing for my camera (or even something like this for my videocamera! But maybe that’s a little too Jacques Cousteau / Steve Zissou…) in order to get some great underwater snaps. But I didn’t, so I couldn’t.
The rest of the day was spent sitting on the beach and getting a tan. Except in my case I just got burnt. The next few days are going to be very painful!
Today (well, March 9th… I’ll be typing these holiday entries in the future and then backdating them to the original date :-P) Hanne and I set out on our first “real” holiday! By that I mean just the two of us on our own, for a week of swimming with the fishes and getting a tan on the beach in the exotic resort of Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt! My family and a bunch of friends used to visit this resort many years ago (circa 1989), before it was even a popular resort. I have many fond memories from those days, of barbeques and playing with friends in the open deserts, and snorkeling around the beautiful untouched reefs. Obviously a lot of things have changed over the past 17 years, and Sharm is no exception. Over the past couple of years in particular tourism to Sharm has exploded (twisted side note: last July tourism was literally exploding in Sharm…) and so construction and modernisation is rife.
Our journey started early this morning, heading over to Birmingham International for our direct flight to Sharm. It’s a 5 hour flight from Birmingham to Sharm, so I was eager to pick up a few books for the journey and the week ahead. I ended up buying Stephen King’s latest novel Cell (horror story in which the majority of the human population go insane as the result of a “pulse” transmitted by mobile phone), as well as Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell (interesting commentary regarding the phenomenon by which we are able to make snap decisions instinctively and almost instantaneously, through the power of our unconciousness). Foolish me. Had I planned in advance I could have saved a fair few squid buying from Amazon instead of at the airport, but there’s no point in crying over spilt milk, I suppose.
Although our departure was on time, we still had to circle around Sharm for almost 45 minutes as there had been an air show at the airport earlier in the day and so all inbound flights had to wait until everything had been cleared away. Bah. As the plane finally descended through the evening haze and into Sharm’s military airport we caught our first glimpse of the Sinai mountains, standing majestically on the edge of the Red Sea as they have done even since the time Moses made his way to the top of Mount Sinai to have his word with God (y’know… that whole 10 commandments thing). I guess there had been a bit of a storm during the day, as the weather was very hazy and it was disappointingly cold as we climbed off the aircraft (although still much warmer than the weather we left in England!).
Once we managed to navigate our way through the craziness that is Sharm’s airport we eventually managed to find the bus to take us to our hotel. The bus driver took our bags to load them on to the bus, but not before cheekily holding out his hand (in which held a £1 coin). And thus we had our first lesson in tipping in Sharm (rather, our first lesson in when the workers EXPECT to be tipped, which basically is always). Our hotel, the Reef Oasis, was a short 15km journey from the airport. (side note: it was only after we arrived at the hotel that I found a sign advertising the hotel’s website. All my previous Googlings had only found reviews from previous guests. These commentaries are actually of more use than the actual website anyway, which seems to be devoid of any real information!) As we checked in to the hotel we were informed that our room had been upgraded from a standard double to one with a sea-view! Score!
By this time it was approaching dinner time, so we decided to head on over to the main restaurant to sample the cuisine. This was to be the most disappointing aspect of the holiday. That’s not to say it was TERRIBLE. As it is an all-inclusive hotel the restaurants have to cook for everyone, so you can’t expect gourmet cuisine to be ready 24/7. But the stuff they did have (pasta, chicken, pizza, etc) was acceptable enough. After dinner we did a bit of exploring before settling down in one of the bars to drink tea, enjoy some shisha (disclaimer: just because I enjoy shisha does not mean I condone smoking. And I cannot wait until next April! ;-)) and watch some of the many Italians and Russians (who dominate the guest population here) dance on a nearby stage. And so ended our first day.
PS The photo gallery for this holiday is here.
