So, it’s been nearly one week since I returned from my vacation and I promised to write a little something about it. Now I’ve got a little spare time on my hands so here it goes:
I stayed at the beautiful Reemyvera Hotel, which is a 4star hotel.
Rooms: spacious as single rooms are double-bed rooms (the hotel online has double bed rooms)
Food: buffet with Fish, beef, chicken, rice, potatoes, etc – very tasty, altough it’s hard to get accustomed to rice as side dish every day…
Beach: lovely, especially as the beach is only 1 minute from the room and there a comfortable beach couches along with sun shades and a lovely beach bar
Other guests:Mostly russian, young and attractive :wink:, altough some noisy kids and (almost) alcoholics round up the picture…
People:All the guys serving you (cleaning the rooms, getting your beach towels, serving you drinks) are very friendly and make you feel right at home
So, what else did I see besides the hotel? Did a day trip to Luxor visiting the Valley of Kings, the Karnak temple and Hatschepsut temple. After a 4,5h bus ride we arrived at the Valley of Kings and it was a really hot day, so the air in the tombs wasn’t all that good…it was really interesting to see all the art on the walls and ceilings…the only let-down: the whole thing is really overrun with tourists (d’oh!) and the total time we spent there was only around an hour while visiting three tombs – all emptied by tomb raiders years ago…
After the Valley of Kings we visited alabaster stone factory (can you say: buy, buy, buy something)…before we continued our trip to the Hatschepsut temple which is really a monumental thing…carved half out of a massive rock, it was one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve seen yet. After having the chance to take pictures and stroll around a little we moved on to the shore of the river Nile to make a little boat trip. We rode on the Nile for about 15minutes until we arrived at the Luxor Hilton where we had lunch.
After lunch it was back to the bus again and off to the Karnak Temple…which is one of the biggest things I’ve ever seen…obelisks, pillars about 10m high, and all sorts of different figures of different Pharaohs…a really interesting and big site.
After that (it was already late afternoon) we headed of to a “Papyrus museum” (can you say: buy, buy, buy please)…to make our guide happy (and not get him fired) we all had a little look around before getting back on the bus…
Then it was of to the staging area where we waited almost an hour before the convoy of around 80 busses began it’s return to Hurghada – escorted by Army and police. I’ve never ever seen such a huge amount of police (with automated weapons – tommy gun) and military (with automated weapons – Kalashnikov aka AK-47). All crossings, bridges and small streets along our way were blocked by police/military until the convoy had passed – just like it was in the morning…I don’t even wanna know how much bakshisch the travel agencies are paying for that…we came back to the hotel at 11pm…a really long, but interesting day…
We discarded the idea of doing another day trip to Kairo as the would have picked you up at 1am and you would have returned at 11pm (if not later) in the evening…after doing a 8-9h drive to Kairo and a 8-9h drive from Kairo – you can calc for yourself how much time would have been left to visits the pyramids and the egyptian museum…
We spent the remaining week totally relaxing at the beach all day…only downside of the whole vacation was the flight (we booked Stuttgart – Hurghada, Hurghada – Stuttgart and flew Stuttgart – Duesseldorf – Hurghada, Hurghada – Duesseldorf – Stuttgart) which was a real bugger…nontheless it was really great to have a vacation (my first since greece 2002)…
Now I can add “Africa” to the “continents visited”…
(I’ll try to post some photos asap…)
