Hurghada Review

Hurghada in Egypt is a good destination if you love to swim in the sea with a nice temperature and if you love skuba diving a/o snorkeling.

Hurghada has an airport where quite a few budget airliners fly too. There are quite  a number of european touroperators that offer good package deals, including flight, transfer, hotel and meals.

I booked with Skytours and paid € 395 per person for a return flight from Amsterdam and a 7 night stay in the Marlin Inn Beach (4 star) resort including breakfast an dinner.

Entering Egypt at Hurghada airport we had to buy a visa for which we paid 15 dollars.

At the hotel we were requested to pay €5 to cover gratuity for the period of our stay and it was indicated that we were still allowed to give tips.

In general, one has to watch out eating uncooked vegetables, but we were assured that the cooks in the hotel followed strict hygiene and that the vegetables were washed in purified water. We ate the raw vegetables and we did not get sick! Something we could not say about people we met that were staying in the Hilton!! The quality and variety of the food offered by the Marlin Inn was very good. It was offered as a buffet and with that one can see and decide accordingly what to take.

From Hurghada one can take various daytrips. Most people come for the beach and the sea and with that a whole variety of diving, snorkeling and other boat trips are offered going to the reefs. With the four of us we chartered a glass bottom boat with snorkelgear and spend half a day at sea exploring the reef and paid in total 45 dollars; a steal. Trips to the pyramids were offered too, but with the temperatures, the distance and with that the length of the tour we decided not too. We had come to relax on the beach, which we did. We went a couple of times into town to hunt for souvenirs.

Public transportation in Hurghada is like in many other countries around the world provided by minibuses that circle town; it is cheap, but if you are the first to enter the minibus and you indicate where you want to go the driver may decide to change to a taxi and will not pick up other passengers end you end up paying 15 dollars where you thought it was just 50 cents per head.

Shopping, there is a big taxfree shop in the middle of town. We did not go there, we heard it was only booze and smokes. We went down town to check out the typical egyptian shops. The egyptian hospitality is known and in almost every shop you go in you will be offered a cup of tea and sometimes they offer you soda's or even a beer. We bought some jewelry that as we later found out turned to be fake gold, allthough it contained the markings for 14 carat and gave my wife allergic reactions that she normally did not get. So you are warned buying jewelry over there. We also bought a lot of natural fragrances, essence oils. There are about two thousand of those shops in town. Further aloe vera products are pretty cheap, so we took some of that with us too and is part of our medicine cabinet now.

For about 20$ me and my wife had a haircut and my wife received a complete facial treatment including a mask. The result was a face as smooth as a baby face. That facial treatment was worth watching as a spectator; facial hair was removed by using cotton threads and the mask was removed using a comb.

Eating and drinking we did most of that in our hotel. As in a lot of countries around the world  one does not drink water from the tap, but bottled water. That said, one also is to make sure that ice is made of bottled or purified water. We took a couple of times lunch at places where we only took fully cooked meals. The prices for those meals were reasonable allthough one would expect prices to be lower and maybe they are for the locals.