Underwater adventures in the Red Sea

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So here it is, my final blog of Kevin's Middle East Vacation 2006, summarizing my time in the fabulous town of Dahab, on the Egyption Sinai coastline. This is actually the second time I've been here, the first being last year, as part of my three week trip through Egypt. The main reason I came back is becuase the first time around I was not a good enough diver to do any of the really good diving sites, but this year I am. As such, this final portion of my trip was intended primarily as a diving vacation to Dahab and the surrounding area.

But anyway, to pick up from where I left off in Israel, I spent the night in Eilat, then got up early in the morning to cross the border into Egypt. The border crossing itself was rather uneventful, I left Israel, then entered Egypt with very few delays. The crossing itself is rather interesting. It is the only border crossing between Israel and Egypt, countries that have a peace treaty with one another, but relations are a little tense right now given the whole Lebanon situation and the terrorist attacks in Egypt this April, so I wasn't sure what the situation would be at the border, but not to worry as things were quite calm at the moment, the border was operating normally, and I breezed through with no issues. Once on the Egyptian side I was now in the resort area called Taba, and I made my way to the bus stop in time to catch the 9 AM bus to Dahab, only to find that the bus decided not to show up this morning. None of the locals seemed very surprised by this, so it seems this happens fairly regularly. I guess bus schedules in Egypt are more like rough guidelines than exact timetables. Anyway, since the next bus wasn't supposed to come until 3PM, I ended up having to split a cab with this Japanese guy who had also been waiting for the bus, which was more expensive but not extravagantly so, and so after about a two and a half hour ride we were in Dahab.

Dahab, just as an overview is a fabulous place. It means gold in Arabic, and was originally a Bedouin village along the Sinai coastline. Ever since Egypt got back control of Sinai in the early 80's however, Dahab, along with the rest of the Rea Sea and Sinai coastlines have undergone massive development as resort areas for rich European tourists. With regards to the coastline in general, some areas have been developed better than others. Hurghada is a development disaster, with the entire coast in the area now claimed as private beaches for the various hotels, who have proceeded to dump sand on the coral reefs in order to create sandy beachfronts for their guests, thereby destroying the reefs. Avoid at all costs. Sharm el-Sheik is somewhat better, in that while it is dominated by five-star resorts, it is a well designed resort town, and is right next to the Ras Mohammed National Narine Preserve, one of the best diving locations in the world. And then there is Dahab, about a two hour drive north of Sharm, and alone among the Egyptian resort towns has somehow managed to resist the rampant comercialization that has overtaken the rest of the coast. There has been development, and there is a resort area, but it's away from the main town, which has no big brand name hotels, stores or restaurants present. The tourists that go there are also primarily budget backpackers as opposed to rich package tourists.

There is quite an amusing story that a few years ago they were in the middle of building a McDonalds in Dahab, when it starting raining (extremely rare in Sinai as this is the desert), which caused a flash flood to come streaming down from the montains into Dahab and completely washed the half built McDonalds out to sea. The locals took this as a sign from Allah that he did not want any McDonald in Dahab, and so ever since there has been no attempt to build a McDonalds in Dahab again.

Anyway, Dahab is essentialy heaven on earth to the budget backpacker scuba diver. A somewhat narrow niche market for the travel industry to be sure, but if one is in that category (like myself), then Dahab is a fabulous place. It's not a very big town, but I have been informed that at last count there were sixty-two different dive centres in Dahab, which is illustrative of how good the diving is here. So upon arriving in Dahab I checked in to my hostel, then immediately went over to the dive centre I had used last year and got myself all ready to go for serious diving over the next few days. I ended up doing seven dives in four days, which turned out as follows:

Diving Day One: Eel Garden and The Islands. Two easy shore dives to start off with, mainly so the people at the dive centre could gauge my diving competence on easier dives before I moved on to the more difficult dives. Eel Garden, as the name implies is an area of sloping sand where there are dozens of eels sticking their heads out of ground and swaying about in the current. It has a very difficult entry though. A narrow break in the coral with a significant outward underwater current, in an area of the shore that is very wind exposed and thus can have hard to navigate surface chop. Thus not a fun entry and exit, but the dive itself is great. Second dive was to The Islands, which is a very cool reef just south of Dahab that was the site of an earthquake a number of years ago, which resulted in parts of the reef collapsing. Consequently, the reef structure is now mazelike, and so one can now swim through all the corridors through the reef and have walls of coral towering about you throughout. One of the best dives in Dahab to do, and actually a fairly easy one as well. Entry was not difficult, and the depth was not all that deep.

