I ve just
spent a few days at a coastal resort here at the bottom of the Sinai peninsula.
And its
definitely a major “resort” town… It’s a city sized resort with all the
expected facilities… Youd be hard pressed to spot any significant differences
from any of the major resort cities in Mexico like Puerto Vallarta or Cancun…
But I was expecting that so no worries J
I came
here because it’s the only way around the peninsula to Israel at the moment
(the road across the top of the peninsula from Cairo is about one sixth the
distance but its not useable by civilians/tourists at the moment because of
some home-grown terrorism issues there in Egypt at the moment… so I had to come
the long way.
But Im
also here to take a bit of a break from riding again and I planned to do two or
three days of Scuba diving and a day or so of just laying around on the beach
in the sun.
The Scuba-diving
in the Red Sea is world class and Ive never been here before so I figured I
should take advantage of the opportunity and see it while Im here. And after
three days of diving I have to say it is indeed high quality diving… The
visibility is excellent. The quality and variety of hard and soft corals is
also excellent (and the colours are very rich and impressive too). The fish
life is a bit less than Ive seen in other places but not by much and all “the
usual suspects” are here in large numbers (for those who recognize the
different tropical marine fish). The only down side (and its slight) is that
there is some damage to the coral from all the diving traffic that it sees, but
corals mostly recover quickly from mechanical damage and it didn’t detract much
from the diving.
The big
down-side is that diving is about the only “activity” for tourists to do here (apart
from the usual para-sailing, and banana-boat rides ec) and so there are HUGE
numbers of divers at every dive site every day… Seriously it’s a bit of a zoo…
There must be several hundred dive boats and they each take about 20 clients
and at any given site on any given day there are about a dozen boats… you get
the picture.! But despite the crowded diving I have to say it was a very
worth-while experience and I don’t hesitate to recommend it to others.
I also
decided to “up” my dive rating to include “Enriched Air” which involves reading
a small booklet, answering a multiple choice exam, and of course “putting
another dollar in” as the euphemism goes for the PADI diving accreditation acronym
(actually about US$120). So with the new rating I then went and did a wreck dive
of a WWII British cargo ship that was sunk in 1941 by a couple of German patrol
aircraft. The ship was called HMS Thistelgorm and it was fully loaded with
locomotives and trucks and motorbikes and rifles and aircraft etc… the wreck is
in extremely good condition and sits in only 30m of water. The Enriched air
rating is not mandatory but it reduces the nitrogen content and allows longer
dive-times in about the 20-30m depth range. But Oxygen becomes toxic at higher
pressures so if you want to go deeper for longer then you need to get another
PADI rating for Tri-Mix which adds Helium to the tank… and yep you have to pay
to get that rating too but Im in no rush to do that… But back to the wreck
dive. I have to say it was a really good dive location and the two dives I did
there were the highlight of my stay here… Really well worth doing. I didn’t take
any pictures (no UW camera) but there are plenty on the web if you care to look
for them…again the visibility was excellent and the access to the ships
interior was also easy and swimming around inside was very interesting!
But now
that that’s done, Im headed North again…
