So, after the Temple of Karnak and the Pyramids at Giza, what did the Egyptians build next? How about a Hard Rock Café and Pizza Express in the desert where Moses walked? Welcome to Sharm el Sheikh and the 11th Commandment: only drink bottled water.
Not everyone, to be honest, seems quite sure where Sharm el Sheikh is. I certainly wasn't when I booked. I thought (a last-minute dotty comment) that it was probably somewhere near Aqaba, with sidetrips to Petra made easy. The reality is rather more detached than that; and the ignorance, perhaps, forgivable.
Thirty years ago, in the wake of the Six-Day War, the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula had nothing to show where the Old Testament world touched the Red Sea.
Tiran island, just offshore, was strategically vital. Nasser had tried to use it to close off Eilat. The Israelis promptly captured the whole of Sinai and then looked for a military staging post. They, in a sense, invented Sharm el Sheikh. Then, after a meeting at Camp David, peace was restored and an international monitoring force was established, which sits even today on Tiran, and the Sinai was Egyptian again. Enter the tourist tribes.
The domain of this transient population stretches some 20km along the coast from the airport. There's "Old Sharm" where the workers live and the bazaars are familiar eastern cubbyholes. That venerable Sharm is about 10 years old. The rest is five years gone at most and still a vast building site. Pell-mell development began when a privatising Cairo government opened its doors to international investors. The millions (in dollars, marks and francs) have come flooding in, ringing the bays with hotels, golf courses, casinos and villas for the rich. Another Las Vegas in the arid middle of nowhere.
Your idea of holiday hell? Perhaps, in the recounting: but the Hiltons and Sheratons and Marriotts aren't all mad. They've bought into a project they think may become one of Europe's great winter playgrounds - and they have more than blind faith in their investment portfolio.
We stayed at the most completed of the artificial sub-towns, Naama Bay. It didn't look promising. This is, literally, a strip in the Vegas style: a double-carriageway between hotels and shopping centres, one side backing on to the sea, the other trailing straight into desert. Somewhere below Benidorm in the charm stakes. Yet appearances are deceptive and the view from the water is what matters.
There, a kilometre of palm-fringed boardwalk curls along the edge of the bay. The beaches are scattered with cafés and bars, the hotels open out into an international array of restaurants. It's a strolling, sheltered place from the town to the west and the great jutting promontory in the east where you can stand and watch the sun set be-hind jagged ranges of mountains as though on a giant Cinemascope screen.
And, of course, the sun also rises with punctilious efficiency. Deserts (amazing non-revelation) are deserts because it hardly ever rains.
Predictable sunshine every month of the year - though it can touch 50 degrees in July and August. This - save for one swathe of visitors - isn't a summer place. Peak seasons are autumn and early spring, before the heat builds; but in the first weeks of February it was already England on a fine June day, with no more than light sweaters needed for evening strolls.
Sharm el Sheikh, though, is a tale of two temperatures: air and water, and one matters just as much as the other. There are two kinds of people on the winter boardwalk: greying panthers escaping the north European chill and hundreds of twentysomethings, come for the diving and snorkelling. The Red Sea remains scuba heaven.
The coral reef in Coral Bay, rather against the odds, still lives and teems with fish. Every hotel along the strand has its own boat and instructors - and there are many more independents as well. They all offer the Near and Middle Gardens, then the wonder of the Far Garden (and the reefs at Ras Mohammed national park, a morning's drive away).
You don't have to be an expert to dive. They'll teach you on the spot; and the all-British team at the Red Sea Diving College did that for my wife. The snorkelling, too, is exceptional. "I think I met a barracuda before breakfast," she said insouciantly.
It's chilliest, the underwater inspectors say, in December and January; but February was still wetsuit bracing. Warm-bath addicts would probably do best in high summer - and hope to make it back to their rooms intact through the desert broil. A morning's diving will cost you around £30, including all the kit. Snorkelling's half as much.
What else is there to do, on dry land? Eating, from the Hard Rock to Japanese and endless trattorias. Drinking at beachside bars. Sunbathing, and the usual array of fitness kicks. But after that the options tend to get a trifle limited: there's the Sinai - and the Sinai. That demands exploration, by jeep on a camping trip far into the wilderness with assorted Bedouin stops, or more conventionally by coach to the theoretical solitude of St Catherine's monastery in the shadow of Mount Sinai, where the queueing hordes make the first night of the Dome look modest.