Diving Day Two: The Canyon and The Bells to The Blue Hole. Probably the two most well known and famous dives in Dahab. First was The Canyon, which is slightly to the north of Dahab, and is a shore entry that slopes gently to 20 metres, and then there is this narrow crevase in the sea floor, in which you drop straight down for 10 metres, and then you are at the bottom of the Canyon, which is this fabulous break in the sea floor that if one is qualified you can swim through steadily downwards to a depth of 52 metres, where the canyon then opens out onto a cliff face. As recreational divers though we were pretty much already at our depth limit at 30 metres, so decended, looked around at the light filtering down from the surface, then ascended, swam around for a while at shallower depths, then exited. Our second dive of the day was the Blue Hole. The Blue Hole is notorious for it's depth (~90 metres) and for the number of people who have died there. There's actually a memorial site on shore for them, although I believe most of the people who died here were technical divers who attempted to dive too deep and did not follow the proper rules for deep diving. As far as recreational diving the site is no more dangerous than anywhere else. The entry point is the best I've ever seen. It's a dive site in itself called The Bells, and is a break in the coral right at shore, but is so narrow only three people can be in the water at a time, and groups must decend single file one at a time. The Bells is a direct straight down drop from the entry point through a narrow chasm that opens out at 27m into the wide ocean. It's so named because it has a bell shape when looking at it from the outside, and is an awsome way to enter the water. After exiting the Bells the route is that one swims around the outside of the Blue Hole reef, before entering and then navigating the inside of the reef. The reef here is fabulous, a sharply dropping off wall of coral stretching as far as the eye can see (about 20 metres). The color of the ocean here is also an amazing deep shade of blue, hence the name blue hole. About 99% of the time there is nothing to see by looking out into the deep see, but this time we got lucky and were able to see this big turtle swiming right past us, which was quite remarkable. They may be slow on land but in water they're quite efficient swimmers. So we continued on around and through the Blue Hole, seeing all sorts of fish and coral, then exited at shore. Probably the best dive I had ever done up to that point. Simply amazing scenery.

Diving Day Three: This was mainly a learning day, as while I was in Dahab I had decided to do my PADI Enriched Air specialty certification course, which allows me to use air tanks filled with mixtures other than normal air, like air with higher oxygen percentages, and so allows me to dive for longer periods of time. So most of my day was spent doing the course, but there was enough time for one dive, which we did as a nice long 60 min drift dive from Eel Garden to the Lighthouse, which is another Dahab dive site. A rather uneventful dive, but fun nonetheless, plus I got my PADI Nitrox certification, which I thought would be quite useful for my Thistlegorm dives the following day.

