Volume II, Number 5 May 1st, 2001

Amar Sina Resort
Sharm El-Sheikh

By Daniel Lanier

Amar Sina Resort Sharm El-Sheikh

Those of us, which occasionally or regularly spend a vacation in a typical holiday resort, know it: If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all! It doesn’t matter, if it is a five-star resort or a three-star facility – their design is too often an uniform, assembly-line production, built by bored, uninspired designers. Not that the tourist doesn’t feel comfortable. But sometimes he may look from his balcony down to the usual pool, next to it the usual pool bar, surrounded by the usual two or three-story modern or kitshy apartment buildings – and he may feel somehow unsatisfied. Everything seems to be a little bit too perfect, too predictable, too standard, not unlike a first-class home for the aged.

The little four-star resort »Amar Sina« in Sharm El-Sheikh follows the same pattern, apartment buildings around a pool, but it is different, very different. It has a soul, a »special style«, as the hotel’s brochure writes it with a touch of understatement. The owner is also the architect, and one feels it everywhere, that he wanted to create a place not for tourists, but for friends. With great fun and an appetite for detail and a sense of harmony, he designed the apartment buildings, each one unique, in a slightly rustic Nubian style, interlocked with each other to generate as much shadow as possible, with different oriels, balconies, terraces and wooden shutters, unobtrusively enriched with rural Nubian ornaments, playful red brick walls, wooden Nubian benches in front of the houses or shipwreck planks integrated into the masonry.

The rooms are simple, but tasteful and cozy, equipped with warmly tinted wooden furniture. The daylight shines through four glassy bricks on the dome-shaped ceiling, each one in a different color, so that the room’s atmosphere changes with the course of the sun, yellow in the morning, red at noon, green and blue in the afternoon and in the evening. Clean bathrooms, AC and satellite TV are standard. The honeymoon suite features a romantic four-poster from brass, so narrow, that bride and bridegroom, as the hotel owner explains it with a smile, can’t escape from each other. The swimming pool, near to the houses, looks like a private hidden oasis. It consists of the main pool, a paddling pool for children, a thermal pool and a Jacuzzi.

The guests have the choice between several restaurants, for example an Italian restaurant, a seafood restaurant, the Ali Baba roof terrace and the marvelous Bedouin Tent. An internet café is open 24 hours per day, but think twice before you’re going to print out e-mails. The price at LE 3 (80 cents) per page is indecently high.

The hotel organizes all kind of activities, water sports, horse or camel riding, desert safaris, and it hosts the Colona Dive Club. Last but not least, the private Red Sea beach is located one kilometer away from the hotel, where deck chairs and beach service are free of charge to patrons and it is easily reachable by the hotel’s free shuttle bus service.

One of the most fascinating attractions of »Amar Sina« is the Egyptian farm behind the resort, with traditional Egyptian houses, a garden, an oriental restaurant and a little zoo with pigeons, ducks and other animals, especially popular with children. The guests are allowed to get their breakfast there if they want, with fresh and warm home-made Pita bread, vegetables from the garden and fresh eggs from the chicken house.

Many of the guests return again and again to »Amar Sina« or recommend it to their friends and relatives, apparently because they really felt at home there.

»Amar Sina«. Ras Umm Sid, Sharm El-Sheikh. South Sinai. Egypt.

Telephone: +20–69–6622-22 or -23/24/25/26/27/28/29.

Fax: +20–69–662233.

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Climbing Mount Sinai By Joyce Carta

The Ancient Egyptian Concept of the Soul By Caroline Seawright

The Nile By Marie Parsons

Just What the Doctor Ordered in Ancient Egypt By Ilene Springer

Package Tours Vs. Independent Tours: Which is Best for You? By Jimmy Dunn

Camels, and Trekking in Today's Sinai By Angela Wierstra

Ancient Words: Scribes of Egypt Revisited By Catherine C. Harris