Visiting Fishes in Sharm

Well, Sharm el Sheikh was pretty cool. We went to a big hotel next to the ocean and sat around in the sun for a morning. The hotel had a huge swimming pool but I forgot my bathing suit and no one was sure if a moose was allowed in the pool. The people were saying that this is a real vacation place. As far as I can see that means that no one here goes for long walks in temples or tombs or anything. A lot of people were just lying around in the sun and sleeping.

Some people were in the water playing and then someone who works for the hotel came and started some music so that the guests who wanted something to do could play some games and do some exercises. It was pretty interesting to watch but looked like you could get pretty tired. They jumped up and down in the water a lot. I guess that my people weren't bored because they drank coffee and ate ice cream instead. A lot of the guests in the hotel were from France but also a lot of them were from someplace that Maryanne called the Gulf. I haven't seen the Gulf before but I heard of France.

While everyone was watching the people bouncing in the swimming pool, I was looking around to see what else interesting was going on. All of a sudden I saw this guy on a big white horse come walking by the pool. Well, I thought, maybe the horse is going swimming. If horses can go swimming, then maybe a moose can too. But it turned out that the horse didn't go swimming. The man was nice though. He works for the hotel and it turned out that Maryanne knew him. They have horses there that people can ride so he let me sit on the horse for a picture. Maryanne said she didn't see why she would pay to ride a horse when she can do it for free at home. Oh well.

One of the things that people do in Sharm el Sheikh is to look at fish. We went to the shop for people who want to look at fish or go to the mountains to see what sort of fun things we could do. Some people wanted to go to see a place in the mountains called St. Catherines. It's a monastery where monks live. They had to explain that monks are nothing like monkeys..if they were it would be much more fun. But it didn't matter because the monastery was closed and we couldn't go anyway. Everyone thought it would be too cold to go swimming to see the fish, even though I thought that I looked pretty good in the mask to see fish with. So instead, the next day we went on a boat with a window in the bottom. Everyone said not to worry because no one was going to open the window while we were in the boat.

The next morning we went down to the beach and there was a boat tied to a dock. We got into the boat and there it was...the window in the bottom of the boat. Wow! It was very cool. While we waited for everyone to come to take a ride on the boat, we looked at fish that were swimming by the beach. Fish are really amazing. They slide around the water very gently and then flash! They are gone. The fish in Sharm are beautiful colours. Some of them are blues and greens and yellows, every different shape and size and pattern. Stripes, squares, big spots, fish with long fins, fish that are big and small...everything.

After a while the boat started moving and we very slowly went around the water in the bay looking through the window at the fish and at things that looked a lot like plants growing in the water. The plant things are called corals and they come in all sorts of sizes and shapes and colours. The fish seem to like to live near them and some of the small ones even seem to hide in the corals. It was really fun to look at the fish and the corals. I hoped that maybe we would see a shark or a whale but the fish weren't all that big. There were some fish that looked like Nemo in the movie though.

One of the people on the boat with us wanted to go swimming with the fish and the boat stopped by some corals so that he could swim. The rest of us just sat around on the boat and bobbed up and down for a while. The sun was warm and the breeze was nice so I decided that sitting on boats is a good thing to do. This boat wasn't nearly as big as the Nile boat, but I think boats are a good idea. It was much better on the boat than it was on shore because unless someone has planted something green in Sharm el Sheikh, it's all rocks and sand.

Later that day we sat on the balcony at the room of the hotel and watched all the boats coming back from visiting fish out at sea. A lot of people in Sharm go out in these boats all day long and they jump in the water to visit fish. It sounds kind of strange to me. They could just look through the bottom of the window boat.

copyright 2008 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani