Heading to the Red Sea

Couldn’t raise myself to go out early this morning and thoroughly enjoyed sleeping in. After breakfast we are back on the road for another 3 hour drive up to Aswan, followed by another 3 hours or so further north to the wonderful Jolie Ville resort on Kings Island, Luxor. Got done by the corrupt police again along the way and had to pay EGY200 for some bullshit reason. I may have been done for speeding or it was just a ‘tourist tax’ but either way the policeman was rude, ignorant and aggressive and it’s the same checkpoint I ‘got done’ at on the drive down. Anyway, it’s around 4pm by the time we arrive here and I’m ready for a late lunch or an early dinner beside the pool, whatever really, (there’s nowhere on these long drives to get anything to eat) and I crash out back in the room soon after and wake up at 8am the following morning! I think this is the start of some bug that’s going to linger for weeks and weeks (Pharaoh’s Revenge I call it).

Jolie Ville Resort

It was a shame we had to leave here really but another loooong 6+ hours drive lay ahead to the Red Sea coast. The beginning of the journey didn’t get off to a good start as the super new highway we were on was blocked by police and of course there aren’t any diversion signs, but fortunately there was a tourist bus in front of us and I assumed they were heading to the coast so I followed them for many miles until we eventually saw a sign for Safaga. Now, this route was the 4th or 5th option we were aware of to get to the Red Sea, as each one further south was allegedly/apparently closed for some reason, which ranged from “it’s too rough to drive on” to “it’s closed by the police due to illegal gold miners and it’s not safe”…… Hmmmm…. So we’re heading ever northwards and we weren’t that far south of Hurghada in the end, as we had an appointment with a Sixt Rental Car guy who was due to meet us in this rundown town to exchange our car as we had a metre long crack in the windscreen. Now here’s a word of warning - no amount of insurance covers you for windscreen or tyre damage in Egypt with rental cars! Anyway, as we approached this delightful town, the Sixt rep ‘WhatsApped’ me to say they were charging USD$700 for replacement windscreen. WTAF! We’d already been in touch with a company who would do it for half that cost, so what ensued was a tense stand off as the Sixt guy had tracked us down due to the tracking device in our rental car and we spend nearly 2 hours arguing via WhatsApp with some faceless individual on text. Anyway, blah blah blah boring I was keen to head off as it was past 3pm now and we still had over 3 hours to get to the resort waaay south. So the upshot is we kept the same car, metre-long windscreen crack and all and hurtled down the coast road. 

The highway from Luxor to here had been good but we were now on the usual shitty road, with random massive pot holes and even more random concrete or tarmac humps appearing just to annoy drivers. Sometimes it seemed we were on a sort of dual carriageway, and other times we definitely weren't - there just weren't any roadsigns to tell you the score! Another thing that endears me to Egypt! I did wonder how the ancient Egyptians had made such phenomenal Pyramids that were geometrically perfect, aligned with the stars and wind direction etc etc when you can’t even get a smooth road here in 2025…?!  

So it was a bit torturous, passing through numerous police checkpoints, as we had done every road we’d travelled on. Some stopped us, others just glared at us for some reason but finally after what had turned out to be an 8 hour plus journey, we reached the Gorgonia Beach Resort just as it got dark at 6.30pm. This is a massive complex and once we’d checked in, I parked the car about 3 miles away and hitched a ride on an electric buggy, and we sped off to our rooms about 15 miles away at the far end of the complex. Even the buggy driver got lost for a minute! And boy it was much more humid here. Everywhere else in Egypt had been a dry heat, so this was a shock to us. So I saw no point in showering before the hike to the restaurant, but the food was possibly the best we’d experienced on the trip so far and then I ended up making a plan to set my alarm clock for 5am and head 45 minutes down the coast to Hamata Mangroves and an attempt to find Crab-Plover…. Goodnight!