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Published: December 18th 2008
After all the temples, tombs and pyramids we needed another time out and headed for the Sinai and the Red Sea. It’s not really around the corner and we spend 18 hours in an overnight bus. Wasn’t that back as I donned on my eye mask, put in the ear plugs and blew up my inflatable travel pillow. Travelling in style...
Dahab has the dubious fame of being Sinai’s backpacker friendliest town and a great place to relax and spend more time than intended. Who are we to argue against this and we stayed longer than intended.
That had not much to do with Dahab itself but with me and the cold that I got from one of the Japanese guys on the Felucca. I tended to the bed and discovered the joys of 8 hours of TV each day in our luxurious (for our standards) accommodation. Not to mention the little cats which came and visited me.
Kellie on her part had better things to do and left me after 2 days to throw herself into the deep blue sea. She decided to do an Open Water dive course and can now plunge into the waters around the
world as a certified diver.
Once I got better I had plenty of time to walk around Dahab which takes around 30 minutes to do the full tour. From speaking to people who have been here before Dahab got a lot touristier on the last 8 years but it’s still far away from the tourist enclaves of Sharm El Sheikh or Hugarda. It has a nice yet touristy feel to it and there is plenty of opportunity to sample banana pancakes with heaps of ice cream. Yum.
I always wanted to do an Advanced diver course and I especially wanted to do one once I heard of the
Thistlegorm. The Thistlegorm is an English merchant ship which was sunk by the Germans during the Second World War and is now considered one of the top dives in the world. So once my ears were unblocked again and I could risk diving without blowing my eardrums I started my course.
There isn't much to diving and the advanced course just teaches a few more skills but nothing too serious. One part of it is to dive to 30 meters. The problem with diving is not the water itself but
strangely enough the air you breathe. Below 24 meters there is a fair chance of getting nitrogen narcosis which in itself is not that harmful but it can cause anything from disorientation to silly behaviour. Affects everyone differently but is said to be the same as being drunk. My dive instructor told me of divers offering their mouth piece to fish…
Kellie the proud owner of an open water license wanted to dive one of the more famous dive sites in Dahab which was part of my dive course but happens to be below her legal limit of 18meters. So she decided to come along for the ride (dive). That meant studying some more and plunging into the underwater world with me. The whole dive was quite interesting as we descended to 16 or so meters and then saw the purpose of this dive. The aptly named canyon. It is a smallish crack in the seabed and not like anything I have ever seen. No idea how a crack like this could have formed. It is an additional 12 meters deep and something like 50 or more meters long. The perfect place to see what happens if you go down
Our Hotel
Just to proof that we didn't stay in bamboo huts all the timeto 30 meters. Actually not much happened. We descended as usual and there is no difference between 3 and 30 meters. We had to do a couple of tests to see how affected we are by the nitrogen narcosis but I think we did rather well. Didn't feel anything at all but that's what I claim after a couple of beers too until I stumble... Anyway we were ready for the Blue Hole which is yet another world famous dive site. It is another strange underwater phenomenon and as you can guess it is a hole and it looks rather blue. Strange indeed as it’s just meters of the shore and goes down to 130 meters. The dive starts however a bit further away at a trench which goes vertically down to 25 meters. From there it’s along a wall which drops off to depths only a submarine can handle. It is quite fascinating to swim along a wall and the only thing you see in the other 5 directions is blue water and nothing else. You really don't want to mix-up up and down...
Once finally certified as an Advanced Diver and ignoring that I didn't feel that
Dahab promenade
Restaurants on the right, souvenirs on the left. What else do you want? advanced I booked my trip to the Thistlegorm. The whole trip starts at 11pm at night as we needed to drive down to Sharm El Sheik and we arrived at our dive boat at 1am in the morning. We quickly (safety first) assembled the dive gear and then grabbed a few more hours of sleep. At 8am it was finally time to put on the scuba equipment and to plunge into the sea. The first dive goes around the wreck and is amazing. The ship must have sunk very fast as it literally just went down. It’s no wonder that it sunk fast as there is a massive hole in the front section of it. The big bombs the German planes dropped landed on ammunition that the ship was carrying and made things worse. The explosion was so great that the two steam engines that were towed to the deck were thrown through the air and lie now 30 meters beside the wreck. Apart from all this the wreck is in an amazingly good condition. Not much has rusted away and a lot is still very visible. We visited the anti aircraft guns, the propeller which looked spanking brand new
and swam alongside the wreck for a while. We also saw some mini tanks which were tossed around by the explosion and some life ammunition of the big sort on which you can still read the manufacturing date 1925. Guess they were stockpiling for a while.
The second dive was even better as we went into the storage holds of the ship. The decks contain heavy trucks, army jeeps, loads and loads of motorcycles and also things like boots, spare airplane wings, ammunition and electrical cables. Again everything in amazing condition if you consider that it was underwater for more than 60 years. It was quite tricky to swim through as in some areas there was a mere 1.5 meters between the trucks/motorbikes/jeeps and you don't want to touch both. Truly amazing stuff. We also went into the captain’s quarters and his bathroom which still contains his bathtub and sink.
The wreck is also home to quite a lot of fish and I saw some yummy looking tuna, massive angelfish, a scaringly large (and I mean meters large) moray eel and lots of other sea life but who looks at that if you have a wreck like this
next to it.
Oh you might be glad to hear that only 9 sailors lost their life and most of the crew was rescued.
The last dive of the day was unfortunately not at the wreck but at the equally good Ras Mohamet dive site. Ras Mohamet is yet another world class dive site and has a stunning variety of corals, yet another wall which drops down to very scary depths and a fish life which is stunning, we even saw two very curious and friendly turtles and a whole lot of bathtubs and toilet bowls. The toilet bowls and bathtubs are courtesy of yet another wreck the Yolanda which sunk here quite a few years ago. The wreck disappeared as it was pushed over the cliff by a heavy storm (how heavy must a storm be to drag a whole shipwreck over a cliff??).
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