El Andalous - Boat Trips

On a Boat in Sahl Hasheesh

So, straight after Luxor, I went to Cairo to go to El Alamein/Marsa Matrouh/Siwa. And the day after I returned from the Siwa trip, I had to be up again early in the morning to go on a boat trip from Hurghada. It was exhausting!

It was the trip with the Lotus Ladies that I’ve done on many occasions before (only we go to different snorkeling sites each time), but it was the only one this year (2019) that I was able to attend. I’m not even sure that they ran this summer. For that reason, I didn’t want to miss it.

I’d persuaded Hilde to try it, so we got the taxi together into Hurghada. We went into the wrong place at first because I’d forgotten exactly where the diving centre was, but the man blocking our entry to where we wanted to go pointed us next door.

There was a good number of us and it was nice to catch up with people and see familiar faces. I was also pleased that there were a fair few Germans on this occasion, so Hilde could feel right at home.

Anyway, we went out and we did some good snorkeling; the sea is a lovely temperature in Oct/Nov. It’s always a bit difficult when you’re snorkeling to know when to go back to the boat as there’s no set time, so I try to keep an eye on the boat. However, to my horror, as I looked round to see where the boat was, it was sailing off in the distance!

I decided not to panic and swam up to another boat, thinking I could hitch a lift. After all, a dead tourist isn’t want the Egyptian authorities want! But, as I swam up to it, it too started to pull away. As I looked round, I realized that all the boats were setting off.

At this point, I thought it best to act with a little more urgency, so I started shouting out the name of our boat, which I could still see, and swimming towards it. It wasn’t easy to shout through my snorkeling mask, so I ripped it off and yelled. Another boat saw me and told me not to worry but carried on sailing away. I swam after it, but they told me to swim back (I guess it would be hard to find me in the middle of the sea!). I swam back and found that there were two others from my boat also there, at which point I relaxed.

Needless to say, we all got back on, although I lost a bit of my snorkel in the drama (probably as I threw off my snorkel to shout), so I had to borrow a snorkel for the rest of the day.

A week or so later, I did another boat trip, but this time it was just a small group of six of us, all owners in El Andalous, and we stayed within Sahl Hasheesh. We hired a small glass-bottomed boat for four hours and just went round locally to various reefs to snorkel and also just to laze about on the deck.

They laid on snacks for us, which included fruit, some of which we’d never seen before. Anyway, we all had a taste of one of them and it was an excruciating experience. It tasted nice on the first bite but then felt like you’d got a load of talcum powder in your mouth. It turned out that it was a Persimmon, which is tasty when ripe, but not so great when not ripe. We decided one of the other fruits was a type of date.

Anyway, despite everything, both days were great fun and I wish I could have done more!