Gebel Umm Murkhat

After a 4 hour flight from Frankfurt, we landed in Hurghada, Egypt, on the Western coast of the Red Sea. There were some cool sights below, including the Adriatic coast, the Greek island Crete, and the Nile river delta. It's pretty amazing to see the landscape change from desolate to lush greens, and shows just why the river was so important to the earliest civilizations.

The airport is quite large and new, but we were the only plane in sight at arrival. Even with plenty of jet bridges available, we deplaned far from any of them and took a bus to the terminal. Inside was equally quiet. The first stop was to get visas which cost $25 each - when we walked up to the stand, the collector shouted "cash! money!" once we handed him our passports. The remaining part of the airport that we walked through was the same, eerily quiet, but employees were still eager to get everyone out of the building.

We had booked a desert quad tour to fill the time until we would get picked up for our liveaboard, but even for the quad tour, we were looking at an hour wait. Not having eaten since breakfast, we started to get hungry. We didn't see any options in the arrival terminal, so Nico decided to try our luck for food in the departures terminal. However, he was declined entry because he didn't have a boarding pass for a departing flight (security is pretty tight). Luckily, we had a small portion of a pretzel left to hold us over.

We finally got on our way for the quad tour after our guide, Ahmed, showed us to our bus. Admittedly, there was a bit of trepidation on whether this was a legit tour because the only branding we saw was on the shirt that he was wearing. Adding to the anxiety, we were told at the airport exit that a police officer would have to ride along with us for safety purposes. However, Ahmed spoke to them and eventually returned to tell us that it wasn't necessary since we wouldn't be going far.

We were still hungry, so we asked Ahmed if we could stop somewhere to get something quick to eat. He offered to pick up some beans and falafel, a typical quick Egyptian lunch. We stopped at a small shop off a busy street and were brought 4 small pitas: filled with beans in 2, falafel and veggies in 1, and another with potato chips and veggies. The beans pita was chased with pickled veggies which was pretty good. We didn't care much for the potato one, but the falafel pita had a lot of great flavor.

After quick (unnecessary) instruction on how to ride a quad and picking up (very much necessary) bandanas to cover our faces, we were off riding through the Eastern Arabian desert. Unlike the Sahara, there are more rocks than fine grain sand. We started seeing the Sinai mountain range appearing in the distance which was unexpected but pretty cool given the jagged features and nice backdrop behind the sandy air. It felt serene to cruise through this landscape with no life, just sand, for miles in any direction.

After 22 km of riding through the desert, and some odd photo poses for the guide (see photos), we arrived at a Bedoin village. Bedoins live a rudimentary lifestyle in the desert. We skipped the camel riding and sheesha smoking since we were limited on time and not particularly interested, but opted for some tea and a quick scramble up one of the nearby hills.

We cruised back and got dropped off at the airport for our shuttle to take us 200 km South to Port Ghalib, the departure point for our liveaboard. While writing this just after the sun set, on a remote stretch of road, the van just came to a screeching halt due to a pack of camels crossing.

Note to our eager readers that the next post may be several days out since we don't expect to have WiFi on the boat.Read more