May 8th.
To be fair to Silversea, this stop was not originally planned, but was added after problems with getting berths in Saudi. There should have been an excursion to St Katherine's Monastery, but alas no.
Chris started the day doing aquarobics with Kim and then breakfast. Jessica gave an interesting talk on "Your journey through words", designed to prompt one's memory of any journey. Very interesting but one needed to be creative!
We had lunch in the restaurant at noon, and then a siesta before setting out on our jeep adventure inland. Chris is not too keen on "Jeep Adventures" but the other 2 alternatives were even worse, so the Jeep Excursion it was then. It turned out to be particularly bad, a middle of the market tourist excursion, with little to commend it. In fact it is a long time since I have been on as mind numbingly bad excursion as this
We were in a jeep with Victor and Carolyn, there being around 25 jeeps. We drove north past never ending hotel resorts and then, after about an hour, onto a very bumpy road in the Nabak National Park , through wadis and then had 4 mindless stops: for what unknown reason?. One to sell camel rides, one to see the small museum, one to take photos of a not particularly photogenic place, and one to see "bedouins" in their "camp"
OK, the second one did possess one single toilet sand a so-called museum - The Nabak Museum . The 4th stop was in a wadi where they cooked their flat bread in a traditional manner. And there was goats cheese to go with it and a hot drink; also a dervish dancer and a belly dancer. The scenery was very pleasant, but suffered from what Al Ula offered!.
And inexplicably after taking hours to get to the bedouin camp, we returned in just half an hour to Sharm along a 4 lane motorway.
click on a thumbnail to get a bigger photo
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So, not a successful outing. Having got back to the ship on a super fast motorway by 7 we enjoyed cocktails on the back deck before a problematic dinner in La Terrazza, but the actual food was yummy