In Sharm in Egypt, there appear to be a large number of people whose job and responsibility is to sit in a plastic chair and look.
The observation was made by me, but first voiced by a pal of mine Ian, when we met up over there.
Men appear to be working by sitting in plastic chairs, near shops (without actually being the shop keepers), alongside police check points in the road, outside hotels, on the beach, in fact, in every conceivable location you can think of.
They sit and they look at nothing in particular. Some say 'hello' but most say nothing, they just sit, looking around.
I am not sure if this is to do with the heightened 'tight net' of security in Sharm due to the bomb a few years ago, but if not, it is at the very least a peculiar sight.
On the subject of security there are a large number of metal detectors placed in the entrance of hotels and jetty's if ever you are going to get a boat to go diving. the strange thing here is that although I must have walked through 30 metal detectors or more, which beeped in all cases, at no time was my bag searched. I was just waved on.
The most bizarre situation occurred when I went diving and as I was due to catch the boat I was asked to walk through a metal detector. My bag however was taken to the left of the detector and passed over a desk to the left hand side of the machine. Well, inevitably the arch of detection did its job and beeped as I went through. No one stopped me as usual and although it seemed as if my bag was due to be searched by a policeman or some other official in fact it was simply slide across the search table and passed to me on the other side of the arch I had just walked through.
My dive buddy that day was a guy called Chris. We spoke about the apparent security nonsense. We concluded that in Sharm there is everything in place to suggest tight security like police checkpoints, metal detectors, mirror sticks to look under tourist coaches and search tables all over the resort, but in effect it is simply a display or facade of security.
The reality is that no-one is actually searched, no bags are actually looked in, no cars are stopped by the police unless a tourist tries to leave Sharm without a proper visa and security guards wander around the coaches with the mirror, but in fact tend not to look at them, they are on a mobile phone or engaged in a conversation with someone else; they literally look the other way too often.
It would be interesting to know how many, if any bombs have been found after the bomb went off in Sharm. Although I would be very happy to know that none have been found, I fear with the lax application of the existing methods of security available to them, it appears (at least to this untrained tourist) like a big loose net with lots of holes.
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