SCUBA diving

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The ferry from Aqaba to Nuweiba (in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula) is supposed to take an hour. On top of this you need to allow considerable time to work out where to actually go. You have to get a taxi out to the ferry terminal, then go into a run-down building that from the outside looks pretty deserted to buy your ticket, then go downstairs, to a room that’s again from the outside looks completely deserted, to pay your departure tax, then go upstairs again with that receipt to get your passport stamped, in the counter just next to the one where you bought your ticket. After this you have to go back down again, to get out of the building, walk across a sort of large loading zone and wait for a bus to take you the 100 metres or so past the guards and onto the actual ship. There’s no signs telling you this so it takes a while.

Then when I got on the ship, it didn’t leave for two hours. There’s no viewing deck, and it was crowded, mainly with Egyptians, Saudis and Jordanians, and the windows were small and covered with very thick window tinting so it was kind of hard to tell if we were even moving. The actual crossing took a bit under one-and-a-half hours, but for some reason once we docked, it took at least another hour until we were allowed off the boat. They locked the doors on our deck, and when staff attempted to leave some people tried rushing the doors. There were a few angry words in Arabic, which of course didn’t help the few tourists to work out why we were waiting. When they finally let everyone off the ship, we left in single file, with someone checking the passports on the way out. When he came to mine he kept it and told me to wait.

I stood and waited with two Canadian ladies. One was in the same position as me, but her friend had been allowed through. The strange thing was they both had the same visas, with the same stamps. No-one could explain what was wrong with ours. The only thing I could think of was that I’d prepurchased my visa at the embassy in Jordan, rather than getting it on the boat, which meant that the guy who came through collecting everyone’s passports and then handing them back a bit later, hadn’t taken mine. After a while, some guy in a uniform turned up in a beat-up old van and signed something in the passports of the Canadians, so they were free to go. I heard something about the problem being that our passports didn’t have a date of arrival stamp in them, meaning there was no record of our actually entering the country, the start to the visas’ thirty-day validity. Eventually some guy in uniform took me back to the customs building maybe 500 metres away, where there was one other westerner who had a similar problem, and about ten Egyptians in uniform doing not much. With hardly a word one of them took me to a room, flicked through my passport to the Egyptian visa section, and stamped it, then waved for me to go.

By this time it was too late to get the next bus to Daha, about an hour’s drive south, down the Sinai peninsula, half-way to Sharm el-Sheik however there were still a few travelers hanging around the taxi stand. The two Canadians were there, a couple of very young-looking Koreans who couldn’t speak English or Arabic, a laconic German backpacker and a rich American who for some reason wanted to charter a whole taxi all for himself, to Sharm el-Sheik. We managed to convince the American to come with us as far as Dahab, and then with the generally annoying but necessarily haggling, made more complicated by the Koreans, who didn’t seem to want to pay a reasonable amount, we finally worked out a deal, which was about the same price as the bus, I forget, about $10 each I think, about twice as much as if the taxi had been completely full (as opposed to comfortably full). For people who don’t travel much, taxi is a legitimate way to get around in many parts of the developed world, and for example in the Middle East it’s not unusual to get a taxi for trips of many hours. The cost is per taxi, so you normally have to wait till they fill up, or pay a fair bit. It’s normally a little bit, but not much, dearer than a bus. Certainly not as dear as trying to get a taxi from, say, Melbourne to Sydney!

Dahab is Egypt’s backpacker mecca, full of budget independent travelers, as opposed to Sharm el-Sheik which is reportedly full of European tour groups, or Hurghada (across the red sea on the African side) which is reportedly full of rich Europeans and poor Russian hookers. Together with Darm, it’s famous for its scuba diving, and is also where they hold the international free-diving championships and kite-surfing championships. I spent five or six days here, scuba diving and generally hanging out.

