So Sharm El Sheikh was beautiful! The red sea had crystal clear water and the best reefs I have ever seen in my life. Colorful coral and even more colorful fish. Our boat trip out to Ras Mohamad was lively. We were picked up from our hotel around 8 in the morning and then thrown into the pit of many other travelers waiting their turn to hop on a boat and ride out to the reefs. We ended up on a very nice boat with our guide Nader (Pronounced Naader (or something close to that) and who Sue so lovingly referred to as Ralph) who knew the sea well and told us a lot about the surrounding area.

We all managed to get a little fried on the boat, but it was totally worth it. Unfortunately we didn’t get to snorkel right off of Ras Mohamad because the water was to rough, but we did get to check out some other amazing reefs along the coast in the Red Sea.

Our hotel on the Sea was nice, but seemed to be a little overrun by Russians, not that there is anything wrong with that…, with a handful of other Europeans making debut and charging to the front of the food lines. We found out the second night, for the “French Feast,” that our hotel’s food wasn’t the best and we needed to venture out to find better food. Luckily the old market was right across the street from where we were staying.

The next day: I can only speak for myself since I split up from the group and went SCUBA diving… It was amazing! My dive guide was a bleach blond German version of Adena from the show Absolutely Fabulous! For those of you who are unfamiliar with that show let’s just say that she was a very colorful character and all I could do was laugh at/with her for most of the day…

I saw some amazing coral and fish, but unfortunately didn’t have an underwater camera handy so will just have to remember them… However, here are some of the animals I saw and you can feel free to google them to get an idea.

Box fish, lion fish, Napoleon fish, grouper, giant clams, fan coral, brain coral, anemones, clown fish, angel fish, butterfly fish, parrot fish, scorpion fish, and probably about 200 other species that I couldn’t tell you what they were called. In all, it was beautiful and amazing…

That night we ended the day with some drinks at the beach and then headed across to the old market to have some local food at a restaurant recommended by one of our guides. We all headed to bed fairly early since we had a long drive ahead of us the next day to see St. Catherine’s Monestary near the base of Moses mountain and containing the burning bush!

Our guide for the excursion to St. Cathrine’s Monestary was a young tiny and adorable man named Islam who was very animated and excited to be guiding Americans to the site. (I think most of the people in Egypt were very excited to see Americans, or were at least convincingly feigning to be…) He even informed us that since we were Americans, we were assigned a special security guard to accompany us on the excursion.

Islam gave us another history lesson that was much easier to understand, but I am still not sure if it was his technique or just the fact that it was the second time we had heard about everything. Regardless, it was a fantastic trip! My favorite part, however, was when Sue was snapping pictures of a bush next to the burning bush and then pointed out that there was a fire extinguisher next to it… Oh why couldn’t that have been the burning bush?!!… it would have been so much better!

Anyway, after a short stop at a “ministry of tourism approved shop” and some new jewelry for the girls, we headed to lunch at a sea side restaurant in Dahab where we enjoyed a beautiful view of Saudi Arabia across the gulf of Aqaba during lunch. Following that we headed back to our hotel in Sharm for a final night before we headed to the port of Nuwaybi to catch the ferry to Jordan… Little did we know that a 2 hour car ride and a 1 hour and 30 minute ferry ride would take us all freaking day to get there…