After three weeks traveling the length of the Nile, from Alexandria in the far north to Abu Simbel in the far south, it was time to ditch the history lessons and head to the beach. In Egypt “the beach” means the Red Sea.

The Red Sea offers two primary playground areas. The first, Hurghada, runs along the edge of the Eastern Desert — the vast stretch of desert between the Nile and the Red Sea. The alternative is Sharm El-Sheikh at the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula. Both areas are famed for spectacular diving and snorkeling. Both areas are massively built out for tourism.

I was in Hurghada on my last trip to Egypt 34 years ago, so I was more interested in going to Sharm El-Sheikh this time. And besides, Hurghada sounded quite overbuilt and a bit run down, while Sharm El-Sheikh is reputed to be a bit more stylish and with more appealing places to stay. Nonetheless, the way the transportation worked out, it was pretty convenient for us to visit both, so we ended up booking five nights at each place. From Luxor, it’s a three-hour drive across the desert to Hurghada, and from there it’s a 30-minute airplane hop over the Red Sea to Sharm.

Indeed, the contrast turned out to be stark (though we’ll save stylish Sharm El-Sheik for our next installment). After five nights in Hurghada we are hard pressed to say very much nice about the place — except that the snorkeling was really impressive. From our hotel you could swim right out to a reef teeming with colorful fish and coral and the works. Regrettably, we have no underwater camera, so you only get pictures of the lesser beloved aspects of our stay.

When I first considered (skeptically) staying in Hurghada, I was less than thrilled wth the choices of accommodation. The place is jam-packed with junky looking all-inclusive resorts catering to Europeans who jet into “Egypt” on cheap package holidays. And a lot of resorts here appear to be abandoned, victims of a tourism slump since the revolution of 2011. But then I discovered that the upscale Indian hotel company Oberoi has a property in an area called Sahl Hasheesh at the far Southern end of the sprawl. Since our Nile cruise was also run by Oberoi, they’d include a nice comfy transfer across the desert for us.

But aside from that impressive reef, even the Oberoi was a disappointment. The landscape was too stark. The hotel was strangely designed so that the well-appointed rooms mysteriously faced away from the sea. The food was hit or miss (more miss). And when we took a long drive into Hurghada for lunch outside the resort, the best restaurant we found was dreadful.

And I won’t blame the Oberoi, but we managed to have five days of weather dominated by wind. It was so windy we never wanted to go in the water, which was rough. The exception was the third morning, when the wind was gone and the water was miraculously still, like glass. An English guest told me this was his last day of a two-week stay, and it was the first day without that hideous wind. He also told me how great the snorkeling was, so Jim and I headed to the dive shop to get snorkel equipment for the first time.

When we came out of the dive shop 15 minutes later the wind had come back out of nowhere. We couldn’t believe it! The gorgeous morning had given way to that damned wind, just like that! We did snorkel anyway, and it really was impressive, until the wind and waves caused me to stress out and crash onto the reef. So I left Hurghada with my hands and legs covered in scratches, cuts, and bruises.

And on top of that, Jim came down with a nasty case of food poisoning. So this stop was not a huge success. Let’s hope we like Sharm El-Sheikh better.

From Aswan we sailed north to Edfu to visit the Temple of Horus, which is arguably among the very best preserved buildings from the entire ancient world. It’s also relatively new for ancient Egypt, as it was built by the Ptolemaic pharaohs (Greek descendants of Alexander the Great) between 237 BC and 57 BC. Its roots go back back a bit further, since the Ptolemies built the current temple on the site of an older, smaller one.

But despite its tender age of a little over 2,000 years, it’s been through a lot. Like many monuments from ancient Egypt it suffered greatly at the hands of Christian zealots after the Roman Empire banned non-Christian worship in 391 AD. Throughout Egypt, devoted Christians thereafter destroyed “pagan” images in temples, often scratching out the faces or whole bodies of carved figures. They carved crosses into various parts of the temples to convert them to churches. And they blackened painted surfaces either through burning candles or intentional arson.

As the centuries wore on and the Egyptian gods were forgotten in favor of Christian and then Muslim teachings, this temple and many others were slowly buried by Nile silt deposits and drifting desert sands. The upper reaches of the Edfu temple only barely stuck out from the sand when French explorers found it in 1798. In the late 19th century, French Egyptologists began to remove the sand and mud, thus to discover a remarkably well preserved temple.

After one night docked in Edfu we sailed on toward Luxor, the capital of Egypt during its golden age in the mid-second millennium BC. While we are not big fans of cruises (or most other kinds of organized group travel) there is something pretty magical about floating along the Nile. We love the colors of the deep blue water, the lush green strip of farmland along the edges, the rose-colored sands and mountains beyond, and the bright blue sky above. We love floating past bustling cities. And we love the glimpses of little villages that appear to have hardly changed since ancient times.