GO FEEDBACK:Shark attacks have sunk diving breaks at Sharm el-Sheikh but the Egyptian resort has many other strings to its bow, writes LINDA McGRORY
IT WAS JUST as well, we were only looking to escape Arctic Ireland because a Jaws-like drama shut the Red Sea to snorkelling a day before we arrived in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
And it was fortunate, too, that we hadn’t shelled out for snorkelling gear before we left, reasoning we would likely get a much better deal when we arrived.
You might think the Red Sea without snorkelling would be like a trip to Dublin without a run to the Guinness Storehouse. Not so. Sharm el-Sheikh in winter time is heavenly. It has consistently sunny weather – daily temperatures of about 25 degrees – rendered perfect by a complete lack of humidity.
Sharm el-Sheikh sits between the majestic Red Sea and the Sinai Desert – a true holiday oasis. As we had almost certainly crossed snorkelling off our holiday to-do list, what then were our remaining options? Take your pick from camel riding and stargazing in the desert; haggling for pashminas in the markets at Old Sharm; eating delicious seafood and Middle Eastern mezze dishes in the myriad restaurants; swimming in the hotel pool or going online to congratulate yourself on how you, albeit temporarily, escaped the Irish Ice Age.
On first appearances, a holiday in Sharm is like a typical package holiday. The place is, after all, a man-made holiday resort created almost solely for tourism in the 1980s. But just hours into your visit, you will realise you can also eke out a more travel-like experience from the Red Sea resort. (Trivia alert: the Sinai Peninsula is the only part of Egypt that’s not in Africa, it’s in Asia.)
If you’re not all-inclusive and like us opt for BB at your hotel, you’ll want to know early on things like where to buy your daily supply of bottled drinking water. Hello guy in the supermarket across from the hotel. He works a 14-hour day, seven days a week for three months on the trot with just one week off to travel the seven-hour bus journey home to see his fiancée in Cairo. He tells me it was “love at first look” when he met his beloved at a cousin’s wedding. He is working in Sharm to save enough money to get married because it is apparently shameful for an Egyptian man not to be able to adequately provide for his wife and family.
One of the things that will strike you when you dander about Sharm and talk to the predominantly male workforce is that none of them are from there. They are all from Cairo, Luxor, Alexandria or smaller towns surrounding these major Egyptian centres. They invariably have wives and children at home or are saving money towards that aim. A 28-year-old hotel supervisor tells me he earns a basic salary of 500 Egyptian pounds (about €66) a month. A percentage of the hotel’s service charges filters down to workers in his grade, bringing his monthly salary to around 1,200 Egyptian pounds (€157). A hotel room cleaner earns a basic monthly salary of about 350 Egyptian pounds (€46) before tips.
The reason the tourism workers are from outside is because the natives are Bedouin and they traditionally live a nomadic existence in the desert, only coming into the seaside resort to trade, buy goods or give camel rides to visitors.
VISITORS TO SHARM will marvel at the number of languages tourism workers can have a decent go at. They have enough language to keep the Russians, Swedes, English, Germans and French happy. As always, you will fare better if you speak slowly, although this comes with the added hazard of speaking broken English to your husband at the end of your two-week stay.
Now, to the sharks and the snorkelling. The following comes with a serious health warning and is undertaken strictly at your risk. Beach-side hotels running the length of the long coastline, including Naama Bay, Nabq Bay and the appropriately named Shark’s Bay, each have their own stretch of the beach. The waters just off these beaches vary in depth from knee-deep to thigh-deep depending on the amount of coral underfoot. These natural aqua-blue lagoons extend out to a distance of about 20m to 50m from the shore when the coral gives way to the deeper and darker blue sea. Many of the hotels in the area where we stayed, namely Nabq Bay, have opened these shallow natural lagoons to snorkelling but, if anybody breaches the distance rule, jetty watchmen will swiftly blow their whistles or personally wade out to retrieve the wayward fish-seekers.
So, we bought two masks and snorkels in the aforementioned supermarket. They cost the Egyptian equivalent of just over €6 each and were very good quality. I resisted the temptation to play look-out for Jaws while my husband snorkelled. (I’m short-sighted anyway and probably wouldn’t have seen the beast ’til he had a leg o’ Irish in his gnarly gob.)
So, joining the mainly Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians and Swedes in our hotel, we waded to barely over our knees and took a shallow plunge. What followed was nothing short of amazing. Once in the water, and with the comforting knowledge we were barely six paces from the shore, a sea-life wonderland opened before our eyes. We saw – and again I must stress we were barely knee-deep in the water – many beautiful tropical fish including, as later identified by way of a fish chart, the blue-spotted grouper, the emperor angelfish, Red Sea bannerfish and Klunzinger’s wrasse, to name just some. It was like floating in a giant aquarium.
Throughout our stay I daily asked the resort staff “Did you catch the shark yet?” only to be told that no, it or they were still at large. We were in the Egyptian version of Amity Island but sadly we didn’t manage to meet the Red Sea equivalents of angst-ridden policeman Martin Brody or the self-destructive shark hunter, Sam Quint.
Curiously enough, I couldn’t get Quint’s song Spanish Ladies out of my head nor could I resist humming the ominous strains of the 1975 Spielberg blockbuster every time himself dipped a toe to cool off. There was a very nice swimming pool and pool-side bar in our resort but, hey, where’s the drama in a pina colada?
The Sharm shark is going to take a huge toll on this tourism-dependent economy. Many agree it could take years for the snorkelling and scuba-diving industry to return to normal. Short of culling every predator in the Red Sea (if that were even possible or ethical) it will take a very long time for confidence to return. Nevertheless, there is a lot more to Sharm than snorkelling and for this first-time visitor at least, it was “love at first look”.