Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Corder.

I am at a hotel reception and it's actually the hotel where I'm staying and that is odd because it's an all-inclusive resort.

It's the Jolie Vil, the pretty town,

and it's, I guess, one of the big resorts in Charmel Sheik.

It stretches all the way from the beach to the main road,

and then there's even an annex, which is the bit I'm in,

and I have the much sought-after

water-boggling works view from my balcony.

But I'm not complaining because I'm not spending much time there.

I am going around and about the reason I'm at all inclusive result, even though I much prefer to stay somewhere and eat locally, is that I want to talk to lots of people

about the experience they are having here. And I've only been around for 24 hours or so,

but it is so interesting to hear what is happening. So, Charmel Sheik, if you don't know it, is the biggest

resort in Egypt. Literally so. It stretches for miles along the Red Sea coast of the Sinai Peninsula.

It is really a whole long strip of all inclusive hotels mostly and then all the other

stuff that comes with mass tourism plus very significantly a lot of dive and snorkeling locations.

It is regarded as having some of the best easily accessible snorkeling that you can find anywhere.

And indeed, there's a place called Amphora Beach, and it's called Amphora Beach,

because you can basically swim out just a little way from the beach,

dive down with your snorkel, and I've done this and find some ancient amphora lost in

a I imagine Greek shipwreck some thousands of years ago and that is really significant for

Charmneuxate because it's really what's kept it going. The number of shocks that we have seen here, we've had bombings of hotels in Charmel Shake.

We had the bombing of a plane of Russian one,

...