Aqaba Red Sea Snorkeling

 Sept 23 Berenice beach club

Today we have arranged a pick up to spend the day at a beach club. This is a “thing” here. The local beaches are really dirty, but about 10km out of town they have some beautiful beach clubs, for a price. For 13JD (about $26.00 pp) they pick you up at your hotel, showers, pool, beach chairs, towels are provided. We found a beach club that also had great snorkeling. We brought our own snorkel gear, well Andre did, Wendy brought a grandkids one by mistake, so struggled a little to get going, but all turned out great. This is the only part of Jordan that is on the ocean, so a few cargo ships coming and going, but we thought there was going to be a lot more. So we can now check off that we swam and snorkeled in the Red Sea. Lots of fish that we have seen before, and a few new ones. The oysters, or clams, or whatever those beautiful blue shellfish were my favourite, have never seen anything like it before.

Spent the day from 10AM to 6PM there. The first shuttle back to town is at 6PM, they keep you captive to spend more money before they bring you back to your hotel. Lunch at a snack bar, Chicken shawarma again for Wendy, fish and chips for Andre. Typical prices, we have been paying around 6 or 7 JD for lunches, but double that to convert to Canadian. Most expensive is the drinks, a can of coke is around 2 or 3 JD, double that for Canadian!

Not very busy at all at the beach club. There are animators walking around trying to get people to join in for beach volleyball and other games at the pool, we only left our chairs for lunch and snorkel. It was a nice relaxing day at the beach with books after all the touring around we have done.

Back to get the bus at 6PM. We were given coloured wrist bands when we arrived to designate which bus you were going back on, it was a crazy mess at 6PM with way more people than 1 bus, but turns out they had 2 busses running. Also turns out on the way back they just drop you in town, no shuttle directly back to our hotel. We were only about 1KM away, and sun had pretty much gone down so wasn't that bad, good thing Andre had walked this way yesterday so we had an idea of where to go. No SIM card purchased for Jordan so we couldn't phone for the shuttle, and the one person we stopped to ask on our walk to call the shuttle had very limited English, so we just carried on. Funny that we did see the hotel shuttle pass us twice, but both times we weren't quick enough to flag them down.

Back at the hotel in time for showers and down to dinner. Another good buffet, but once again most of the hot food is cold. Lots of good salads to choose from. I will be happy to be done with buffets.

Watching Facebook to see if there are any Mr. & Mrs. Mark Odishaw pictures posted, sorry that we missed the wedding.

A few port terminal on the way to our beach club

View of beach resort, maybe 1/2 of the chairs were occupied

My favourite, not sure if it was a clam, oyster? or what it was.  The color was amazing

You know you have picked a good spot for your day of snorkel when the snorkel tour boats arrive and anchor right off your beach

Sun is setting, time to move on

Back in town we walked by an ancient ruins