Orange Bay

A sandbar island off Hurghada with genuinely white sand and water that shades from near-transparent to deep turquoise within a few metres. It is the most photographed spot on this coast and the most popular day trip out of the marina — which is worth knowing before you book, because the appeal and the drawback are the same thing.

A typical day

• 45–60 minutes out by boat, longer by yacht, shorter by speedboat
• One or two snorkelling stops on the reefs on the way
• Several hours on the island — sunbeds, shallow water, a long wooden jetty
• Lunch aboard or on the island, back at the marina late afternoon

Getting the best of it

The island fills up in the middle of the day. Boats that leave earliest get an hour on an almost empty beach, and a private or speedboat charter buys you that hour. The snorkelling around Orange Bay itself is decent but not the best on the coast — if reefs matter more to you than sand, Giftun or Abu Ramada are the better trips.

There is a separate island entry fee, usually not in the boat price. Bring reef-safe sunscreen; shade is limited and the reflection off pale sand and water burns faster than people expect.

Orange Bay sits on the edge of the Giftun Islands protected area, declared in 1995 to slow the damage that Hurghada's expansion was doing to the reefs. The islands themselves are uninhabited outside the day-trip infrastructure, and the surrounding waters have mooring buoys precisely so boats stop dropping anchors onto coral.

The rules exist because the alternative was visible. Through the 1990s and early 2000s the reefs closest to Hurghada were badly hit by anchoring, landfill and construction runoff, and several near-shore sites never recovered.

What the sand is

The white sand is not mineral. It is biological — pulverised coral skeleton and shell, most of it processed through the guts of parrotfish, which bite off coral, digest the algae and excrete the rest as fine carbonate sand. A single large parrotfish can produce a substantial amount of beach in a year. The reef and the beach are the same material at different stages.

The nesting islands

The Giftun group is an important seabird site, with breeding colonies of white-eyed gulls — a species found only in the Red Sea and gulf of Aden — and several tern species. Parts of the islands are closed for that reason, and the closures are seasonal rather than permanent.