Diving Day Four: The Thistlegorm. The climax of my Egyptian diving trip, this was a dive that I had been looking forward to and have been wanting to do for over a year now, and is the main reason why I put so much effort into upgrading my diving skills this summer so that I'd be qualified to go on this trip. The Thistlegorm is the wreck of a British freighter carrying military supplies through the Gulf of Suez to British forces in Egypt when it was sunk by German bomber planes based out of Crete in 1941. Since the ship was carrying munitions, the side of the ship was ripped wide open and the ship sank. The wreck was discovered by the FRENCH underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau in 1956, and today is considered the best wreck dive anywhere in the Red Sea. The entire wreck is in very good condition, and it is in water depths of between 18 and 38 metres, meaning it is entirely at a depth that is accessible to recreational divers. That is a rather rare situation for a wreck to be in, which makes this a very popular dive. Getting there is rather time consuming, especially coming from Dahab, as I was required to take a two hour taxi ride leaving Dahab at 2 AM in order to get to Sharm el-Sheikh at 4 AM, at which point we boarded our boat to make the three and a half hour boat trip to the wreck site. We arrived at the wreck at 7:30 AM, where there were already about five boats present. So we anchored a little away from the boat, got on our SCUBA gear and piled into the small inflatable rubber boat with an outboard moter to directly above the wreck. Backrolled into the water, then descended along the anchor line of one of the other ships down to the wreck for the first of our two dives at the site. Descending along the anchor line was necessary since there are fairly strong underwater currents in the area that can carry a diver away quite quickly if one is not careful. The view of the ship as one is descending is spectacular. On our first dive, we did a circular swim around the outside of the wreck. With the exception of the munitions hold that got blown up, the wreck is in very good conditions, and we were able to make out the bridge, main decks on the bow and stern, an anti-aircraft gun and another larger gun, plus the ship's anchor line, propeller, and a whole bunch of other things. It was quite amazing to see. After the first dive we surfaced, went back to our boat, spent about 90 minutes decompressing, which we kept to the minimum safe time since the boat was tossing about quite a bit on the surface and we wanted to get back into the water before anyone started getting seasick. With our second dive the entry was the same as the first, except this time once we got down to the wreck we swam inside through all the various storage holds of the ship, which was also incredible as we got to see military motorcycles, trucks, train locomotives, crates full of Lee-Enfield rifles, and a host of other military supplies, most everything still recognizable although well crusted over with coral at this point. From a diving point of view, this was the most difficult part of the dive, as we were swimming inside the wreck through narrow doorways in semi-enclosed areas that required extremely precise buoyancy control in order to navigate. Hence why this dive is for experienced divers only. So after seeing the main holds we exited the ship and swam around the outside of the wreck for a while longer before ascending back up the anchor line to the surface. All in all a fabulous set of dives, and well sacrificing a night's sleep the previous night. So we go back on our boat, traveled back to Sharm, then back to Dahab by taxi for me. A very long day, but a very good one and one of the highlights of my entire trip.

So the Thistlegorm was the final two dives of my trip, and also essentially the end of my vacation in general, as by going on the Thistlegorm I had delayed my departure to Cairo a day longer than I had planned, and as a result I had about 24 hours left before my flight home left from Cairo airport, and I was still in Dahab, which is a 10 hour bus ride away! So after one last good night's sleep, I got on a minibus to Cairo which had been organized by the hostel I was staying at, did the 10 hour travel to Cairo and arrived in the city a full 8 hours before my plane left. I hung out for a while at the hotel that some of the other people from my Dahab hostel were staying at, then took a taxi to the airport, and after many many hours of waiting, flying, waiting in Frankfurt, and flying again I was home.

Final thoughts on my trip. The whole thing worked out extremely well, and I am very glad I went on it. The middle east is an amazing part of the world that is incredibly important to our culture and history. The sights are just as incredible as advertised, and the people are very friendly. I encounted no security of safety problems while I was here, and I didn't even get sick from the food, which I was very surprised about. Highlights were the four day Fethiye to Olympos boat cruise that I did in Turkey, Damascus, Petra, Jerusalem, and the Blue Hole and Thistlegorm diving in the Red Sea. My only regret is not being able to go to Lebanon due to the conflict in July. At the time that I would have gone, the situation was still too unstable and the ceasefire too tenuous for me to risk it, which sucks 'cause I think that would have been fun to go there under normal circumstances. Anyway, that's it from me for this year. I hope that everyone who's read these blogs has enjoyed reading them. Until my next vacation, goodbye.

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Photos

Dahab
Seaside view of the originally Bedouin village turned budget backbacker resort area

Dive Centre 1
Entrance photo of the dive centre I used in Dahab

Dive Centre 2
The happy staff of Sinai Divers ready to take you SCUBA diving in the Red Sea

Dahab Diving 1
Shore diving in Dahab

Dahab Diving 2
This is a school of Barracudas we swam past

Dahab Diving 3
An isoloated area of fan coral

Dahab Diving 4
A weight belt on the sea floor with a pair of sandles attached. I'm as mystified as you probably are.

Thistlegorm 1
Anti-aircraft gun on the deck of the Thistlegorm

Thistlegorm 2
British military motorcycles in one of the ship's holds

Thistlegorm 3
Diving amongst the wreckage of the ship

Final Photo
Last shot of the trip. This is the Egyptian Museum in Cairo