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Major Progress!

I went up to the hotel at sunset last night to see how its moved on since our last wave day up there. The progress has been huge compared to the rest of the year!

6 of the rooms (there is 24 total) are now fully tiled, bathroom floors and walls and the bedroom floors and edging. They are clearly working their way round the whole place to do this, there are loads of boxes of tiles all over the place waiting to be used.

In the main reception/ restaurant building they have dug out foundations and put cages in, to make the walls inside the shell that is already built.

Outside the buildings they have now laid concrete both sides of the bedrooms to create the pathways between rooms and the beach or reception, and there is a small wall built between the path and what will be the gardens down the middle of all the rooms. Out the front of the hotel they have flattened a lot of the land, and also between the back of the hotel and the beach they have flattened all the dunes which already makes access to the beach much better for us.

This movement has been rapid, and its the most people i have ever seen up there working on the hotel. They have now given us the date of completion as Feb 1st 2010. If they keep this level of improvement up it looks like it may finally come true!

I'm afraid to report that progress on the hotel is still slow if any.  However this doesn't stop the action, here's some pictures from yesterday, 3.3m - 4.2m were clung on to as the waves built and jumps just got bigger and better.  It was a fantastic day leaving everyone exhausted, especially after the downwinder back to the bay.  Todays wind is the same and the point is going off, and forecast for tomorrow is also great so maybe get back to Habibi for some more big wave action.

A little amount of progress has been made on the hotel, there are some nice steps out both sides of the bedrooms now, and some brickwork has been put around the buildings, but sadly no change has occurred in the main reception buildings or inside the bedrooms.  However we did recently have the pleasure of meeting one of the local camels who had come to check the place out himself, and we have been having some great sailing sessions up there too.

It's been a little while since I updated the Habibi Beach Blog so let's bring everything up to date. First, some nice water shots taken a week or so ago when Jem Hall was out on a coaching week. The shots were actually taken on his 'day off'. We went up not really expecting much as the forecast was for quite light winds, but it kicked in for a couple of hours and gave some excellent waves for jumping and even for riding. It's actually much easier for swimming about and taking pictures than I'd imagined and I managed to get a load of nice shots and not destroy the camera, which makes a nice change! I've also heard that we've managed to sneak one of them into the contents page of the next Boards mag, so watch out for that.

 

More importantly, what's happening on the building site? There are no dramatic advances in hotel building to report, but there are signs of life. The rooms have received another coat or two of whitewash and some fancy decorative brickwork around the doors and windows so that they finally look a bit more like a hotel and less like a prison! The main reception area is about twice the height of the pictures below, and they've now remembered to put some windows in that as well. We has some clients sailing at Habibi who worked in the building trade in the UK, and while they had a bit of a chuckle at some of the workmanship they generally gave it a thumbs up. 

I would have taken some pictures, but faced with a dilemma of whether to go for a sail or set up the camera for land shots the waves called me. On the plus side I got a sweet back loop!

I'm back out to Egypt in a week's time and will do a proper Habibi report with shots of the hotel once I get there, and hopefully be able to report an updated estimated date of opening... 

Update Jan 2009

It's been a little while since I updated this blog, and that's because it's been a little while since much building work happened up at Habibi Beach!

We don't know exactly what the delay is, but we have been told that there's now no real chance of the hotel being finished by March this year, but the intention is still to get it finished around early summer time. Unfortunately that's a sign of these credit crunch times!

On the plus side, there's still been plenty of windsurfing action up at Habibi, and I'll get Danielle to post up some photos. Just to make you jealous if you're stuck in the UK's coldest winter since records began (well it feels like it anyway!)

happy new year to everyone...