Dahab and Hurghada

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Days 34-38 (Tue 27 Feb - Sat 3 Mar)
At Dahab I had wanted to scuba dive in the Red Sea but, due to a problem with my ears (they're too big), I could not, so instead I contented myself with snorkelling at a spot known as the Lighthouse. The coral was not as colourful as I had seen on the Ningaloo Reef in North West Australia last year, but there was plenty of it and I was surrounded by colourful fish. I was also lucky enough to see three dolphins, although only at a distance.
On another day I took a windsurfing lesson in which I found I could get moving but I struggled to grasp steering the thing. I had an hour's practice on the following day but the wind was very blustery and I found it hard to control the board and sail at all. To do this windsurfing I had had to go to a resort a few kilometres away from Dahab called Ganet Sinai (at which I did see a lot of Ganets). Ganet Sinai is populated mainly by russian and german tourists, and prices are displayed only in Euros which I found lessened the feeling of being in Egypt.
My time spent at Dahab was very relaxed, but as I couldn't scuba-dive I became bored after a few days, and due to transport timetables I had to wait until the Saturday to move on. That afternoon I took a minibus to the port of Sharm-El-Sheik, the original big diving resort on the Red Sea which apparantly is now extremely touristy, to catch a ferry to Hurghada on the other side of the Gulf of Suez. On the ferry I met Tariq, a half english-half egyptian lad of about my age, and his girlfriend, Christiana, who is Russian. He had taken more or less the same route as me as far as Aqaba in Jordan several times in his previous job as a tour leader. It sounded like interesting work and he gave me some advice about it should I be interested.
Once in Hurghada, which was my first experience of a non-resort town in Egypt, i.e. a real town, I found the bus-station and booked myself onto an overnight bus to Aswan in the far south. I found a street restaurant for some dinner and then wandered around the rubble and litter strewn 'downtown' streets between market stalls, dodging donkeys, mopeds, and boys trundling wooden carts laden with egyptian bread. At 10.30 I got on the bus and tried to sleep as it set off. My doze was interrupted in the middle of the night though by an unexpected change of bus, after which I failed to get to sleep again. Such is the nature of this kind of journey.

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