Coming Home from Hurghada

If you have been doing a lot of diving, it is  essential to spend 24 hours on land not diving before you fly. Normally liveaboards end with a boring day in port but on this occasion, because the boat was heading out again the same day with a new set of divers, when we returned to port, we were sent to the Marriott Hurghada

for the night with full board and late check out – not really a hardship.

Our bedroom had large comfortable beds,

 

the view from the balcony was quite nice

and the balcony also made a good drying area for our wet equipment.

This part of town has a lot of abandoned

building sites and there was one adjacent to the hotel – apparently (if you believe the advertising) it was going to be a block of luxury apartments. It takes a lot of imagination and forgiveness to regard Hurghada as a picturesque town.

The shops sell designer goods at ludicrously cheap prices. This “genuine” Hermes bag

cost only £30 and a “genuine” Prada was not

much more.

One thing the town does offer however is a

Big Mac Delivery service – something we

have never seen anywhere else.

The flight home was easy on a 757 with more

seats than passengers and so 13 hours after leaving the hotel, I opened my front door to a warm house (our neighbour had put the heating on) with only 12 days to wait until we set of to Norway.

Views about The Brothers Itinerary

I am glad I have dived The Brothers although I do not think it was as much fun overall as other dives I have done. The Brothers suffers from its popularity, its small size and slightly unpredictable weather. Never-the-less, diving there was interesting but the diving elsewhere was very good and this unplanned change made a welcome variation to the scheduled itinerary. I suspect that others in the group agreed with this since there was no opposition to the idea of moving on after we had done nine dives at The Brothers.

There are itineraries on offer (such as “Simply The Best”) which combine The Brothers, Daedalus and Elphenstone and these might be more interesting.

Never-the-less, a good week in great company and I enjoyed diving with my buddies (Tony and Pat) and sharing a room with Tim.