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Tuesday we went to the aquarium in Eilat. One of the key exhibits is the underwater observatory; they've bult a sizable complex under water so instead of putting the fish in tanks, you effectively put the people in the tank. It was pretty nifty. I had mixed results photographically. (I experimented with both regular and "night" settings on the camera, of course disabling the flash for all of it.)
We had to check out of the hotel before going but we didn't leave for the airport until after 4:00, which posed a bit of a problem. Fortunately for us, one family in our group planned to stay an extra day in Eilat and then head to Petra, and they had had a difficulty wiht the hotel that resulted in them being given a suite, so they offered to store our luggage for those few hours. The tour organizers couldn't have anticipated that, of course, and I think this timing was the one bit of bad planning in this trip. The norm, I suppose, is to check bags at the hotel desk, but there are two problems there: first, our guide told us that just a few days earlier he'd heard from another guide that airport security was searching all such bags (that counting as a bag being "out of your control"), which would have been time-consuming, and second, it's not clear the hotel was prepared to store 22 peoples' worth of bags from a two-week trip.
The family with the suite also had a large balcony and they were willing hosts, so lots of us hung around there for the hour or two before it was time to go. Then it was time to load up a bus to drive approximately across the street to the Eilat airport. (It's tiny; I wouldn't have noticed its presence if we hadn't used it.)
( getting home was not so straightforward )
We had to check out of the hotel before going but we didn't leave for the airport until after 4:00, which posed a bit of a problem. Fortunately for us, one family in our group planned to stay an extra day in Eilat and then head to Petra, and they had had a difficulty wiht the hotel that resulted in them being given a suite, so they offered to store our luggage for those few hours. The tour organizers couldn't have anticipated that, of course, and I think this timing was the one bit of bad planning in this trip. The norm, I suppose, is to check bags at the hotel desk, but there are two problems there: first, our guide told us that just a few days earlier he'd heard from another guide that airport security was searching all such bags (that counting as a bag being "out of your control"), which would have been time-consuming, and second, it's not clear the hotel was prepared to store 22 peoples' worth of bags from a two-week trip.
The family with the suite also had a large balcony and they were willing hosts, so lots of us hung around there for the hour or two before it was time to go. Then it was time to load up a bus to drive approximately across the street to the Eilat airport. (It's tiny; I wouldn't have noticed its presence if we hadn't used it.)
( getting home was not so straightforward )