Even in the grounds of the hotel we couldn’t completely escape the sales pitches. Each day as we settled by the pool, the same guys would make their way around the sunbeds, reintroducing themselves to the punters as if they’d never met us before. The young man from the spa was particularly immune to rejection. At least twice a day he’d approach us and ask if we’d changed our mind about being beaten up by one of his team of masseurs. Twice a day we politely rebuffed his overtures, making it clear that the service he offered wasn't in our lexicon of fun things to do. Other suitors came and went throughout the afternoons, trying to sell us all manner of things we’d shown absolutely no interest in. At least they weren’t as persistent as those naughty Bedouin tribesmen in the mountains who refused to take no for an answer. The only way to deal with them was to avoid eye contact and keep moving. Not long after arriving, we booked the desert buggy safari, and some time before leaving home I’d paid for the overnight excursion to Mount Sinai, but apart from that we were very happy right here. I’d been put off the scuba diving experience by a tragic accident in the Red Sea that had been in the news just a few weeks beforehand. I could stick to using my snorkelling gear down on the hotel’s private beach. At the welcome meeting on the first morning, one well heeled young couple from London paid for a number of excursions, including day trips to Cairo and Luxor. The total bill came close to what I paid for the pair of us to spend two weeks here.
So the hotel grounds were our home for most of the two weeks that we spent in Egypt. As long as we stayed down on the beach, or by the unheated infinity pool that overlooked the Red Sea, things were relatively peaceful, with Fahim, our friendly waiter, bringing drinks to us on a tray at regular intervals. Well they were peaceful with the exception of the septuagenarian card school from Preston who couldn’t live without the collection of 1960’s hits that rattled out of a tinny speaker on the first afternoon of our stay. We gave them a wide berth afterwards. Down here, egrets and hoopoes, shy birds in Europe, populated the lawns with the bravado of pigeons, prospecting for invertebrates and whatever else they could find. Most residents spent the daytime at the bunga bunga pool, where loud music blared from huge speakers for several hours at a time as the all inclusive party monsters barely moved from their underwater stools beside the bar. We jumped in that pool just once. It was lovely and warm, but within three minutes of being there I couldn’t take any more from a number of the potty mouthed patrons who were unable to string a sentence together without throwing in an F bomb or seven.
For a couple of hours each afternoon, just around five, the quiet time descended like a soft embrace. By now we’d be on the balcony of our apartment, listening to nature’s music, the evening chorus, overlooking the still glowing bunga bunga pool as the yellow and blue clad animations team switched all the noisy things off and headed for their quarters before supper. And there with reassuring regularity went the hotel grounds team, just like always, walking along the path towards reception. All of them clad from head to foot in green workwear, three of them sporting the trademark white wellies, while the other, presumably the boss, wore plain black shoes.
In one corner of the hotel grounds were a handful of shops selling things we neither needed nor wanted, but one evening Ali couldn’t resist dragging me over in that direction after dinner, just to browse. And there in the window of the first shop was the answer for all of us of a certain age. Sphinx Anti-Wrinkle Oils, an organic moisturiser. On the box, a picture supposedly showed two halves of the same female face. The right side portrayed a sixty-five year old zombie with an ominous looking skin complaint, while on the left sparkled a fresh looking beauty in the first bloom of youth. If the transformation were genuine, demand would be off the scale and the world would run out of Sphinx Anti-Wrinkle Oils overnight. People would be spending weeks at a time lying in bath tubs full of the stuff in California. I couldn’t help thinking it was a mistake for the beauty queen to be on the left, but then again doesn’t the Arab world read from the other side of the page? I knew too that it was a mistake for Ali to take a photo of this dubious looking product with its barely credible claims, but she couldn’t resist. And I also knew the irony would go whooshing over the head of the salesman waiting behind us for his moment to pounce. It’s hard to back out when they sink their teeth into a potential customer.
He asked us where we came from, no doubt a salesman’s trick to put the target at ease, although this always has completely the opposite effect on me. We like to answer with “Cornwall” rather than “Britain” or “England” and watch the confusion spread across peoples’ faces. It’s the only form of counter attack we have. But this one was keeping an unplayable ace up his sleeve. Looking at her, he came back with “Inside I’ve got something. If you give him two drops it will turn him into crazy horse for four or five hours.” What, like the Osmonds? Ali giggled nervously as I quietly died on the inside. It was time to move on, and quickly. We skirted the other shops, looked into the Piri Piri Bar from the outside, decided we preferred the one in the lobby, and snuck off into the shadows to walk around the grounds in peace.
