Rudders at Home

Day 2 – Thursday, November 9, 2006

And we wake up to SUNSHINE!!! And with that I fell in love with Egypt.

Our breakfast was included in our stay, so we got cleaned up (ok, I got
my bikini and the suncream on) and headed to check out what there was
to eat. We sat outside in full sunlight our first morning. Gorgeous.
Buffet, with nice cook making omelettes to order. The first thing our
waiter did was show us a table and ask our names, then introduced
himself. Very nice service.

Once we’d stuffed ourselves, we decided we’d take a little wander
around the hotel – see what there was to see. The first sidewalk we
wandered down led us to the Nile! We had a good look around and took
some pictures, and then headed back up. We then followed another path
which led us back down to the Nile and we decided to follow the jogging
path around the island for a bit.

The rest of the day was spent doing exactly what I’d been dreaming of for ages: Absolutely Nothing. After we wandered back to the room, we slathered ourselves in lotion and headed to the infinity pool. We brought towels along, and once we got to the pool, we realized that we didn’t need them. There was a man who took care of all that – brought clean towels out, spread them out on your sun lounger and then took himself off to take care of someone else. He didn’t even expect a baksheesh, which was great.

So, we hung out by the pool, and soon enough a fella came round asking if we wanted something drink. Just after noon, and we thought, yeah, sure why not? So we had a nice cool drink in the sunshine. The bottle of which is displaying on the left. Not a bad beer, really, but it’s not all we had while we were there. I had some really good juice as well – something they called karkade, or hibiscus tea. It was bright red, and sweet, just like almost every other drink we had in Egypt. Coffee had sugar in it, tea had loads of sugar in it, as did the hibiscus stuff, which we got both, hot and cold. I really wish I had brought some back, but I guess I probably never would have made any.

Later, the same guy came round asking if we wanted to attend a barbeque that they were having at the pool terrace restaurant. And we decided we’d try that, not really wanting to go into town just yet. And the afternoon slowly passed.

We made it back to our room and found that our tour operator person had left a note with some info on local tours and activities that we could do while we were there. So, we decided on a few of those, went to meet her and booked them. Then got ourselves cleaned up and headed for the barbeque.

Overall, time well spent and day full of not very much except the sun. The pool was freezing, by the way!

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