Note: This video is about two minutes and 20 seconds long, which is how long the funicular ride is. Enjoy!
You know the drill: you’re on holiday, you’re feeling kinda lazy, lying by the pool is great but hauling your bod back to your room is a trial.
Luckily, the folk at the Four Seasons in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, feel your pain, as we found out when we stayed there last week*. The resort is built over five levels running down the cliffside to the Red Sea below. Which is ace, because it gives buckets of space for the 200+ rooms (they’re self-enclosed little cottages), meaning that the resort feels half-empty even when it’s at full capacity as it was while we were there.
The downside, of course, is that with the pool and beach at the bottom of the resort, the reception and restaurants at the top and the rooms in between, your day could involve a lot of walking, which would hardly be conducive to a holiday state of mind.
There are 67 steps between the pool and the lobby – a lot for holiday feet. So to avoid over-stretching your calves (it’s hot, after all), they’ve had a funicular railway shipped over from Sweden to lug your sunburnt bones back to your room. It goes up and down all day, the journey takes just over two minutes and, as you can see from the video, gives you some pretty nice views of the resort.
And it seems to have quite a following. Not everyone is as energetic as the people walking down the steps you see in the video. Lots of guests take the funicular downhill too. Carrying a towel must be heavy work.
There’s a little fleet of golf carts too, if you want to be dropped direct to your door, but then they aren’t exactly unusual in lux resorts. But the funicular is great. Maybe that’s how they built the pyramids?
If you want to try it out yourself, rooms start at a whopping $350 a night; though at the moment, if you stay six nights, you’ll get an extra one free.
*Disclosure: juliab stayed at the Four Seasons Sharm as a guest of the hotel as part of a feature for another magazine.
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