Mahmoud (the waiter from the night before) was on again at breakfast and ran off to get us OJ when we sat down. It was delicious – freshly squeezed. He also brought Stephen a proper coffee (not Nescafe) so all was well with the morning – for him! I’d decided to have tea and it was Liptons and it was disgusting!!
After a morning of sunning we went up to meet Ahmed for our welcome meeting. He was nice, funny, told us where to go in Sharm, what to avoid, not to engage with the blokes on the streets offering things for free in order to get you into their shops, stick to the Malls…valuable advice - most of which we ignored later!! We booked up a couple of trips – one to Petra and one to Luxor. We couldn’t do Cairo as it clashed with Petra and my thinking was that you can do Cairo from Cyprus if we don’t make it back to here and Petra might not be so easy.
Then we had a lot of fun with the credit card. He swiped it and it didn’t like it. We’d already taken the precaution of telling the card company where we were going to avoid problems, so we phoned them to say – put the transaction through. Not their problem we were told – its his “floor limit” that has been exceeded. We tried again whilst we were on the phone to the bank, and got the same message. It was time to try another card – eventually we found one that worked, being rather reluctant to hand over our debit card – but it was looking like we might have to at one point as we were running out of cards that would run!!
We headed down to Naama Bay in the evening. The taxi dropped us off that the shop of his mate and told us to get his mate to call when we were ready to be collected. Of course we then had to go through the whole ritual of smelling the perfumes and haggling for the perfume (which we didn’t really want but felt obliged to buy) before we could leave. Stephen was suckered into another shop a couple of minutes later by the offer of a free papyrus drawing and this guy was determined that we were going to buy a large papyrus drawing to go with it. It took about 30 minutes and $10 to secure our release with the painting. The guy wasn’t happy as S wasn’t budging on the price. He didn’t give us the free one he’d written our names on in Arabic (before I could stop him) as S refused to give him another $5. I wasn’t happy as it was becoming a little uncomfortable. I would actually have given him the $10 for the free one just to get out the shop!
There were plenty places to eat. Everything from proper Egyptian food to KFC (Kentucky Fried Camel) was available for your delectation. We decided on the Hard Rock Café. You can rely on their burgers being the same no matter where you go! We also were treated to the (male) serving staff giving us a performance of the Electric Slide to something Arabic sounding. Everyone looked baffled, but that’s because most folks looked Briitsh and its not something that’s permeated over from the US to the UK…if they had been doing the Birdie Dance everyone might have got it!!
We had drinks in the Camel Bar watching the world wander by (in incredibly short skirts and tiny tops – whereas I packed in order not to cause offence in a Muslim country!). The taxi home was interesting. The driver drove at breakneck speed in between the speed bumps and was shouting in Arabic at the other taxi drivers (he could have been saying “see you for a coffee in 10 minutes” but Arabic is a fairly aggressive sounding language and it was a little disconcerting!) – all of this to the soundtrack of “I’m a Barbie Girl” played a full volume!!!
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