Sharm: the alternative to the resort

The real trip begins in the dead of night on a Saturday morning, the classic hour when people usually come back from an evening at the club with friends. It's freezing cold and my poor travel companions come to pick me up. We squeeze into Buso's car, maybe more because of the outside temperature than because we don't fit. We arrive at Malpensa sleepy, but perfectly on time and, after taking care of the boarding procedures while trying to spy on possible travel companions in line, and looking enviously at the departure desks for more exotic destinations, we already start to decompress, each beginning to find their own rhythm. We have to board a charter plane (with the exotic name "Blu Panorama". The flight is smooth, the on-board service better than expected, the staff very inexperienced but kind.

Basically, aside from the moment of takeoff when you see a breathtaking panorama with the whole snow-covered Alpine range lit by the lights of dawn, the rest of the trip is spent entirely above a bank of clouds. Only when we reach the coasts of Africa does the sky open up. It's beautiful to head toward an entire continent....I had the feeling that Africa was welcoming me with a warm embrace. Below us the desert, the Nile valley, then the sea and finally the reef off Sharm with beautiful plays of color on the water. The vacation is truly about to begin. As soon as the plane's door opens we understand that we have truly arrived in Paradise; beautiful or not the place, what matters is the outside temperature, what matters is that we're already in tank tops in December...

At the airport we notice our first travel rip-off; in fact we discover that the entry visa costs less than what we tactically bought at Malpensa...well, it doesn't matter much, we'll soon learn to bargain, in fact we'll become the terror of Egypt, never mind the plagues of Moses!!! We are immediately welcomed, as per the script of the most perfect organized trip, by the Settemari staff and we begin to make our first friendships. We finally arrive at Club Aloha, a new and very nice hotel made entirely of little villas in a large garden by the sea. The day is long ahead of us, or rather short, since it gets dark at 4 and so we dive straight into the water. My first attempt to discover the coral reef is a total failure. The mask kindly stolen secretly from my brother is broken. The current picks up and we abandon the historic undertaking to devote ourselves to our first tan.

The first evening we go to old Sharm. The old town with its old market is nothing special. It's a melting pot of shops only for tourists, full of junk of every kind, where everyone tries to drag you inside promising gifts and swearing they don't want to sell, only to let you look at their goods!! After dinner, exhausted, we go to Naama Bay, the Egyptian Las Vegas. Naama is a rather fake place where there are only international clubs and discos, fast food and well-known chains....thank goodness the Egyptians hate Americans...so why build these symbolic places?? Just to please tourists?? Who knows... Total disappointment, I was expecting something more characteristic.

Of course, being enterprising young people, we do our best not to live the village life and in fact to stay as far away from it as possible. Our first outing is to RAM SUL SID, which actually isn't called that, but I've never understood the real name. We try to get into a beach that Andrea already knows, passing ourselves off as guests of the Hotel Aida. Spotted right away because of the little yellow bracelet on our wrist, we get bounced just as expected. We look for another beach (a paid one) nearby, El Fanar. The name comes from an old lighthouse that juts out on the promontory. The sea is flat, the weather perfect, the temperature very pleasant. My second attempt at diving begins. The three divers, with wetsuits bought with the "buy 3 pay 2" deal at Decathlon, throw themselves into the water.

I still have some trouble adapting because of my brother's crappy mask and because I'm missing the fundamental element for navigating salty, buoyant waters like those of the Red Sea, namely fins!!! Without even realizing it, a few meters away from me there is paradise, one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. The drop-off in the Red Sea reef plunges all of a sudden, creating a sort of abyss, with turquoise and very deep water rich in rainbow fish of all kinds and myriads of corals. A few years ago I had seen the Great Barrier Reef, which was completely different, poorer, and I was not expecting such a scene at all. I got emotional, I swear. In the afternoon we organized the desert dune-buggy ride for ourselves, along with a camel ride (or rather dromedary ride) and tea in the desert with the Bedouins. The buggy ride is scheduled with quads.

It was beautiful, even if too short!! How many jumps we did... In the evening, once the buggy ride was over, still not satisfied, we go again to old Sharm and have an unforgettable, very Egyptian experience...an evening at the hairdresser/beautician. Buso starts by getting his hair cut far too well, earning quite a few points. Then the hairdresser begins giving him a hair-removal treatment unknown to us, with a spool of white thread. It's practically impossible to describe it, let's just say the guy puts the spool in his mouth and, pulling the thread held between 2 fingers and making a turkey-like movement with his head, very musical and rhythmic, starts plucking out the stray little hairs one by one. The thing is so fascinating that, indeed, one by one, we all end up submitting to the beauty treatment.

