'Where did you say?'
'Sharm?'
'Charm? Where's that?'
'You know, Sharm, as in Sheikh, in the Red Sea.'
'Red Sea? Kinda like Dead Sea sort of thing...?'
Sharm is not easy to explain. It's not Orlando, Tenerife or Dubai, although judging by its recent appearance in winter sun holiday brochures, it might like to be.
Ten years ago this one-road desert town had one proper hotel. The Hilton. Just that and a few basic B&Bs, a few live-aboard dive boats and very little shade. The only people to bother with this tiny strip of Sinai desert linking Egypt and Israel were hardcore divers lured by the waters around Sharm with the best diving in the world.
Today I was arriving as a family tourist. One of the bucket-and-spade brigade on a package tour via a charter flight packed full of other mums and dads and squirming children.
Sharm el Sheikh is on a mission to rise from backpacker hippie diver terrain to big-time family winter sun territory. The tourist board wants you to come, even if you think divers are akin to bird watchers. It doesn't matter if you don't dive, they say, come anyway.
There are several selling points. It's a four-and-a-half-hour flight from the UK (similar distance to Cyprus or the Canaries). It is one hour time difference (hey - no jet lag). You don't need jabs. And it now has one long row of top-class hotels packed with kids clubs and state-of-the-art swimming pools all at reasonable prices. Oh, and sunshine's guaranteed. It hasn't rained since 1996.
You can imagine a group of marketing men sitting around scratching their heads and thinking - if the boring old Canaries can attract winter sun tourists, why can't we?
But the rationale behind this surreal row of gin palaces comes from Egypt's need to stake out its territory. Seeing the land being put to no use, the Israelis invaded twice. The Egyptians finally retrieved the Sinai in 1982 and are keen to establish ownership. Huge government incentives encourage Egyptian wealth to invest on this coastline (deadline is the end of this year). The result is a bizarre holiday resort in the middle of nowhere, with international and American franchise and management-contract big brands stamped on fantastical hotels oozing glossy marble floors, huge gold-plated columns and international hotel piano music. The Ritz-Carlton even has an air-conditioned tent with chandeliers for parties and conferences.
Driving along the coast is like flicking through a catalogue of chain-hotel names: Hyatt, Radisson SAS, Ritz-Carlton, Movenpick, Hilton, Four Seasons, Sofitel, Conrad and Marriott. There they are, all waiting open-armed for tourists to arrive. When I travelled in April, the hotels were brim-full. Five-star hotels on a par with Dubai at three-star prices was proving a star pull. Since 11 September, by all accounts, it's eerily quiet.
As we pull up at the Hyatt Regency (a very child-friendly 10-minute transfer from the airport), this could be Florida. One of those themed hotels in Orlando - where they recreate Egypt or Arabia or the like. Behind us is pure desert. Orangey sand dunes forever.
Inside the marble hotel lobby there's a huge picture window looking down on to layers of terraces with extravagant swimming pools and streams, slides descending for acres down to a small beach. There are villa-style rooms on each tier. Everything is glitzy and polished.
The Hyatt's beach is full of Milanese in designer beachwear and high-spending scruffy Russians shouting into mobile phones. It's a small private beach and when the hotel is full (there are 236 rooms - taking more than 500 people when full, including 150 kids the weeks we visit) there are not enough loungers to go round.
When your kids dig in the shingle, they soon hit concrete. The beach is artificial, like most of what you see landside. But none of this matters if you poke your head under the water.
The best part of each day is walking to the end of the jetty, jumping into the warm water and snorkelling along the reef, which stretches along the waterfront. Well, I've never seen corals and underwater life as good as that in the Canaries.
A couple of hours into the holiday I realise something is out of balance. And then it hits me. No Egyptian women. The chamber maids are men, the shop assistants are men and the receptionists are all men. The town is staffed by migrant workers who leave their families at home in Cairo or Alexandria and travel the long bus ride to man-made Sharm to work three weeks on, before taking one week off to rejoin their families.
One day, we hire a taxi with another family to escape the hotel complex and see Ras Mohammed. I'd been gagging to go after seeing almost unreal crystal clear waters and white sand in a guide book. Please God, don't let it be fake!
Our driver plays Moroccan pop music full-blast as we rattle along the desert, kids on knees and sticky thighs on hot plastic. 'I am new-married. Twenty days till I see her again...' he sighs.
The three kids (one mine and two belonging to our new friends) run naked into the water laughing. Ras Mohammed is no mirage. It is the true unadulterated stuff of holiday fantasies. Beautiful wide white powdery sand and acres of turquoise shallow bath-warm water. The adults take turns to mind the kids while the others wade out to a sand ledge in the water where you spy masses of tropical fish darting around your toes.
The area is a national park, which means there are no buildings, ice-cream shops or sun-lounger rentals, and you have to pay an entrance fee to get in. The result is paradise - sans rubbish. It is physically impossible to stay too long untidying the place. Two hours without shade is about most people's limit.
Some evenings we escape the half-board hotel eating plan and wander into town, but the offerings there make the hotel look exceptionally good. Central Sharm is Leicester Square desert-style. KFC, Pizza Express, McDonald's, Planet Hollywood, Hard Rock Café, Pizza Hut, a tandoori Indian restaurant, Benetton, a Havana Club 'with live salsa music from Cuba'. It's anything but Egyptian, apart from the ornate trinket shops and distinct lack of alcohol on the menus.
