Say Dahaab

Hello

A quick message from Dahab. It's the penultimate place on our tour (Mt Sinai's next, before we head back to Cairo), and we're all loving it. The waterside restaurants here are so much more inviting than those in Sharm El-Sheikh, where we were last, and are the perfect places to sit and soak up the atmosphere of the town. Sharm, the place many Egyptians aspire to holiday at, is very touristy, and in many respects feels just like an indistinct European resort, but Dahab is completely different. Famed primarily for its diving (though it also has drink, drugs and a stray dog problem), it's also a town where independent tourists can kick back and relax following an exhausting time sightseeing, and that's just what we've been doing. Our schedule for this trip has been pretty hectic (in one week we've done Cairo-Aswan-Abu Simbel-Aswan-Luxor-Sharm [an epic bus journey of fifteen hours, for the duration of which we had to sit in the foetal position]-Dahab), and now we're getting ready for tomorrow night's journey to Sinai. We'll get there in the early hours of the morning, and climb to the top, where Musa (Moses) is said to have received the Ten Commandments from God, in time for the sunrise. Until then, though, some more swimming and snorkelling awaits. I did some snorkelling in Hurghada and in Sharm, but now I've managed to find a way to keep my specs on underwater without water entering the mask. I tried it for the first time this morning, and I had a much better time compared to Hurghada, as now the coral reefs have come alive for me. I've also been practicing my swimming every day, and have ditched the life jacket I wore the first time (the Red Sea is so salty that drowning is a tiny risk for snorkellers), and so can follow fish by diving down with them, but the water pressure becomes too uncomfortable at a depth of around 4m.

The area where we've been swimming is known as the Blue Hole, famed as a snorkeller's paradise but a diver's graveyard. The reefs here are incredible and so close to the shore, but the ones that the divers explore are between these narrow fissures, and some inexperienced divers have suffered from the bends there after trying to ascend too quickly. In fact, just yesterday a Russian guy had blacked out at a depth of 65m and had drowned. As I write there is an expedition underway to reclaim the body.

Anyway, we’re going back in. See you later.

Yours,
Mus