Become a Member
Travel

White beaches? I’d much rather have a Red Sea

You don’t have to fly 10 hours for lush hotels, winter sun and palm trees...

January 14, 2010 12:13
The Bay of Eilat: Israel’s Red Sea resort with its beach, palm trees, pools, malls and year-round sunshine

ByJan Shure, Jan Shure

5 min read

Lord Levy isn’t happy. Actually, that isn’t strictly accurate; sitting in warm sunshine, eating breakfast with his wife Gilda, in Bubbe’s, one of two breakfast venues at Eilat’s Royal Beach Hotel, the chairman of Jewish Care seems remarkably happy and relaxed, especially at the end of a year during which JFS (of which he is president) has been riven by seismic legal judgements, and in which he underwent emergency heart bypass surgery.

However, there is one issue that is definitely exercising him: it is that so few of his fellow UK communal leaders take their winter holidays in Eilat, preferring — as he notes — to head to the Caribbean.

It would be foolish to suggest that Israel’s Red Sea resort can compete with the Caribbean’s endless eye-ravishing vistas of cerulean sky, azure ocean and palm-dotted silver sands.

But even ignoring the fact that some of the islands are less glamorous than they appear in the travel brochures and that Eilat is less than half the flying time (just five hours from Luton with one of the new direct flights courtesy of Isrotel’s Sun Express), Eilat still has a lot to offer for anyone in search of seriously warm sunshine in a period when the northern hemisphere is collectively slipping on the ice and scraping its windscreens before the school run.