Dahab strip
Lunch at El Salam - stressful
Taxi rank with Sinai Mountains in the distance
Day3 and geared up!
Robyn does the Macarena…aaaaiiii!
The Blue Hole
After an arduos 23 hour coach trip from Luxor across to Hurghada, up to Suez, across the Sinai Desert Peninsula to Taba and down a short distance from there, we finally reached Dahab. It was worth the effort. Dahab is quite a quirky little place with plenty of character and charm. It was originally a bedouin settlement, the remnants of which are thankfully still evident, which was only really opened up to the rest of the world in 1986 when some dusty traveller discovered that the volcanic reefs off it's shores were some of the best in the world to dive in.
Dahab is another place blessed with a lot of rugged natural beauty. A large mountain range resembling a collection of giant hardened mole hills, looms large a short distance from the sea, coupled with the varying view of a mountain range in the opposite direction out across the Gulf of Agada (25kms) in Saudi Arabia and the deep blue sea in between, creates a memorable setting. The narrow 'promenade' is littered with rustically presented restaurants and cafés (with great chillout areas) along the length of the small bay and the mantra for almost every one of them is to come in and chill out. I would say Dahab is still relatively untouched by commercial tourism in comparison to other Egyptian resort towns such as Sharm-el-Sheikh and Hurghada, but the signs are there that it is heading that way. One can only hope that when it does go that way they maintain the integrity of the town and it's people.
So Robyn and I did our Open Water 1 diving qualifications. This involved 3 pretty intense days of theory, drills, tasks and getting to know and be comfortable with all your gear. Days started promptly at 9am and didn't finish before 5pm. Lunch breaks were spent revising and going through our 'homework' and on the final day an exam! You may think that this doesn't sound like much of a holiday but it was and we both found it incredibly good fun and I would highly recommend it! Diving is the most surreal experience and something I never pictured myself doing for some reason but I am eternally grateful that I've tried it because it was brilliant.
Once we finished our Open Water qualification, our instructor (Sophie - who was excellent) was leading two dives a few days later and our fellow student, Jon-Paul was joining them. One was a 'drift dive' at a reef called The Canyon and the other a 'deep dive' at The Blue Hole. These dives could go towards an Advanced Open Water qualification, for which you need to do a total of 5 different types of dives. Upon reassurance that we were more than ready for it we decided to join them. Well the dives were superb and were undoubtedly the highlight of the trip.
The Canyon was I guess, a fairly routine sort of dive however at 18m you descend through an intimidatingly narrow hole into what is essentially a cave which at the bottom is just over 30m deep. One by one we descended like parachuters into the hole and once we were all there we casually swam towards an exit a short distance away. At all times on the dive we were surrounded by different types of brightly coloured fish, large and small and by this time we were feeling very much in control and comfortable with our buoyancy and breathing.
The Blue Hole was our next dive. It is famous for having 'no bottom' although it's rumoured to be around 800m deep (that's almost three Eiffel Towers deep). Diving along the reef shelf at just over 20m was once again incredibly surreal. All these new sensations twitch to life around your brain, like dusty switches that have waited a life time to finally be turned on. One of these sensations was the feeling of flying. I was at the back of the group of five and to the right and towering well into the distance above us was the life-infested reef and in front, below and to the left as far as the eye could see, turquoise blue getting ever darker to finally an inky black. In front of me, four divers gliding through the blueness. Looking upwards to the swarms of fish and finally light rays at the surface funnelling down and refracting and reflecting through the water, illuminating things on the way down. All the while maintaining a yoga-like calm, the only sound - your own controlled breathing. Magical!
