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Published: March 15th 2024
My first blog and first visit to Saudi Arabia. It has to be a diving one for diving my 69th country!
From 2005 to 2010, two liveaboard were operating on the Red Sea Saudi side. At the time they had managed to get visa for diver. Well, one day in 2010, the government told them that they had one month to leave the country. Then in 2019 Saudi established a new tourism visa, the road was open again for diving trips to Saudi. With Covid, it meant those operations only resumed in 2022...Tornado fleet with 2 boats and another company just launch another boat. That's not a lot of divers for such a place. The season here extend from October to June.
First a little of geography about the possibilities of diving in Saudi. I'm diving out of Al Lith on the Farasan Banks. There is currently some day trips going out of Jeddah, but that's not very impressive in term of diving. I've got some friends who also stay for few months near the new project of Neom doing exploration dives...but the quality of the pictures clearly doesn't show much impressive diving either.
So if you dive Saudi, it's all about a liveaboard on the Farasan Banks. First step is the online tourist visa. It takes few minutes to apply, sadly not yet on the cheap side...but an easy process. Next, land in Jeddah...that airport is old and nothing to rave about...I felt like being back in the 1980s! They loaded divers in a bus and we were on a three hours drive South to Al Lith. Huge and boring highway with not much of a scenery all way down. From there, it's around 3 hours navigation to Farasan Banks. It's a huge collection of sand banks. We are roughly at the same level as Port Soudan, some 200kms on the other side of the Red Sea, and some 500kms North of Yemen.
As you can guess, there is zero diving out of Sudan right now. I did it years ago and yes, it was more impressive than this trip in Saudi.
I'm diving on the Monsoon liveaboard. Boat is massive and super comfortable. I share this trip with a group of 16 Italians. The two guides are also Italians, so indeed, I improved my italian over
the week. They were decent divers. I'm happy that my guide let me do my own stuffs most of the timeto enjoy 17 nice dives over 6 days, 2 of them being night dives. The plan was 18 dives, but on the last day, we had to face solid winds over 20 knots...so they had to cancel the last dive.
The big highlight of this trip must be the healthy hard corals in massive quantities and the gorgeous architecture. What you will not see here is macro! I couldn't spot a single nudibranch in a week diving! Had few sharks, but we have more shark back at home in South Africa in a single morning! decent amount of rays and eels...and a lot of tropical fishes.
I hope you enjoy the pictures. Next blog coming soon, with a little stop-over on my way to Congo. My next dive is just a week away from here, back in South Africa. I'm not sure I'll blog about this. Two, maybe three more diving blogs are on the program for April, with one of them that should be pretty exceptional!
Last funny comment! Tripadvisor
do consider now that I've visited 97% of the world...what a joke! But yes, I still have to visit 38 countries in the world...27 of them being in Africa!
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Home and Away
Bob Carlsen
I was sure that you had visited 100 countries by now!
I should have known that you only visit countries with great diving and golf!