Chronicles of Egypt, Part 4
This should be the last of the series, unless something incredibly interesting comes up tomorrow…
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Day 10-13, Dahab
After a long train ride and a farewell breakfast with the whole group on the morning of Day 10, Ahmed, Katie, Lisa and I continued on to the next leg of the tour to the Sinai peninsula. We boarded a private van for another 6-hour journey, offering the majestic scenery of the desert and rocky mountains to our left and tantalizing views of the Red Sea to our right. We had already been travelling quite a bit overnight so we were really looking forward to relaxing on the beach in Dahab.
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(I was excited to be passing through the Suez Canal, working for a shipping company and all, so I took out my camera once the signs said we were approaching. Alas I never got to see anything at all as we passed through a long two-lane underground tunnel.)
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We stopped by the somewhat more upscale and overly commercialized resort town of Sharm el’Sheikh for lunch then arrived in Dahab at around 4pm. The tourist area was basically a long strip of hotels and bars and restaurants along the seaside with a parallel street of shops and cheaper dining options behind it. The beach wasn’t all that great, in fact I think during my whole stay there I only saw two people swimming in the water. Most people travelled to nearby beaches for better wading and snorkeling options. Also the winds were quite strong for the first two days so it was slightly disappointing, although it did manage to calm down on the last day which was even slightly frustrating that it didn’t happen sooner.
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Anyway I was initially intending to make one or two dives in Dahab and spend the rest of my time either relaxing or going on safaris to the desert, however I ended up deciding taking my Advanced Open Water Diver course instead. I made three dives on day 1, the first two in Moray Gardens for my underwater naturalist and navigation dives with the instructor, Hesham, and a Kiwi currently residing in London, Chad, who just tagged along.
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I did my first ever night dive that evening at the Lighthouse, which was both exciting and unnerving. At the beginning of the dive as we were descending from the shore I was a bit freaked out when all of a sudden, after shining my dive light to my left, I realized I was swimming quite closely beside a large coral formation with sea urchins! It also gets a bit surprising sometimes when you’ve been shining your light around you to look at the corals and fish and then realize you are swimming straight for a large jellyfish! Anyway it was all cool, with lots of different aquatic life you normally don’t see during the day, like large eels and stonefish. We were also treated to the sight of a Spanish Dancer, a large red slug about a foot long that sort of looks like a jellyfish. The instructor, Mohammed this time, played with it with his hands but I still wasn’t brave enough to do so myself. Now I wish I did. (Or maybe it’s good I didn’t, as he kept rubbing his hands when we got out of the water, I’m not sure if that was because of the slug.) It was also quite an experience when we turned off our lights, suspended in the dark, and then moved our hands around to activate chemical reactions in the plankton around us, so they lit up and seemed like magical specks of dust floating all around us.
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The next day we headed out into the Canyon for my first deep dive, down to 30 meters, with another instructor also named Mohammed, Lotka (sp?) from Sweden and Chad. We swam through holes and caves and ridges with different kinds of corals and fish all around. For my final dive to complete the course (a drift dive) we saved the best for last and headed out into the world-famous (and crowded) Blue Hole. We entered the water in this small hole they call The Bells because of the sound the tanks make when they hit the rocks, then descended straight down (head first!) down the long hole before exiting out into the deep through an archway about 28m below the water. We swam along a ridge or corals which dropped down to more than 600 m, so you couldn’t see the bottom, which made you feel like you were flying. It’s also almost scary when you face away from the coral and towards the empty blue expanse of water on the other side, as if you were floating in (blue) space. The drift helped us swim towards the Blue Hole, literally a hole enclosed by corals supposedly more than 150m deep. Some brave and experienced skin divers were trying to swim down to the bottom of the hole (in one breath!) that time, and we could see their bubbles floating up from the seemingly endless bottom.
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While in Dahab, we had quite expensive (by Filipino and Egyptian standards) seafood dinners of fresh fish, calamari and prawns every night. On the third day, I got a relaxing Egyptian massage in the morning and then we all just hung out beside the swimming pool in the afternoon, reading books and chitchatting. I never got to do the desert safari, but the relaxation after quite a hectic schedule from the very beginning of the trip was worth it.
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Day 14, St. Catherine and Mt. Sinai
We left Dahab at midnight for a 1 1/2 hour drive to St. Catherine at the foot of Mt. Sinai. Then at 2:30 am, armed with our flashlights and led by a Bedouin guide, we began a 2 1/2 hour hike to the top of the mountain, and without any sleep in my case, it was a very challenging task! After 30 minutes or so though your body gets used to the continuous trekking, freezing cold and thinning air, although when we got to the top of the peak, 2,235 m above sea level, I wished I had brought gloves to protect my almost bluing fingers! Huddled in our sleeping bags, we waited for the sun to rise, but because of some dark clouds in the horizon it wasn’t as magnificent as we had hoped. Mostly I felt really miserable at the summit, although the large number of old Koreans and Russians together with us at the top seemed to be enjoying themselves, chanting and singing and praying as the sun rose.
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The hike down was much more pleasant and exciting, as we took a different and more direct route through rocky steps down the mountain. Midway down though it started snowing very lightly, which shortly turned to a bit of rain, and then then a bit more later into hail! It rained lightly but continuously on the way down, which made traversing the rocks a bit more dangerous, but we managed to get down anyway, soaked but otherwise unharmed.
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It took a while to completely thaw out at the bottom. We had breakfast at one of the hotels in St. Catherine, and then immediately headed back into Cairo. When we got to our hotel I skipped lunch and went straight to bed and slept the whole afternoon. Katie and Lisa woke me up for dinner at some slightly fancy pub, then we headed out for a short drink at a swanky jazz bar at the Nile Hilton, where there was no jazz playing but a mix of latin music that local Cairenes were dancing to. Lisa and I danced a bit but most of the time we were just watching expert couples take the floor. After tonight I decided to take up some mambo or salsa lessons again in Copenhagen!
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Tomorrow we might visit the Citadel and a few mosques, and afterwards Lisa and I are flying out at almost the same time very early Sunday morning at 3am. Katie is staying one more day in Cairo. I’ll be in transit in Milan for about 7 hours so I decided to see a friend in the city who’ll be driving out from Genoa to meet me. As much as I enjoyed this vacation immensely I’m actually looking forward to coming home and even going back to work (egad). Anyway I have an even longer trip to Turkey planned for the next month, so that’s something else to look forward to!
