After spending the day with Em, doing a whirlwind tour around Cairo, I decided to head for a place called Dahab, on the Eastern edge of the Sinai peninsula to relax and above all else, scuba dive.

The bus ride said it was going to take 9 hours, and they were bang on, which is a nice change from the bus rides in Thailand, here the buses were actually early, crazy...anyway, I got to Dahab around 5 in the afternoon; it's a great little city, right on the Red Sea, and although it is a tourist destination, it doesn't feel that touristy. So, I spent about 3 hours looking for a company to dive with. Apparently, unlike Thailand, you cannot purchase insurance from the dive centers in the rare event that anything happens. However, I was told that all the instructors have insurance, so their's will cover you. After going to about 3 places that told me, oh nothing happens, you don't need to worry about it, I finally found a person that told me that instructors had insurance, and on top of that he was a really pleasant, professional and all around nice guy. So, at 9 at night, I signed up to do my advanced course with a place called Deep Blue Divers (anyone going to Dahab to dive, I would recommend this place, the owner Nasser does a really good job of running his business and is a really great guy).

Before I get into that, they have this wonderful dish here in Egypt called Koshery. Apparently if you have been here for 3 months, and eaten it a lot, it is not so wonderful, but if you are just passing through it's great. Basically all it is is noodles and rice mixed with chick peas, onion, lentils, tomato sauce and if you want it, chili sauce. A large plate of this costs oh, 60 cents. You can also get a huge meal consisting of half a chicken, lentil soup, bread, vegetable and beans for about $2.50. Needless to say I had koshery a fair bit in Dahab, and my fair share of chicken.

So, for those of you who aren't familiar with diving, an Advanced course lets you dive to 30 meters instead of 18 and consists of 5 specialty dives, two of which have to be a deep dive and a navigation dive. The other three that I chose were fish identification, a multi level dive, and a night dive (very cool). Also, for an extra $20 I could get two additional fun dives, so I opted on that for 7 total.

The fish you see down there are amazing, I bought an underwater camera and used it on my last dive, but there weren't as many different types of fish, but I have maybe 15 or so photos which hopefully turned out.

Here are a couple pic's of some of the stuff that I wasn't able to get photographed.

A Blue Spotted Ray: I saw this on my second dive, really cool.

A lion fish: I first saw these on my night dive, but saw a ton of them after that. Make sure you don't touch the spines cause they can hurt a fair bit.

A scorpion fish: These critters camaflouge in with their environment, and are really hard to spot. My guide had to show me this one. But once you see one, you can get quite close and they tend not to move. However, as was with our case, when they do you can see bright red pectoral fins.

Blue Trigger Fish: This fish has a "Trigger" or a small spike on the top of it's head, and raises it when it feels threatened. Unlike the ones in Thailand, these ones will not attack divers, and I managed to see one raise and lower it's trigger.

Two of the dives were especially cool, the night dive and a dive called the blue hole. The night dive was just me and my instructor Mohammed, and a couple of flashlights. According to Mohammed, we didn't see that many things, but I thought it was great, it's really peaceful diving at night (as in the day but more so) and you get to see things you don't see in the day (like moray eels, these are ugly scary looking things, with big pointy snouts and long jaws).

The other was the Blue Hole. You start by descending down to 28 meters through this small cavern. Once you are down there, there is just this wall of coral with thousands of fish everywhere on it. The depth it's only about 15 meters off shore, and the wall extends 180 meters down so you can't even see the bottom. If you look down, all you see are fish and blue nothingness. The same can be said about looking up too, where you just get a glimpse of sunlight. It's a really sureal feeling, and although I felt really comfortable, I was breathing a lot heavier on this dive than any of my other dives.

Here's an aerial view of it View image

And this is the best photo that I could find of inside the blue hole: View image

One of the interesting things about Dahab is that it has a lot of Bedouins, which are nomadic people who live in the deserts. They mainly raise livestock, and, well traditionally, would roam the desert finding food for their livestock and setting up tents whereever they went. Now, many of the Bedouins have become stationary, partly due to tourism. In Dahab, some of the dive sites can only be reach by camel treks which are organized by the Bedouins and sometimes involve a stay at the Bedouins villages. I didn't have time to do this while I was there, but I spoke to a few people who said they were quite an experience.

On the last day, I hung out with a Canadian guy that was just starting his advanced course. He had been traveling the Middle East (and a bit of Europe) for about as long as I had been traveling SE Asia. It was cool to talk to him and hear about some of the things he had done and seen on his travels. Around 11 pm, I boarded my bus and headed off to Mt. Sinai.

When I can find a place that will let me upload some of my camera pics, I'll post em (although it's been acting a little funny, so I don't have a lot).

Cheers,
Drew