Ras Mohammed Park

In the last big hurrah for this vacation, we are spending our day on a snorkeling trip in the waters of the Ras Mohammed National Park. Our travel books all talk about this area being a great place to dive and snorkel, and the weather is sunny and hot, so some time on a boat sounds a whole lot better than staying around a hotel jammed with tourists. We are awake, dressed, and out front by our scheduled pickup time of 8:15am. After a few calls to figure out where our ride was and a bit concerned that we would miss our boat, it finally rolls up at 9:15. In retrospect, this works out in our favor, as sitting out front of the hotel for an hour still ranks higher than sitting in a crowded minibus for an hour.

After a few other stops, we finally get to the port close to 11:00 (the takeaway being that in the future, we should just ask about meeting our group there, as the $5 cab ride would have been an easy trade to have the last 3 hours to ourselves) and board our boat. There are about 13 people in our group, which means the boat isn’t very crowded. However, at least half of them have little, if any, experience in the water, and after being flippered in the face a half dozen times, I make the call to give up swimming with the guide and head off in a completely different direction just to find some space.

We make a total of three stops during the day, and by the third, we are pretty much snorkeled out. The reefs are in great shape, but Ang and I agree that the places we saw in Dahab were even more spectacular, so using that as a baseline, we are a little disappointed. The bikinis and speedos are out in full force though (or at least what shows from under the rolls of flesh), so we have that going for us.

By the time we finish up on the boat and get dropped off at the hotel it is after 5pm. We don’t have the energy to go back into town, so have a nice meal at an Indian restaurant in the hotel and head back up to the room to pack. Tomorrow we return to Cairo, which just doesn’t have a vacation feel to it, so for the most part, we’ve pretty much hit the end of the road.