Travel Journal:

Peevees' Big Adventure - Diving the Red Sea


Diving the Red Sea
 
This was most amazing. We had to decide between taking a safari to a desert oasis and diving the red sea. Since we are planning to spend 9 days on a liveaboard dive boat, we opted for the Red Sea, so we'd both be a little more primed for that. It was a great decision. We hopped the next flight to the Sinai Peninsula, and met a wonderfully funny man who became our friend for the next week. A concert pianist from New York City named Chris. It was fun to hear he and Alan "talk shop" in the 1 hour taxi ride from Sharm-el-Sheikh to Dahab.

It was a tough decision to make, but we chose Dahab because we'd heard it offered more of the authentic desert experience. Sharm is overdeveloped, and about as charming as Egyptian Disneyland. It does, however, have the easiest access to the Ras Mohammed National Park dive site, which is the main reason people go there.....it is FABULOUS! Dahab was a wonderful spot to be spending our above water time. It is much closer to Mt Sinai, and offers the experience of riding a camel to your dive site......is that tourism at it's best, or what? Also, Dahab is a lot slower, perhaps because of the off season for diving, or that only 2 years ago, it suffered bombings from Bedoin terrorists from the desert mountains. A lot of security measures are changing in Egypt to assure safety for tourists and citizens alike. Live and learn, on a government scale.

The diving was great. Alan and I actually got our advanced diving certificate while we were there. Dahab offers canyon dives, beautiful naturalist dives with hundreds of fish and coral species, a blue hole of its own, and some great night dives. The latter was really pretty amazing. Our two last dives were in Ras Mohammed. These were drift dives and we saw so many different fish there wasn't room in our dive books to log them all! Barracuda were in abundance, though we hear that in the summer there are literrally thousands schooled up. Also heard that summertime there are so many fish you can't see another diver 18 ft away for all the fish. Wow...

Sorry we didn't have any underwater cameras to document this part of our trip. Hopefully Mark Snyder will allow us to post some from the Maldives next month.

 
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