Dahab on the Red Sea

I'd seen just about all of the amazing temples and monuments that I could handle for the moment so I made a spur of the moment decision to change my plans and take the plane from Luxor to Sharm El Sheikh on the night of the 29 May. My booking agent in Cairo and the people at the Luxor airport couldn't have been more helpful. They cancelled my train trip and hotel and bus for the next two days and rearranged to have me collected at 12:30am in Sharm El Sheikh and driven the 120 Km to Dahab. This has saved me more than two days of travelling and sitting about, and give me more time near the Red Sea and back in Cairo. Service and courtesy towards tourists in Egypt is very good. If they could get the toilets to work it would be great.

So here I am in Dahab, about half way down the East coast of the Sinai Peninsular. On a clear night you can see the lights of a Saudi city that no-one around here seems to know the name of. The Red Sea is THE place in the world to enjoy scuba diving. Here in Dahab I can literally walk 20 paces down the beach from the dive shop, part of an hotel complex, and drop into an other world of corals and fish and colour and wonder. Tonight is my second full day (3rd night) in Dahab and I've already taken five dives, each with different depths and challenges (underwater navigation, deep dive with nitrogen narcosis test, etc.). Tomorrow I'll take two more and then I'll have my Advanced Open Water ticket which entitles me to endanger myself in deeper and more difficult ways. Features so far have been sites like The Caverns, which involves transferring from the shallow beach-side water to deep water through a series of passageways through and under a coral ceiling, and Blue Hole, where the one-metre deep water, ten metres from the beach, drops like a cliff edge to 110 metres. (You don't go to the bottom - you would die). Then we glided over a relatively shallow saddle in the coral to the open water where the depth rapidly goes to 800 metres and the coral wall is filled with all types of creatures, including some very large groper, millions of tiny multicoloured reef fish, plus sweet-lip, parrot-fish, lion-fish, moray eels, barracuda, rays, anemones, soft and hard corals. It's just fabulous.

I've just finished a very pleasant meal of Egyptian salad and babaganoush whilst sitting on Persion rugs in the open air under a full moon with reflections on the calm waters of the Red Sea. Life is good.