Hurghada - No I Am Not Clearing My Throat.

Okay, so the kids have 2 (yes, 2) weeks off for Spring Break. We wanted to go somewhere for at least one of the weeks but one of Kiki's friends from home is visiting for one week so we needed to be back for her arrival on Easter. The kids wanted to go somewhere warm, I wanted to go somewhere both warm and with interesting sights and Chizz wanted to go somewhere that wouldn't cost us an arm and a leg. Mostly the kids and I won. So in order to get any warmth, you need to go south of London quite a bit. We dismissed Portugal (already been there), Spain (just been there), the Canary Islands (really couldn't guarantee the warmth), Greece (we are going to do that later). So what did we come up with? Another clue below:




Sense some kind of theme in our vacations recently? Yes, we went to Egypt for the second time in 3 weeks. Now here is our reasoning. First, when we made our plans for Spring Break, we weren't quite sure whether the swim team was going to take any JV boys on the trip to Cairo. We knew that Egypt was something that would be interesting to the whole family, it met all the other criteria - warm, interesting, fairly cheap. And, I mean, Chizz and I weren't going to be going to Cairo. Only the kids were and we weren't sure whether Snake's team would be going. Well in fact they ended up just taking one JV boy, Snake. And then the parents decided to go. But we still went and we were glad we did.

We ended up going to Hurghada, which is on the Red Sea. It was an old fishing village that was turned into a resort town. It's main, and really, only business is tourism. We went on a short little tour of Hurghada and I asked our guide,(Mohammed 1 - we started numbering our Mohammeds, because it seemed like every other guy there had that name. We suspect they all use the same name tag and just pass it around)about it. Anyway, I asked him what was the other industry besides tourism and he looked at me quite quizzically. He said there is no other industry in Hurghada, just tourism. The boat companies all run snorkeling, diving or fishing trips. The hotels and restaurants all service the industry, the bus companies - all for tourism. Mohammed was proud of Hurghada but realistic about Egypt as well. This photo is of a memorial dedicated
to the people in Hurghada who fought in the altercations between Egypt and Israel. I inquired about the large numbers of unfinished building we saw all around Hurghada. To be fair, on my recent trip to Cairo, I had noticed the same type of thing. In Cairo, I noticed a few buildings that were clearly unfinished but you could tell people were living in the buildings. You saw laundry hanging from the balconies, people inside the windows etc but there were not roofs on top. The buildings were topped with cinder block that had rebarb sticking out of it. Our guide Cairo explained that was because of a tax that was enforced on "completed" buildings. Once the roof went up, the tax was levied - apparently a very steep tax. So to avoid that tax, the buildings never "finished", even though people moved in. In Hurghada what has happened is similar. Apparently, in order to stimulate the economy, the government gave people property. The only stipulation in the land giveaway was that sometime in the 5 years after the new owner took possession, he must start building. If after 5 years, no building has commenced, the land would revert back to the government. So all these people got land, didn't really do anything with it until right before the 5 year time limit expired. Everyone runs around and starts a building, building it enough to ward off repossession of the land and then building stops. Bureaucracy at its best.

After the first day of laying around, we were up for a bit more action so we decided to book one of the many snorkeling trips offered in Hurghada. In their haste to build up Hurghada as a tourist resort, they damaged quite a bit of the coral reef right off the Hurghada beach. As a sad result, most of the snorkeling is done by taking a short boat ride to the coral reef a bit further off. We snorkeled off Giftun Island and we saw some amazing fish. These photos are not retouched, the water is actually about 4 different colors of blue and turquoise. The water so clear, that you could see right down to the reef from the boat and sometimes make out a few fish as well.

In addition to lying around and soaking up the sun (too much sun in Kiki's case!), we managed to do quite a few day trips. As I mentioned in my other recent post on Egypt I really enjoy this part of the world and although I did get to see some of the ancient wonders of the World, ie. the pyramids, the sphinx and cab driving in Cairo city, I was anxious to see more. So we arranged several different tours for different days. Instead of relating it in a very long, long post now, I have decided to break it down over the next few days in little manageable posts or post-its (tee-hee). So stay tuned for more Egyptian adventures (and I promise no more musical clips unless - wait are there any more Egyptian themed ones - perhaps one younger than 20 years old? Nope, I don't think so.).