ARRIVING at night at the Makadi Spa Hotel is like stepping onto a Disney film set – a thousand lanterns, palms, towers, domes, the whole thoroughly Westernised and sanitised fairytale Arabian Nights setting at your feet. The hotel is one of the many five star resorts outside Hurghada, on the Red Sea, which have sprung out of the sand in the last 30 years, a safe enough place to visit if all you seek from your Egyptian is sand and snorkelling.
Most guests want nothing more than to flop down by the infinity pool overlooking the Red Sea but for the full ersatz experience, quad biking in the desert and scuba diving on the reefs are on offer. Neither are in the remotest sense an authentic experience.
Quad biking begins with a short ride to a desert encampment and an intensive three minute explanation of the controls but you could just stay in the shady compound and enjoy tiny cups of sweet Turkish style coffee.
The camp has a mosque and a pathetic zoo with a small sandy coloured desert cobra. It’s hard to feel sorry for a snake, perhaps, but seeing spectators slapping the glass tank to make rear does just that. The visit ends with everyone trooping off to for the photo opportunity on a camel. I wondered, did these well educated guides, many of them multi-lingual, never think tourists wanted a real experience?
It seems not. The second ‘visitor experience’ was no better than the quad biking: snorkelling. There’s a 40 minute trip to an island, during which you will be shown a colourful page of all the denizens of the Red Sea deep including parrot , zebra and stone fish. There are some you would not want to meet when half naked – like the Giant Moray eel. They don’t say much about the eels, or sharks, both of which are quite common and both of which can give you a nasty bite. We were unlucky to park directly over an aggressive Moray which spotted us and rapidly chased our party back to the boat. Terrifying, and perhaps yes a little more authentic.
The reefs in the Red Sea are an underworld wonder but they are in danger from exploitation and abuse by souvenir collectors who break off chunks of coral and bring them home. If you go, it’s preferable to take a private guide instead of joining a party, costly but worth every dinar. You only have to do it once, you won’t forget it.
Still hoping to see something of the real Egypt we asked our guide if we could visit old Hurghada’s traditional market which I’d seen 10 years before.
“Closed down,” he said, at first. Then “foreigners are not allowed,” and then “only some people who have lived here for a long time are allowed.”
Eventually he agreed to take us downtown to the area now rarely visited by tourists who are shepherded instead to the new marina.
Downtown is an extraordinary melee of people, animals, stallholders and endless holes in the wall selling the same stuff you see everywhere. King Tut and Queen Nefertiti – or their plaster representatives – are never more than a few feet away in Egypt; few royals can have worked harder for their country.
We never did find the old market but we sat in a small cafe and were offered drinks of sugary cane juice. The cafe owner begged us to “tell the world to come to the old town “. He said it was rare to see foreigners “they all go to the marina”. .
The Red Sea Holidays trip included a visit the Nile which means an overland trip to Luxor where you board the Grand Rose to see the temples of the Upper Nile. The route is littered with checkpoints manned by the Egyptian equivalent of Dad’s Army, turbanned old men with a gun slung over the shoulder. It makes you feel safe and not safe somehow.
When you reach the first tributaries of the Nile, the landscape transforms almost instantly from sand to sylvian fields full of goats, donkeys, men hand planting and harvesting, emerald green paddy fields and tiny peppermint green cafes. It is truly biblical.
The great Nile cruise ships have fallen into ruin and are devoid of tourists which is a shame for step aboard the Grand Rose and you feel as if you have returned to the 1920s. The lobby is a mini replica of the Titanic, with wrought iron balconies, glittering chandeliers and shiny parquet flooring. The cabins, all wood panelling and swag curtains, are extraordinarily comfortable. I have no idea how, given the cost of a ticket today, they maintain standards. The staff are impeccably polite. Everyone greets you with the word “welcome “.
If ever there was a time to see the Valley of the Kings, where the sensational tomb of the young king Tutankhamen was found it is now. Tourist numbers have dwindled from 10,000 to 500 a day, photographs are forbidden altogether and the street sellers have been distanced. You can experience the raw beauty of the landscape in the company of highly educated Egyptologists who will surprise you with new perspectives on the ancient myths about the Pharaohs.