The Land of no Top Floors, Fri, 18 Mar 2022 | written by Simon
Jemma and Simon in Africa, Egypt

Diving is awesome! After completing our trial dive, we decided to go full in – we’re doing the PADI Open Water Diver certification that will allow us to dive up to 18m. Basically, we came to Dahab thinking we’ll be just chilling and sunning on the beach, and instead we’re doing full days of diving and then spending evenings on studying the theory for the exam. Not exactly the chill end of the trip we envisaged, but pretty awesome.

And to be honest, it’s the only way. We are really unlucky with the weather – the temperatures dropped to below 20 during the day and below 10 at night, and the wind is constantly howling at 40+ km/h. We actually started wearing hats and gloves outside. In those conditions, it’s not like we could enjoy ourselves above the water that much anyway.

In the end, we’ve done seven dives at two sites, and a lot of theory learning. Honestly, we’ve done little else in our evenings than read the theory. Diving also makes you pretty tired, ferry to all the nitrogen that dissolves in the blood under pressure, so we didn’t have much strength in the evenings anyway. There was also some learning stress involved, and frankly, in the end we wish that we had another day or two just to relax before flying back. Especially since the weather got much better now, that we are about to leave. Instead of returning rested, we feel that we now need a holiday from our holiday…

More thoughts about the town:

  • Dahab makes much more sense as a sport destination than a chill holiday spot.
  • It just doesn’t feel Egyptian – even the music in the bars is Western.
  • It’s a real shame that it’s so geared for restaurants – our camp doesn’t even have a cooker in the shared kitchen and the shops are poorly supplied and expensive. We’d really rather not eat out every day, but they make it hard not to.
  • There are also a bunch of half-built resorts a bit out of the centre – they look like someone’s is trying to make another Hurgarda here, and we hope that it won’t work out.
  • The vendors here are almost not aggressive at all! But the prices are much higher, so we are pretty happy we did our shopping before.
  • There are more liquor stores in Dahab than in the rest of Egypt, it seems.

And some thoughts about diving:

  • The coolest thing, even better than watching the reef, is moving in a new dimension. The whole concept of adding up and down to the normal range of movement is amazing!
  • Having said that, the reef is amazing too! We saw:
    • lionfish
    • scorpion fish
    • puffer fish
    • trumpet fish
    • parrot fish
    • clown fish
    • lots of cool jellies (sometimes getting eaten by fish)
  • We spent a lot of time practicing various skills and now know a lot of ways to not die under the water.

Anyway, that’s the end! We think we’ll be returning to Dahab soon for more diving – need to use those hard-earned skills now! And there is still Cairo and Alexandria, so plenty of reasons to be back.

See you, Egypt!!!