Travel Tales #2
Diving in the Desert

It’s a tall order to truly absorb or explain the wonder of Egypt, because its reputation precedes it… So I will simply tell you about a few things that I really loved...

Cairo
The Pyramids of Giza are impressive. But the thing that most struck me in Cairo were the Sufi Dancers. I saw them one desert evening as the sun was setting and a warm breeze blew across the Egyptian horizon. The dancers spun around and around to rhythmic Persian music, and dissolved into Allah. It was very beautiful and mesmerising to watch.

After Cairo I caught an overnight train all the way down the centre to Aswan, a city towards the bottom of the country. I love train travel, but I'd only managed to sleep in two hour blocks that trip, the last of which was to a huge red rising sun.

Aswan
Aswan is a colourful mix of palm trees, people and concrete. There’s a hotel there where Agatha Christie started writing Death on the Nile. I only saw it from the outside, but imagined her sitting at a desk by the window, looking out over the river, whilst conjuring up murderous plotlines.

Aswan has a great night market, which like most markets is loud and vibrant. There are pyramids of spices in a rainbow of colours, walls of Persian rugs, shisha pipes (picture the pipe-smoking caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland), intricate teapots and delicate glasses.

I’d half forgotten my bartering skills and found it all a bit overwhelming at first. But I soon got back into the swing of the game of pretending not to be interested, walking away, negotiating a price, then returning to purchase the desired item. I bought scarabs, incense and alabaster figurines.

Aswan is also famous for its hydro-dam. It’s a place that Egyptians are very proud of. To me it just looked like any other water reservoir. But if you have a look at a map of Egypt you’ll see that it’s basically completely desert, except for a narrow strip of green that runs down the middle. This is the Nile River valley, and towards the bottom, is this dam that provides water to a vast number of Egyptians.

The Nile
From Aswan I spent a couple of days and nights sailing up the Nile on a felucca - a traditional Egyptian sailing boat that looks like a catamaran. Most of the deck is made of what looked to me like a trampoline, but probably has a special sailing name.

Gosh that was a wonderful couple of days - swimming in the Nile during the day, and tacking from side to side up the river with the breeze blowing and reggae music playing in the background. Then meals and sleeping on the deck under the starry Egyptian night sky.

When I re-emerged from this river heaven in Luxor, I caught the front page of an English newspaper another traveller was reading. It featured a picture of the Twin Towers falling down.

Even though this has gone on to become part of the fabric of our times, it was so far away from where I was, in more ways than one, that it didn’t even rate a mention in my travel diary.

Now when I reflect back, it baffles me that on one side of the world a catastrophe can be happening, while on the other a girl is sitting on the side of a felucca, swinging her feet in the water, feeling utterly content.

Luxor
Luxor is an amazing place. Even the sound of the word feels exotic on my tongue. But to be completely honest with you, there is just sooo much history, sooo many artifacts, statues, obelisks, hieroglyphics, monuments and huge geometric boulders that it was a bit wasted on me.

But Luxor Temple by night was definitely something that stayed with me. Each stone and statue was lit up by strategically placed lights and the overall effect was otherworldly.

When the Islamic call to prayer (Adhan) rang through the temple that night, I thought the ancient Egyptians immortalised in the stones around me might come alive.

This was the essence of Egypt for me. I loved hearing the Adhan amplified from crackly speakers at set times each day. It's such a beautiful aspect of Islam.

Dahab
From Luxor I took a (bloody long) bus trip through the Sinai Desert to Dahab, a laid-back town on the shores of the Red Sea. It used to be a sleepy fishing village before becoming one of the world's most popular dive sites.

Throughout the rest of Egypt it is respectful for women to wear clothing that covers legs, arms and sometimes head. But Dahab seemed to exist in it's own little bubble, where togs, a sarong and bare feet (if you can handle the heat) are standard issue uniform.

The shorefront is lined with Bedouin-style restaurants with low tables and cushions, looking out across the sea to Saudi Arabia on the opposite coastline. I spent happy times there learning to play backgammon, sharing a shisha and drinking mint tea.

I was there to learn how to scuba dive. My dive course didn’t start for a couple of days, so I snorkelled and started to feel a bit nervous. With my snorkel and mask I practiced diving down as deep as I could in what I thought would be good preparation for the course. It hurt my ears. I wondered how I would be able to stand the pressure of going even deeper. What if I panicked while I was 30 metres down, then drowned?

