Wednesday 12th May - Egypt or bust

We were up at 5am for a 6am taxi pick up and a 9am flight to Sharm el Sheik. It all went smoothly for which I’m grateful – it was a fairly last minute booking and they hadn’t got us the flight tickets in time, so I’d had to get the agency we’d booked through to arrange a ticket on departure, then run into work on Tuesday in order to print the hotel voucher (or rather have someone print it for me as time was too short to allow logging on!). I’ve been used to the US where you have an e-ticket reference and that’s it. No need for paper tickets, but hey – it was a charter flight so back to the old days!

The flight was fine. We got seats together. The chap next to Stephen was only tiddly as opposed to drunk (he had the munchies big time – the bloke never stopped eating!). The film was good (it was the one we’d heard and been mildly disrupted by the première of in LA!). And it was only a 5 hour flight. Altogether a pretty good flying experience! The crew warned us just before landing that the Egyptians were worried about swine flu so would be taking everyone’s temperature. I’m not sure what they were doing with those folks that had one, but I suspect they might have been on the next flight back home!

When we got into arrivals it was pretty chaotic. There were lots of men in masks thrusting slips of paper in our hands and thermometers in our ears. There was a large queue for something and so we joined it. It turned out to be for visas, as although you don’t need one for Sharm, you do for any trips you make outside the area, so it was good to get one! We flowed through the airport quickly and were on the transfer bus about 45 minutes after landing – then had to wait 45 minutes for another flight to land to pick up another couple of passengers. Just as well we got free transfers with our hotel as the bloke who’d paid 75 quid for the 10 minute journey didn’t look too impressed!!

The hotel is lovely. We were greeted with a glass of Hibiscus tea when we checked in and the room is HUGE! We dropped down for dinner and the restaurant was pretty empty. Not so many people here – but loads of staff! We got very attentive service! Deployment of a little Baksheesh is very important – a little seems to go a long way in making things run smoothly!