We track down the famous Camel Bar, a real divers' hangout with floor cushions and low-down tables and monkey-nut shells strewn on the floor. Travellers in bandanas click away on their email accounts at some dusty computers in a back room. We drink expensive beer on the roof terrace and watch the neon lights of hamburger bars and ' super mercatos ' below.
The supermarkets import everything a British, German or Italian tourist might need, at inflated imported prices. A box of eight tampons costs £8. As the only women in town are tourists, they can charge and get their asking price.
Two weeks eating hotel buffet food turns into a routine. We find ourselves wandering aimlessly around the hotel's 'Egyptian souk' each night, eating pasta or mezze (interesting, the first night, but by day 14 hard work) while Ukrainian teenage girls dressed up as Egyptian belly dancers writhe on stage. We eat at the hotel's fake Thai restaurant at least five times. The pad thai and tom yang goon are excellent, although it is frustrating to be pretending to be in Thailand when we are actually (well, according to my map anyway) in Egypt.
Call me an alcoholic, but the best part of any holiday is that magical moment each evening, usually around 7pm after you've showered off the suntan lotion and sand, and your skin is tingling with a little too much sun. You open the fridge and pour out the cold Chablis (or, in Spain, a couple of San Miguels). You sit on the balcony eating olives, getting slightly tipsy on an empty stomach before eating a treat meal - maybe some runny cheeses, fresh crusty bread, gloriously ripe tomatoes or Serrano ham. If this is the highlight of your holiday, Sharm el Sheikh is not for you.
I checked prices with other travellers and visited a couple of nearby hotels and found the story pretty much the same, whichever international hotel you pick. The cheapest beer (a local brew) in the Hyatt was £3. And the cheapest bottle of non-Egyptian wine was £50. The hotel manager told me there is a 500 per cent tax on alcohol, hence the prices.
This means we spent many an evening watching the belly dancers, over one warm beer each, drinking extra slowly to make it last just that one drop longer. It seems that the Egyptian government doesn't ban alcohol because it needs alcohol to please tourists. But the big taxes symbolise restraint, bowing to the Islamic fundamentalists. You won't ever see a lager lout in Sharm, well, not a British one anyway. There are reports of the occasional rich Russian one, though.
So back on the transfer bus we jump, picking up British tourists along the hotel strip, which in places still resembles a building site. A weary woman battles her way down the aisle to a seat in front of me and in the loudest voice decrees: 'I'm going straight down the pub when we get back. I haven't had a glass of wine for a week.' 'Yessss,' we shout back.
How safe is Egypt right now?
Napoleon came to Giza, demented. So he entered the great Pyramid of Cheops and passed the night alone. In the morning, to the amazement of his troops, he emerged completely calm.
You could have the partial Napoleonic experience if you went to Cairo right now. Get to the Pyramids soon after 8.30am and you might well find yourself alone in the airless burial chamber of the king - for a few precious minutes, at least.
There are no Japanese, hardly any Americans, only a few Britons. Even the larger flocks of Italians and Germans are outnumbered at the major sites by Egyptians themselves, mostly family groups and excited school parties.
On the Nile, it's the same story. Where 300 beautifully appointed river cruisers would normally be weaving their way between Luxor and Aswan, there were just 20 doing so in the first week of November. At certain times of the day there were more swallows than human sunseekers flitting about the top deck of our boat. Mix that level of solitude with a passing landscape of camel, heron, ibis and palm trees - with the Valley of the Kings as a backdrop - and it comes close to bliss.
Temple visiting, too, becomes much more intimate. An Egyptologist, more used to groups of 24, will take you and perhaps just four others, to the stunning, columned halls of Karnak, or the tiny clinic in the corner of Kom Ombo where, 4,000 years ago, you would wait to see two doctors: one for your body, one for your mind. Believe me, in the present climate, body and mind can be amply restored.
But it is enormously sad. 'It was all going so well this year,' the manager of our boat told me. 'The high season was just beginning and our advance bookings were well up.' Then the Twin Towers came down. Everyone, from the national airline chairman to the trinket sellers in the souk, is feeling the consequent 70 to 80 per cent drop in visitor numbers.
The only people not short of employment are the armed tourist police and security guards. Egypt cannot afford even one minor incident involving a foreign visitor, for what remains of her tourism industry would then vanish.
My trip, a tailor-made holiday with Bales, was booked and paid before 11 September. It was well worth £1,500. The Mancunian couple in the row in front of me on the plane home got a late deal with Kuoni for £329 at the Isis hotel in Luxor. Their friends, who were coming with them, stayed at home, plagued by bad dreams and premonitions.
I checked the Foreign Office website (www.fco.gov.uk) obsessively in the days before our departure - and then forgot it. As the feisty old lady from Maine who danced with us in the desert after our dawn flight by balloon, put it: 'I wasn't gonna let 'em stop me.'
Susan Shepherd
Factfile
Jeannette Hyde travelled with Longwood Holidays (020 8551 4494; www.longwoodholidays.co.uk).
One week at the Hyatt Regency Sharm el Sheikh is £473 per adult and £333 per child under 11 in early February, rising to £505/£370 respectively on February 16 (half-term). Prices are B&B including return flights and transfers. For safety information see www.fco.gov.uk.
