Egypt - Post One

So I'm finally getting around to posting some of our photos from our trip to Egypt. If you've been following this blog, you'll know that my husband and I went to Egypt for our belated honeymoon trip this past November. It was the perfect weather and time for Egypt. Mid seventies and not very many tourists. We had only booked the first four nights at the hotel in Sharm el Sheikh and the rest we played by ear. I'll be posting these pictures in increments. I hope you enjoy them :)

I came up with the idea to go to Egypt because while riding the subway one morning and reading the ads, I noticed that Delta just opened a direct flight from JFK to Cairo.


We took the overnight flight from JFK and this is us flying over Cairo. Yeah. It was huge. Think about this: NYC has 1,104 people per square kilometer while Cairo has 9,031 (via Wikipedia). Yeah. NYC really felt deserted after Cairo. And yes...that is a ton of smog:

But I'll come back to Cairo. We flew into the airport and then took an Egypt Air flight to Sharm el Sheikh on the Sinai Peninsula. (Quick note: we found out once we went there that the Sinai Peninsula is considered part of Asia. And because of it's turbulent history, you don't need a visa to go to Sharm or other resorts, but if you travel on to other parts of Egypt you will need one.) I've lived in different areas of Nevada so I thought I knew what "desert" meant. I had no clue. This is the Sinai Peninsula from the air:

From the airport at Sharm we had to figure out how to get a taxi to the hotel. There really isn't much information. If you go, look out for the black and white cars...they are the taxis and you have to go searching for them. We got a hired car which cost a little more but we learned :) The driver was nice and swung us by a very cool green mosque that I had seen from the road.We stayed at the Hilton Waterfalls and our view was gorgeous. Here's the view from our room's balcony that night:
And the next morning we could see the pools and the Red Sea in the background. Beautiful.And here's views of the hotel grounds as we made our way down to the pools and the Red Sea.

Here's Robb (he said I can use his name instead of "my husband") testing out the Red Sea. It was so clear you could see the colorful fish swimming around:Here's the resort's beach:And this is me chilling with a good book:
I loved seeing the oddness of resort life which is definitely not anything like traditional Egyptian culture:I did get to go snorkeling for the first time. And this was a perfect place to do it. The reef dropped off sharp, I literally gasped which isn't a good thing when you are snorkeling :)
And here's us after snorkeling:
Hope you enjoyed this post. My next Egypt post will take us to the souks of Sharm el Sheikh and to the top of Mt. Sinai.