10 Mar 06 Beach Bums

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!