I hadn’t scuba dived for four or five years, and never done it much before then, so I did a refresher dive, which is where you go with an instructor and he watches to make sure you don’t do anything stupid and gives you a few pointers. This of course helped me remember how great scuba diving in tropical waters is. Since I had to tick “yes” to a couple of questions on the long medical questionnaire, I had to go off to the doctor to get a certificate to say that I was healthy enough to dive. So off I went to the dive doctor, out in south of town near the kite-surfing area. He checked my ears and shuddered, apparently I have very ugly eardrums, which I already knew, but I guess my eutstachian tubes work fine because it’s not a problem for me when diving, sometimes I just need to descend a little slowly at first but usually no problem. He told me to chew lots of gum before and after dives. His waiting room is dominated by a large Hyperbaric Oxygen Chamber which looked so impressive it almost made me want to stay down too long, so I could get to see it from the inside.

So after that day wasted, I did ten dives over another five days. Five or six of these gave me my PADI “Advanced Open Water Diver certificate” which isn’t as great as it sounds, perhaps other instructors are stricter but it basically just meant that I did more than five dives. It still helped me learn a bit though. Anyway, scuba diving is great, you should all do it. The Red Sea is great, we had good visibility and of course the coral and fish life is great. I saw needlefish, cornetfish, various species of lionfish, a Red Sea coralgroper, crabs, stonefish, porcupine fish, yellow-tailed barracuda, seabream, puffer fish, a white moray, a Devil’s Scorpionfish, goatfish, a blue-spotted stingray, needle-fish, cleaner wrasse, crocodile fish and Golden Belly trevally, among others. For those who’re thinking I have a great memory for fish names, I only remember them because the instructor on some of the dives made me write them down in my dive logbook. I also saw another fish which the instructor didn’t see, which at first I thought I must have been a hallucination. It was a Flatfish of some sort, although I can’t work out exactly which species. My initial thought was that it looked like a Picasso painting, which is how a lot of websites describe flatfish. It was sliding along the sandy floor of the ocean, but on the visible upper side of its body it had two eyes and a mouth. It was also camouflaged into the sand. Apparently several species of Flatfish do this. It looks very weird.

Two dives a day doesn’t sound like much but it takes an hour or more to get your gear ready for the dive, wait for the others, get driven out to the site, listen to the dive briefing, etc. Then the dive might be forty minutes, then it takes a while to clean your equipment and all that. While it’s low energy - the point is to conserve your air - diving still makes you tired. I thought it was just me because no-one seems to talk about it but I did read somewhere that this has to do with the accumulation of Nitrogen in your blood, I don’t know if this is true or not. Luckily Dahab is a great place to chill out, particularly the water front cafes with the really poor service and the large open areas where you can sit all day watching the tankers sailing up and down the Saudi coast just across the gulf, and about half the time their wifi connection even works. Sometimes they don’t pay their Internet bill for months and when you connect to their WiFi, you get a message from their Internet provider saying that they hadn’t paid the last two months’ bills and they owned them so-and-so many Egyptian Pounds.

In case anyone knows the area, the dives I did were Lighthouse, Rick’s Reef, Penguin House Reef, Canyon (twice), Lighthouse, Blue Hole, The Island, Golden Blocks to Moray Garden and a rather lame “drift dive” from Bells to Blue Hole. I had to pay a fortune for the photos in this blog, which were all taken on the same two dives at the Canyon and the Bells to Blue Hole dive, so I hope you like them!

After Dahab I took a bus direct to Luxor, on the Nile. I would have liked to climb Mt Sinai, which isn’t too far away, and is usually climbed in tours that leave Dahab or Sharm at around midnight and climb to the top of the mountain for sunrise, but of course after diving, you’re not allowed up to altitude for 18 hours or so, so I couldn’t really fit it in timewise, as by then I already had my flight to Switzerland booked.

I've written another blog already but due to various problems haven't been able to post it. This one is late because I'm currently in India and there I can't connect my laptop, so it's hard to upload pictures and suchlike, plus I'm having problems with my camera, more about that later. This blog is of course still very late, relating to the period around about 26 July - 02 Aug.

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