The 22 Greek Orthodox monks, guides to a rota, will show you the "original", if transplanted, burning bush; the greatest religious library outside the Vatican; and a handy charnel house where every monk's bones since the sixth century is stored amid a mountain of skulls. They'll also tell you how St Catherine was tortured on a spiked wheel, the Catherine wheel. But the monastery itself - and still less the "tourist village" down the hill - isn't really the point of a 400km round-trip: the point is the southern desert, a changing panorama of granite and then sandstone threaded by great flat valleys and etched against a perfect blue sky.
The drive, swirling along empty roads in the clearest of light, is like a hypnotic video game. The gentle walk up Mount Sinai takes three hours, and strategically-sited Bedouins will feed you coffee on the way. It's a place, once seen, that can't be forgotten. £35 a head with a surprisingly decent lunch thrown in.
The rest of the available excursions, however, don't begin to compete. You can fly to Luxor or Petra for a couple of days. You can bus to Cairo and back in 14 hours of travelling time and fit in the Pyramids in between.
But at root Sharm el Sheikh is an island in its own sea of sand and rocky scrub. It's a tourist theme park, Arabyland, not a real place. Nothing grows; nothing's made. The fruit, the vegetables, the population, the infrastructure, are all imported from distant parts. Only the fish arrive direct.
History effectively begins about eight years ago. There are advantages to this. The hotels are all brand new and spankingly tended. The staff, from top to bottom, are brilliantly trained. The waiters speak German, English and French or Italian. Because space is almost infinite, nothing's cramped. Because there is massive investment to protect, tourist police are everywhere and hotel security staff patrol constantly. It's the safest place money can buy.
You bargain for almost everything, of course, but only as a pale imitation of normality: Cairo Lite. Communications are splendid. Instant mobile connections, with the added bonus of internet cafés on tap at £4 an hour. I surfed the net while my wife snorkelled the reef.
The clientele thus attracted is pleasantly eclec tic and by no means British-dominated. Germans, Swiss, French, Italians, Greeks. Here is the European Union taking a break.
Problems? You need to be very sure where the hotel and the travel agency are offering you a room. We stayed at a predictably-efficient Movenpick resort and took a room with a "desert view". That turned out to be code for "on the other side of the road" with a frontal view of the Sinai Water Company - and a good 12 minutes' tramp to breakfast. Anything on the desert side is cheaper, of course, but you need to like hiking. Sea-view room supplements (maybe £40 a week dearer) are probably worth it. Be careful, too, to pick a hotel with its own beach area. The public beaches are slivers of desolation, and repeated entrance fees to the private areas could ratchet up costs alarmingly.
The distance of your hotel from the town areas can also matter. Basically, the nearer you are to the airport, the further from leisured civilisation. A second Movenpick, with golf and a confected tropical garden to turn the Disney Corporation green with envy, exudes luxury in an isolation that could grow a little oppressive - until they finish the town that they're building to keep it company. But there are always mini-buses, moving back and forth, and taxis (at a highly theoretical £2 maximum fare anywhere in Sharm) are everywhere.
The over-arching question, perhaps, is whether the millions flooding in will ever turn a profit flowing out. Sharm el Sheikh isn't wholly on the map yet. It is grandiose work in progress as new hotels and villas fill in the gaps between the bulldozers. Thousands of rooms chasing occupants. Dozens of restaurants in search of the dining classes. "How was your fish?" enquired an anxious manager. "Very bony," I said, with extreme accuracy. "Oh thank you so much, sir. Most kind." It is an endearing enthusiasm. He asked me to go to his rival down the road the next night and ring him to contrast and compare.
Anything can go wrong. Sharm expanded may collapse under the weight of its gargantuan ambition. A tremor of political instability could make horrendous waves. Coral reefs die rather more certainly than they live. But, for the moment, this instant lotusland five-and-a-bit non-jetlagged hours from Gatwick, is trying hard. A week at a time is probably enough, but as a new winter sets in or an old winter lingers, there is a shortish-haul alternative setting out a formidably ambitious stall.
The practicals
The Prestons flew Kuoni charter by Monarch (Thursdays in and out from Gatwick) and stayed at Movenpick in Naama Bay for a cut price £339 each. Seven nights at brochure price cost £459 per person including return flights, transfers, accomodation and breakfast. Details: 01306 747000.
