Egypt Day 19: Rough Roads and Deep Diving

We had another early morning this morning, as we had a long trek ahead of us. Dahab is approximately one hundred kilometers north of Sharm El Sheikh, with very little in between. We met Dave, our dive master, and two British chaps we'd met on the Ras Mohammed dive and we all trucked out to the van to meet Walid, our driver. Walid set forth, while Dave regaled us with more diving stories on the ride out. In addition, there was a great deal of discussion on the joys of not having children and the possibility of hiring an au pair even when you don't have kids (apparently, it's legal but tricky to explain to the neighbors).

Once we reached Dahab (three security checkpoints, no problems at any), we headed north of town on a coastal dirt track to get out to our dive sites. We actually passed the second dive site, the Canyons, on the way out to the Blue Hole. This drive was a bit harrowing, and included one spot Dave repeatedly referred to as 'the hillock'. Apparently, the state of this dirt track was so inconsistent that it wasn't uncommon for the microbus to be insufficient to the task of surmounting the hillock, necessitating hiring a jeep from one of the locals. Luckily the track had been graded recently, so we had comparatively little trouble (if you don't count the experience of losing traction multiple times on the way up and down 'trouble'). Once we reached the Blue Hole, we disembarked, set up our gear, suited up and then hiked over another small hill to our jump site.

A word about the Blue Hole. The Blue Hole itself is an enormous (think house-sized) natural vertical shaft in the reef. The entrance is at sea level, and the shaft itself slopes a bit with the shoreline's natural slope as it descends to the exit, which is approximately twenty meters tall and spans the depths from eighty-five to one hundred and ten meters (if you follow the sea floor all the way out). This is too deep for recreational divers (you'd need either mixed gas for breathing, decompression stops on the way up, or both), so instead we dove a slightly different route.

Dave led the way on the decent down the Bells, what I can only describe as a natural chimney in the reef - a coral tube with a long vertical gap on the ocean side that was approximately three meters in diameter. I could have touched both sides had I tried. The gap was wide enough to admit a diver, but the path for the planned decent was to drop from the surface straight down the shaft and exit after 'the arch' - a place where the gap was spanned by reef coral about a meter wide, forming a completely enclosing ring of reef we would drop through before exiting the shaft. Needless to say, Mel and I went head first down the shaft. Woo hoo! Oh, and did I mention the exit was at thirty meters? Our deepest dive yet! In fact, the dive center was uncertain about letting us dive it until they saw us in action on our previous dives. Glad to know we made the grade!

Once we'd completed the drop, we then worked our way back to the Blue Hole by slowly ascending along the reef. We saw some fabulous examples of lionfish (poisonous, can be deadly) and scorpionfish (ditto only more so). They're beautiful and very docile, so we were able to get quite close to them without arousing their ire. There were also several large schools of small orange fish with an iridescent blue ring around their eye that were quite docile - we swam right through them without disturbing them too much, and they would swim right up to our masks!

When we reached the Blue Hole, we had to swim over a lip of the reef to enter it. This lip was covered in a fantastic coral garden. Every color, shape and size of coral you can imagine. There was a particular type of branching coral that was inevitably home to a small school of tiny electric green fish - as soon as we would pass over one of these coral, the fish would immediately swarm between the branches of the coral, filling in each and every gap!

The Blue Hole itself wasn't terribly exciting from our perspective (floating on top, essentially). That said, one look into its depths and you immediately wanted to dive to the bottom. The blue of the water in the middle was like something from a Mediterranean postcard - just unbelievable.

As we ascended, Dave grabbed a bottle that had been discarded from the surface. Looking around, I could see literally dozens of bottle caps winking up at me from every corner of the reef. When we surfaced, Dave began to grouse that the locals were destroying the place. It seems the plastic pontoon jetty we could see from our exit point was a new construct, only a month old, and all of the trash we had seen was new as well. The jetty allowed the locals to play in the deeper waters of the Hole - and throw their trash in it as well. I'm glad we got to see it before the locals destroy it.

We then broke down our gear and headed back up the track to the Canyons. This dive is named for several natural features in the reef. We would be diving along the reef to one of them, shaped like an igloo, that marked the entrance to one of the canyons. We would then drop into the canyon from above, swim down it a way, then turn around and ascend back up the bottom of the canyon, exiting through a small opening in the igloo itself! This dive would also take us to thirty meters.

The dive was, in a word, spectacular. Sitting at the bottom of an underwater crevasse, lying on one's back, blowing air bubbles up to the surface a hundred feet above you is both relaxing and tremendously exciting. The exit back through the canyon took us through some tight spaces as well - not for the faint of heart! Not as many fish on this dive, though we did see some particularly large lionfish hanging out in the coral. There was also a small school of long, cigar-shaped fish that appeared to be hunting another school of electric blue fish - no carnage, but a lot of synchronized movement that was amazing to watch. I'm sad to report that neither Mel nor I sighted and large, pelagic fish - no sharks, no big tuna, nothing. Ah well.

Once we completed our second dive, it was time to relax. We all piled into the van and headed for Dahab proper. We ate lunch at the Al Capone restaurant (no joke), where we had some fantastic fruit juices and some okay fish and chicken right on the edge of the water. There we met Dave's roommate Mike, an Austrian and itinerant diver. We spent a happy couple of hours just talking and watching the world go by. Mel made friends with the local cat population, who seemed to be having some sort of meeting under our table. All too soon it was time to head back into town - we all napped in the van on the way back (well, Walid stayed awake - he was driving).

That evening we decided to wander back to Disney on the Red Sea, better known as Na'ama Bay. After staring at several streets of identical local cuisine, Italian and Chinese restaurants and the local Mickey D's, we decided to throw good taste to the wind and proceeded to have dinner and drinks at the Hard Rock Cafe. Before you chastise us, dear reader, know that we'd avoided almost all tourist traps until now and simply wanted to experience the kitsch of a true European tourist trap. Or at least that's what we told ourselves. Astonishingly, the prices for food were downright reasonable by western standards (which is the only reasonable way to judge anything in Sharm - it's that commercialized). Oh, and they knew how to make a Long Island, which is more than I can say for any place else in Sharm.

Once we'd stuffed our faces and watched enough euro-disco excitement performed by the wait staff it was back on the shuttle to the hotel and off to bed. Check out Mel's blog for the next installment: What Camels Do Standing Up.