Diving
Trip Start
Aug 25, 2008
1
2
7
Trip End
Sep 15, 2008
Dahab,
Egypt
Monday, September 1, 2008
We wandered up and down the beachfront, finally settling on Seven Heaven based mostly on the fact the air con dorm cost LE20 a night, plus the lukewarm recommendation of an American girl we met in Cairo. Straight away Dave and I signed up for our respective dive courses, since the attached dive centre (Divers Down Under) seemed to be one of the cheapest around
Bird
. My instructor was a (generally) chilled out English/Israeli guy called Avi, who turned out to be a great teacher, but was pretty jaded with the management of the dive centre itself (he was not the only one).The advanced course took five dives spread out over a week. The highlight for me was diving the Canyon, about 20min drive north of Assalah where the hostel was. Here volcanic activity had formed a steep-sided crack in the sloping bottom lined with soft and hard corals. Avi and I dropped to about 30m and took our fins off - pushing off from the sandy bottom meant you could bounce up into the middle of the canyon, scattering schools of fish to either side, and the royal blue water beyond was sharply outlined by the edges of the reef on either side. Ascending through the narrow crack in the rock you exit via 'the fishbowl' - a cave containing a resident shoal of glassfish circling like a whirlwind. Rolling onto your back and looking upwards through the cracks in the roof you can see the spiky outlines of about 20 lionfish with the sunlight filtering through the translucent skin between their spines. We also did a night dive at the Lighthouse, right near to the hostel. I spotted cuttlefish and squid rossing the narrow beam of the dive torch, and black and yellow moray eels were winding through the reef. When you turn off the light you can see the flashes of phosphorescence from plankton like blue sparks coming off the blades of your fins
The beach towards Blue Hole
.Dahab itself isn't really anything that special - prices are about on a par with Cairo, and most of the restaurants are touristy places along the beachfront with hustlers in the street trying to rope you in every time you walk past. Fortunately most of them have given up on us by now, though there are one or two extremely persistent ones near the bridge. The best way to spend the evening is to go to the Christian liquor store to buy Sakara beers, then find a restaurant that doesn't serve alcohol, get a seat and order a shisha and some bread and dips and drink your beers by the sea. There are one or two places that serve cheap local food in the side streets (though it's Ramadan now so they are usually closed during the day) plus a couple of restaurants that serve reasonably-priced seafood (most are a total rip-off).
Having finished our dive courses I'm going to do a trip to dive the Thistlegorm wreck and Ras Mohammad National Park, but after that there's not really that much left to do in Dahab - the dive centre probably won't let us borrow their snorkelling gear for free any more! Might have to head for Mt Sinai pretty soon...
