Christmas 2010 - Egypt!!

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Dear all,
It's been a long time since I last wrote..but here I am In Egypt. Dan and I decided that we needed a quick week of winter sun and although Egypt is not my most favourite of places it certainly ticks that box!
On Friday (Christmas Eve) Dan and I woke early with a plan in our heads of a relaxed day of packing and getting ourselves ready. We had plenty of time as our flight would not be leaving Heathrow until 10.30 that night. In true Dan and Wendy style we still had not achieved much by 4pm and we ended up having our usual rush to get packed!

But we got to our flight, we took off on time and we caught our connection in Cairo which took us here to the Red Sea. Our uneventful journey did get interesting when we got into our taxi to bring us to the hotel! Having been in Taxi's in Bangkok and Manilla I like to think of myself as quite liberal when it comes to getting a taxi. However this one is ranked in my top 3!! The roads between the airport and our hotel were quite poor and yet still the speedometer managed to reach a top speed of 170 km per hour!! Yes it was very very fast...and we got here very very quickly!!

Our hotel is lovely...the best we have ever managed to find in Egypt. There are no Russians here, infact Dan is feeling very much at home as the hotel is mostly full of people from Yorkshire!! But they are a friendly bunch even if I do have trouble understanding one word in five!!

Dan has started his Tech diving course which involves wearing lots of black, wearing lots of tanks and diving very deep. I, on the other hand, will be wearing lots of pink and only using one tank. I plan to dive on Friday.
Dan disappears in the morning for his course and I spend my morning reading, sitting in the sun and generally relaxing.

Now a word about the weather! The weather here had not been great before we arrived. Things were a bit unusually cold and wet. We got here and on Christmas day it was 30 degrees!! Seems I packed all my jumpers for nothing. However today it started raining. Egypt only usually gets 3 days of rain a year so this was a big event. The sand bags came out and the hotel started to flood!! We are now expecting a couple of days of heavy rain and a possible sand storm coming down from the north...all part of the fun of our holidays!!

Thats about all from me. Some of you will know that Dan was made redundant a week before Christmas...we are not terribly upset, it just makes us realise that we really need to stop talking about other plans and actually doing them!! So before we left I posted the first document for our application to live in Australia. It's going to take a while but at least we are finally doing something!!

Love and huge hugs to you all,
Wendy and Dan xxxx

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