After Charming Notes. Part 1. Wall of Sharma, or the Mirage of Security
I planned our second visit to Egypt with great care. In November, my mother turned 75 years old, and a trip to the Red Sea "to fish" was my gift for the anniversary. The three parts of my story will be a little chaotic - we did not have dizzying adventures, but notes of a relaxing layman have accumulated. We got separate chapters.
I will make a reservation right away: there will be almost no illustrations in this part. Tourists in Egypt are strictly forbidden to take pictures of the airport, policemen and even fences. I think that in a couple of shots I would hardly have been arrested, but on a southern vacation I don’t want to capture concrete walls and dogs with the police at all.
After the explosion of a Russian passenger airliner in the skies over Sharm on October 31.2015, tourists were the first to be banned from flying to Egypt not in Russia. On November 4, flights were suspended by Great Britain and Ireland. On November 5, citizens of Germany, France and the Benelux countries were warned about the undesirability of the visit. Russia introduced the ban on November 6. Today, the Egyptian beaches are mostly Ukrainians, Belarusians, Kazakhs, Germans, Italians.
The sharply reduced tourist flow has negatively affected business: the ghosts of unfinished hotel complexes and half-abandoned hotels are scattered along the entire coast. The rest of the hotels were desperately dumping, so there was almost no money left for reconstruction and normal service.
We arrived on vacation at the end of November 2019. There was a tremulous expectation in the air: in a week the first plane with British tourists was expected. All the tour guides, hotel workers and shopkeepers mentioned that the Egyptian government has poured a lot of money into ensuring the safety of foreigners in Sharm. The locals are waiting for the British like manna from heaven and counting future fabulous profits. We should be wary of rising prices for holidays.
Along the tourist area of Sharm, the authorities erected a six-meter concrete wall. According to the official version - "from goats and sheep. " I did not know that Egyptian sheep fly like our Bubka - six meters high. There are photos of the wall on the Web, the concrete disgrace looks completely expressionless and unassuming.
The territory of the airport was also fenced off with a solid concrete fence, with lighting, sensors and video cameras. In general, for the safety of tourists, in the best traditions of the Middle Ages, Trump and Yatsenyuk, the Egyptians built walls.
As a result, Sharm turned out to be such a reservation for tourists, behind a high concrete fence. Inside - well-lit roads, checkpoints a few kilometers away, speed bumps, hotels, entertainment centers, staff, dressed up Bedouins and tourists.
What does security look like through the eyes of a tourist? The usual bustle at the place where migration cards are issued (thanks to our travel agent, we arrived with the cards already filled out). At passport control, they put fingerprint scanners and a bunch of equipment. No one scanned us, we went through in the usual way: a smile, a slap of a stamp in the passport, and the procedure is over.
The baggage claim was surprisingly chaotic. Our passengers collected suitcases from the Nikolaevsky flight along all three airport belts, mixed with cargo from Kharkov, Kyiv, Minsk and Astana. As always, no one compares luggage tags with receipts: take the most beautiful / large / expensive suitcase and stomp your way out. At the exit, no special frames were noticed.
At the bus stop, dim-witted guides casually check the lists "by voice" without checking the vouchers. Luggage falls into the belly of the bus, a crowd of incomprehensible people runs around, tourists themselves must look after their own cargo.
At the entrance to the hotel stands a frame and a guard assigned to it. The same frames are at all exits, including the promenade. Everyone runs past the frames so as not to wake up the guard with the ringing. The frames and guards look a little ridiculous: there are no fences near the hotels from the side of the promenade, only low bushes, through which even I can easily jump with my considerable weight. Judging by the video cameras that are firmly fixed, they either do not work at all, or leave a lot of "blind zones".
In pretentious hotels (I noticed when they were collecting tourists for a flight home) buses are met by security guards with a metal detector in their hands and a dog on the side. Both do not go into business, they are simply present as a fact.
I walked along the beaches of Naama hotels from Marina to Gafi and back without any problems, no one looked at the bracelets. Lifeguards are more likely to drive tourists away from the reefs with whistles, the rest is not in their competence.
The shopping and restaurant streets of Naama are guarded by the tourist police. It's become much cleaner. I was pleasantly surprised by the impeccably sparkling stop with the cleanest seats, air conditioning and flowers in a vase. Otherwise, everything is the same: for me, my mother was first offered 300 camels, then 500, then 700. Trade is carried out in Russian-Ukrainian surzhik, payments in American banknotes are welcome. Repeatedly as a greeting I heard from the locals “Glory to Ukraine”. The British will be surprised.
The icing on the cake was the greetings of our chefs when meeting each other in the hotel restaurant. Agree, "Allahu akbar" against the background of the traditional "Salaam alaikum" is a bit annoying.
Most of all, tourists feel safety concerns when departing from Sharm. The passage of a crowd of tourists with suitcases and boxes from the airport entrance to the departure area took us 2 hours, we almost missed the plane. They check luggage and hand luggage twice, make them take off their shoes and manually feel everyone in a row. At the second check, the stream is divided into boys and girls.
As a result of the strictest control, no one found our impudent excess of hand luggage (the mango for colleagues turned out to be very weighty), and my mother and I stumbled into the “clean zone” with two bottles of mineral water (one more from Ukraine). No one puts suitcases on the field anymore, they just load them onto the plane, like everywhere else.
They say the best sign of good anti-terrorism work is the absence of terrorist attacks. Fortunately, Sharm has been safe for tourists in recent years. The maximum risk is to run into a lionfish under a pontoon, cut yourself with a surgeon fish or poison yourself with body brandy. I think that much more reliable than walls, frames and metal detectors, the material interest of the locals protects us from troubles - they need to feed their families.
Perhaps in six months paid excursions will be carried to the Egyptian Wall.
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