Day number 2, the trip to Dahab is planned. We leave with Ibrahim, a taxi driver we met the night before, whom we hired for the whole day for a truly ridiculous sum. The taxi is like all the others, 8 seats, 3 rows of chairs. The journey is calm and pleasant. To get to the famous Dahab beach where the Blue Hole is, a hole with the reef, we have to take a jeep from the center of Dahab. The road is in fact quite a mess. There's even a point where you mustn't lean out because you risk being grazed by the rocks. We set ourselves up on the beach, I feel unwell, the sea doesn't inspire me, so I let the 2 strapping young men go off to discover this hole. This place is very strange, isolated, it seems like a grungy place for flower children and alternative types, a place straight out of "The Beach." At a certain hour we go off to explore the surroundings and the adventure begins.

With flip-flops on my feet, as pretty as they are uncomfortable, "blisters guaranteed" style, I get dragged up and down over the rocks, despite the wind like the Bora at the summits and slippery stones along the way. It's truly worth it because we end up on a beautiful, pristine and wild beach, where a Bedouin is praying at the water's edge facing Mecca. We return to Dahab town in the afternoon and do a bit of shopping. We get ripped off by the tea seller, who fleeces us...but yet another rip-off is lying in wait! We decide in fact to treat ourselves like kings and eat fish in a seaside restaurant with the very Egyptian name "Al Capone," and to treat Ibrahim to dinner too. We eat industrial quantities of excellent fish, calamari, shrimp, grilled vegetables, Arab bread with little sauces, etc., convinced that we'll spend very little given the average Egyptian prices.

When the bill appears, totaling 1,124 of the local money, we nearly have a heart attack. We manage to haggle a bit, but in the end we still pay what we would have paid in Italy.

On the 4th day the group splits up. Hans is involved, to his immense joy, in a day dedicated entirely to volleyball, I mean beach volley!! There's the much-awaited challenge between the neighboring villages and Club Aloha needs its star man. Buso and I couldn't care less and go to Gamilla Beach, past the airport, where one of the coolest hotels in Sharm is, the Coral Bay Resort. It takes us forever to get there, not only because the place is about 35 km from where we are, but above all because the road system of this tourist town is truly mind-boggling; There are no traffic lights, and that could be a brilliant idea, there are just a couple of roundabouts that taxi drivers take the wrong way, when no one is coming, to save time, but above all there are the U-TURNS.

Basically if you want to turn onto a parallel street you have to go all the way down the road and come back to get onto the next street, a bit like the little train of the Andes that zigzags to climb because it doesn't have enough space. So you rack up lots of useless kilometers to actually cover just 100 meters... Gamilla Beach is enchanting, the sea is perfect, it feels like being in the Caribbean. We're in front of Tiran Island, where there's also an immense coral bank with a shipwreck stuck on it, the classic postcard landscape. We spend a day at the beach doing the usual dives. The desperate struggle to find a taxi begins since we have to get back to watch the match of the century and we're already late. Unfortunately we're in an area where taxis are mirages.

On the 5th day we take a little trip to Ras Mohamed. We try to rent a car for the venture, but without success. In fact, outside the hotels, car rental isn't a thing. Basically if you want a car and you trust someone, you stop an Egyptian, ask him if he'll lend you his and you pay him for it. We would even have done it, but we noticed that they were the ones who didn't trust us, in fact they wanted to give us an escort. In the end we fall back on Ibrahim. Ras Mohamed is a splendid nature park not far from Sharm. There are several beaches and natural beauties to admire. The first beach is a bit too much on the windy side for my taste, I save my energy for the second beach, Main Beach. You get there by passing a very beautiful salt lake.

The landscape vaguely reminds me of the Camargue and the mouth of the Rhône, even though in reality we're on the Sinai Peninsula on the side facing classic Egypt. I wouldn't have minded spending the day on horseback here, but I have to make do with the taxi. Once the watery little outing is over we go to explore the surroundings of the park, and finally we force Ibrahim to show us the mangroves, even though the park is already closed and the guards are pissed off because we still haven't left...

The last evening the entertainment guys organize the "desert party" for us, that is, an evening in a sort of disco in the middle of the desert. Basically we find ourselves in a place near the rocks used as a bar and console, decorated with lots of Christmas lights, the same ones we had noticed on our way back from the buggy ride, but which we hadn't realized what they were. The disco in the desert is very atmospheric, even if the music really sucks!! Well, an unforgettable evening in any case, maybe because it was the last one and maybe because of the awareness that the next day we have to go home.

And here we are at the day of departure, the hottest day of course, 32 degrees, not a breath of wind, with the sea perfect and transparent. So the desire to leave is practically zero. After one last swim we go to the airport. We're lucky enough to see the Pyramids from the airplane window.