adventures in egypt: hurghada

my last week is egypt actually felt like a real vacation - get up, put on bikini, hop on boat and scuba dive. i had nothing to plan or think about other than whether or not i had enough oxygen while staring at beautiful fish. there was a total of 6 of us in hurghada (friends joined us from finland and amsterdam) and we stayed at the Zahabia Hotel & Resort for about 85 euros/person for a week. it wasn't luxurious but it was nice.

the beaches in hurghada are not great. i would only go there to snorkel or dive. if you want to dive, check our Red Sea Divers. they are located at Zahabia Beach, which is why we stayed at the hotel across the street. the owners are german but they speak english really well and reply quickly to e-mails. my favorite diver master was Alona. she was sweet, patient and cautious but fun, all the things you want in a diver master.

hurghada is a resorty town built for tourists but, unlike sharm el-sheikh, it is built for egyptian tourists as well as foreigners, so you can find food that caters to both groups. there are lots of fast food and "international" cuisine restaurants that serve burgers, pizza, spaghetti, etc. and i ended up at a few of those places because my friends had sensitive stomachs and didn't want to go to egyptian places. however, my favorite places were El Mina (for seafood) and Al Masry (for classic egyptian food). El Mina has a few locations in Hurghada but the one i went to (El Nasser Street, across from the post office) is reputed to be the best.

in the LP's Food&Drink section, there's a nondescript reference to hamam (pigeon stuffed with spiced rice) as being extremely popular. thanks to my egyptian dive master, i discovered why. he said that egyptians considered hamam to be "like viagra" and that men often eat this dish for weeks before their weddings. when i asked what happens to women who eat hamam, i got a sheepish shrug. i should have known better than to ask a muslim man what happens to a woman's sex drive but, what can i say, i like to be provocative. as you can imagine, there isn't a lot of meat on a pigeon but hamam is supposed to be made with very young birds whose bones are still soft, and egyptians eat the whole damn thing - bird, stuffing and bones! i tried to eat my little viagra bird bones and all but, i admit, i spit out a few. and to preempt the inevitable question - yes, it tastes like chicken.