Best Day Trips From Sharm El Sheikh
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Sharm el-Sheikh’s own resort strip covers diving and beach time, but a handful of day trips reach further into the Sinai and beyond it. Two of these, St Catherine’s Monastery and anywhere overland toward Cairo, cross into the Sinai interior, which changes both the visa rules and the safety picture, so read the advisory note below before you book either one.
Travel advisory: the Sinai interior beyond the St Catherine-Nuweiba-El Tor road carries an “avoid all but essential travel” warning from most Western governments, and North Sinai further away is a do-not-travel zone. St Catherine’s Monastery specifically sits inland and should only be visited on an organized tour, never independently. Sharm itself, Dahab, and the boat-based dives below all sit within the coastal carve-out that’s treated as normal, low-risk tourism. Check your government’s current advisory before booking any interior route.
Dahab and the Blue Hole
Dahab sits about 80-90km northeast of Sharm, roughly 1-1.5 hours by road, and it’s a different kind of place entirely: a laid-back former Bedouin fishing village turned diving capital, with none of Sharm’s resort polish. The Blue Hole, a few kilometers north of town, is a submarine sinkhole over 100m deep with a genuinely notorious reputation, but that reputation belongs almost entirely to divers who attempt “the Arch,” a submerged tunnel at around 55m, without the technical training and gas planning it requires. The surrounding reef itself is safe and popular for ordinary recreational diving and freediving, and police now monitor the site to keep untrained divers off the Arch. Dahab is also one of the world’s best windsurfing spots, worth knowing if diving isn’t your thing.
Ras Mohammed and the Straits of Tiran, by boat
These are covered in depth in our things to do guide , but as day trips they’re worth flagging here too: Ras Mohammed National Park, about 12km southwest of town, and the Straits of Tiran reef chain are both boat-based excursions from Sharm’s marinas, and operators commonly treat them as staying within the free entry permit zone since neither crosses an interior checkpoint. Confirm this with your operator regardless. Tiran Island itself is Saudi Arabian territory since a 2016 transfer, though Sharm boats still dive its reefs daily.
St Catherine’s Monastery and Mount Sinai
This is the one genuinely inland day trip, roughly 2.5-3 hours’ drive each way through the Sinai interior, and it’s normally sold as an organized tour rather than a self-drive option. St Catherine’s Monastery, built 548-565 AD under the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, is the world’s oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery, home to the traditional site of the Burning Bush and the world’s oldest continuously operating library. UNESCO inscribed the wider Saint Catherine Area as a World Heritage Site in 2002, citing its importance to Judaism, Christianity and Islam alike. Mount Sinai (Jebel Musa), rising to 2,285m nearby, is the traditional site where Moses received the Ten Commandments; most visitors climb overnight via the camel path or the steeper 3,750 Steps of Repentance to reach the summit for sunrise. Because this route needs the full Egyptian visa, not the free resort-strip permit, and crosses advisory-sensitive territory, book it only through a licensed operator and confirm current guidance close to your travel date.
Colored Canyon and desert safaris
The Colored Canyon, a narrow sandstone slot canyon near Nuweiba, is usually bundled into a Sinai jeep or quad-bike day trip: up to 40m walls carved by erosion, roughly 800m of hiking through a passage that narrows and widens as you go. Most desert safari operators pair it with a Bedouin tea stop and, on longer trips, a camp dinner under the stars. These stay within the coastal strip rather than pushing deep inland, so they don’t carry the same visa or advisory complications as St Catherine.
Cairo and Luxor, by flight
Both are realistically flight-based excursions rather than road trips from Sharm; treat either as an overnight rather than a rushed single day, since the round-trip flight time alone eats into whatever hours you’d have on the ground (verify current flight schedules before planning around a specific day). Luxor rewards travelers with an extra day or two to spare for ancient Egypt properly, while Cairo adds the Pyramids and the Egyptian Museum to the mix.
For where to base yourself between day trips, see our best places to stay guide, and for the full sights list back in Sharm itself, our main travel guide covers Naama Bay, the Old Market, and the rest.
One concrete tip: book the St Catherine overnight trip, if you’re doing it, before anything else on your Sharm itinerary. It needs the most lead time for the full visa and a licensed guide, and everything else on this list is far more flexible to slot in around it.