Earlier this month we spent a 10-day holiday at the Amar Sina hotel in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. We chose the Amar Sina because our preferred dive operator, Colona Divers, is located there. Online reviews of the hotel were mixed but mostly favorable. Here is my review of the Amar Sina hotel.

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On 24 August, the day before we visited the Vogelfestival this year, we went to the city of Giethoorn, which is known in the Netherlands as the “Venice of the North”. We got an electric boat from the many rental companies and made a two-hour tour around the city and adjacent nature area and lake. There were many boats out on this beautiful summer day, and on the lake we found a boat selling packaged ice creams! There was a girl on a small barge and an Ola freezer selling ice creams to passing boats:

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We took pictures of 26 different species of birds on our holiday in Sharm El Sheikh and South Sinai last week, nine of which are lifers (bringing our grand total to 326). Here they are: More »

Last week we had our second excellent experience with Colona Divers, this time in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. Colona is a Scandinavian dive operator with shops in Hurghada (where we first dived with them in 2005) and El Gouna in addition to Sharm.

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We took many taxis on our holiday in Egypt last week, most of them flagged down on the streets of Sharm El Sheikh. It’s always a big hassle to agree a price with the driver before you get in. You know from seeing official price lists and reading travel books and trip reports what constitutes a fair price, but still they laugh in your face if you mention anything near these prices and make you pay something many times more. More »

At Ras Mohamed National Park we saw this extremely cute “Do not feed the fish” sign. It’s the way the fish looks at the (mysterious object in the) hand that makes it a really funny sign, I think:

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On Sunday 14 October we had our fourth diving day in the Red Sea (see our photo album of this trip) with Colona Divers and our guide David took us to Yolanda and Shark Reef for our first dive of the day. It took about an hour for our boat to arrive there from the Travco jetty in Sharm El Sheikh. The famous dive site (which is often listed among the top dive sites in the world!) is located at the southernmost tip of the Sinai Peninsula in Ras Mohamed National Park, where the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba flow into the Red Sea:

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I still remember the old-fashioned pull tabs on pop cans that were introduced in March 1963 by the Pittsburgh Brewing Company. You put your finger in the ring and pulled the tab off. Unfortunately, these pull tabs were an environmental disaster; pets and wildlife died from digesting the sharp things, as did a few people who dropped them into a can and then accidentally choked on them. The hazardous tabs wound up on beaches, where people cut their feet on them, and littered roadsides and damaged garbage disposals. More »

From 6 to 16 October we visited South Sinai and stayed at Amar Sina Hotel in Sharm El Sheikh. We dived and snorkeled with Colona Divers and visited Ras Mohamed NP, Nabeq NP and St. Catherine’s Monastery.

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View large slideshow in our photo album »

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