I went to a doctor, sure I had an ear infection. He said it looked fine and not to worry. He gave me some ear-drops for good measure. Probably as a placebo.

My ears were fine and I didn't drown, but before I tell you about the diving, I’ve got one more story for you...

Mount Sinai
I took a bus to Mount Sinai in the middle of the desert one evening. I'd been told that watching the sunrise from the top is the thing to do. I started climbing the mountain at close to midnight, reached the top a couple of hours later, drank a hot chocolate at a makeshift coffee house with a couple of Bedouins, then rolled out my sleeping bag and spent a chilly night tucked between some boulders.

Mount Sinai is where Moses supposedly received the 10 Commandments, so there were many wafer-laden Christians chanting at the sunrise. And who could blame them. It was beautiful watching the sun paint the mountain and the desert in gold.

I took it in, then stuffed my sleeping bag into my backpack, and hightailed my chilly bones back down the mountain.

I think I must have been the first one down that morning because when I reached Saint Catherine’s Monastery at the bottom it was just me, the serenity of the chapel and an equally serene monk dressed in a black cloak that swept the floor as he walked, and an impressive gandalf beard. It was a special few minutes to be in the quiet, feeling the divinity of the place before the rest of the sunrisers started arriving.

Learning to Dive
The big day arrived, the beginning of my dive course. There was a lot of theory to get through first, mostly learning about the dive equipment, communicating underwater, how oxygen acts under pressure, and the importance of not coming up too quick. Then some basic skills in shallow water like clearing a mask and retrieving a regulator underwater.

Pretty much all the diving in Dahab is shore diving. Which means you walk straight in from the beach instead of having to get a boat out into the ocean, which is more often than not the case with dive spots around the world.

Since I get sea-sick this is great. No sitting in an undulating boat in the hot sun with a churning stomach.

Instead we geared up on the shore. Part of the course was learning how to put the gear together – attaching the tank to the buoyancy vest, the regulator to the tank, checking gauges, strapping on a weight belt, donning a mask, then wading into the sea, and the welcome relief of weightlessness and cool water. Things get steamy quickly in a full-length wet suit under the intense Egyptian sun.

The Sinai Desert is sand and rocks and a monotone palette of sepia, which makes the contrast of the underwater world that bit more incredible. Underneath the surface of the Red Sea there is another universe of colour and life.

And what I discovered about diving is that instead of ear pressure increasing with depth, it gets released, like ears popping on a plane. Having a tank of air to breathe means there's time and breaths to allow ear pressure to adjust (equalise) to the depth pressure - either by swallowing, jaw wiggling or pinching the nose closed and blowing air through the sinuses.

Learning to dive is very much about equalising air spaces, mainly the dive vest, aka bcd (buoyancy control device). When the air pressure in the vest matches the pressure of the water, it's like being another sea creature, suspended in space, instead of being a strange four limbed thing peering down from above.

It was quiet down there. The only sounds were my own Darth Vader inhale and exhale and the quiet muffled scratching of sand moving over coral in the current.

I was hooked.

I loved it so much that as soon as I finished the first course I started on the next one, which basically meant I would be certified to dive deeper and do more adventurous things like wreck dives and night dives.

I did lots of great dives in Dahab, but maybe you are getting a bit bored with all this dive nerd talk so I will just tell you about my favourite one, The Blue Hole.

The start of the dive is through a coral “chimney” – a narrow tunnel down through the reef, that opens out to a sheer vertical wall of coral. It’s so deep that the bottom is a mysterious void where blue turns to black, and all along the wall are soft corals, schools of fish and fascinating little creatures like tiny transparent shrimp and colourful slug-like creatures called nudibranches.

I didn’t go much below 30 metres, but it’s a popular dive spot with technical divers who dive with a mix of oxygen and nitrogen (nitrox) which allows them to go deeper. One diver who had been down to the 100 metre bottom that day said he saw a hammerhead shark resting down there. That was a bit unnerving and a bit fascinating all at the same time.

Since learning in Egypt, I've dived all around the world - from exploring WWII wrecks in the freezing, choppy waters of the Orkney Islands, north of Scotland, to tropical reefs in the middle of the Andaman Sea, but I'll never forget first learning to dive in the desert.

Leonie x