Red Sea Diving

Back on the surface after 50 very enjoyable minutes on the bottom. 

One of the parts of our trip to Egypt that I was looking forward to the most was diving in the Red Sea.  I’ve always heard that the water is amazing, full of life and clear.  The visibility for each dive was at least 20 meters and the water temperature was around 82 degrees F.

Clear waters await.  The bottom that you see here is about 30ft deep.

 

Here’s the same view except that I’m looking up toward the surface.

The hotel has a dive shop on the grounds and they helped arrange four boat dives.  The boat left the dock in the morning and motored for about one hour before arriving at the dive site.  After gearing up we were lead by some very knowledgeable local guides.  Each dive lasted about 50 minutes and reached a maximum depth of around 60ft.

 

Everything is looking good down here.  This is after 30 minutes.  You can see my hands starting to turn into prunes.

A school of fish here on their way somewhere.

The neighborhood watch dog.  This morey was probably close to 6ft in length.  We saw close to 10 of these eels that day.  Seeing one on the night dive was not as much fun though.

I’m horrible at fish idetification, but I think this my be a blue spotted ray.  The name makes sense anyway.  (If anyone knows feel free to email me and let me know.  Thanks.)

I believe this is the crocodile fish.  It’s one of the most interesting fish I’ve come across.

Something I thought I’d never do was make a dive at 10 o’clock at night.  It was pitch black, I had one small flashlight and another back-up light and I was going to go 60 feet underwater.  Sounds like fun huh?  It was.  Diving at night is a completely different experience than any day dive.  There are no currents, you won’t run into any other diving groups, and the sea life is completely different.  It is a very relaxing experience.  Just be sure that you go with a very experienced guide that knows the area well.

Here’s another blue spotted ray at night.

One of the advantages of a night dive is that you’ll see the lion fish hunting.  During the day they are mostly sitting in between rocks or coral resting/sleeping.  The best sight of the night was coming across an octopus.  Because of the darkness, my slow reflexes and the octopus’ speed I wasn’t able to get a decent photo of it.

14 Days in Egypt: Part V Hurghada

This is the only view we wanted for the next seven days. 

Showing up in Hughada meant that we would be getting lots of time to sit around and relax.  The sunsets on the Red Sea were perfect every day. 

 

Just in front of us was the crystal clear waters of the Red Sea.

Looking at the pool side restaurant around 10PM.  There were three infinity pools here at different levels.

Here we are at the lowest level pool that overlooks the beach.

Hurghada was once a small fishing village on the Red Sea with very little tourism, but now you will find every major hotel chain here.  It is quickly becoming a very popular winter destination for Europeans.  The constant sunny skies and warm weather are a draw along with some of the best diving you’ll ever do.

This is one of the few times were wore ‘regular’ clothes at the hotel.  Most of the time we were in swimming suits with towels around our necks.  We were heading into town for dinner and came across a very good Italian restaurant called Da Nanni.

This is a view of part of the hotel’s reef.  I ended up making one night dive here that turned out to be one of the most interesting dives I’ve ever made. 

Our time at in Hurghada would be all about relaxing.  Laura would take some time to visit the spa and get some reading done by the pool while I would go out diving.  We had seen so many monuments and temples in the last week that we could hardly differentiate one from another.  They were all spectacular, but it was getting hard to separate some of them in our minds.  We wanted to spend the last week of our trip having late breakfasts, lounging by the pool, and room service dinners. 

Our back deck and private sunning area if you want the ‘all over’ tan.

This may have been the most beautiful hotel we have ever stayed in.  Each room was at least 900+ sq ft with a large private deck and sun area.  Just in front of the hotel was a great reef for diving and snorkeling.  The hotel was fairly isolated so you were forced into relaxing.  Too bad.

Here’s the view of our room from the outside.  Each room was more like an apartment than a hotel room.  I think we’re ready to go back.

The pools and the Red Sea coming together.

Perfect.

Not Your Usual Commute

Going between Luxor and Hurghada was an event in itself.  Surprisingly, there are no flights between the two.  Both are fairly good sized cities with a huge tourism industry.  Luxor has several monuments surrounding it and Hurghada is a beautiful Red Sea town with several hotels hugging the crystal clear coastline.

 

You just can’t get away from these guys, and no, we never ate there once.  This was on our way to the early morning caravan to Hurghada.  Dan, you may really like Luxor.

If you want to travel between the two you need to join a caravan that leaves three times a day from either city.  We left the boat at 7:30AM to join the first trip of the day before the heat became too intense.  The cars and busses in the caravan met at a staging area surrounded by police and the Egyptian army.  When the time came to leave we got back in our car for the four hour drive east through the desert.  The interesting part of this is that as the cars pulled out of the staging area they were stopped periodically so that a vehicle full of armed guards and soldiers could join.  In all there were probably 80 passenger vehicles with a truck full of machine gun carrying guards placed between every 8 to 10 cars. 

This was the staging area in luxor.  Fortunately we would be making a stop about half way into the four hour drive.

A Bedouin family leaving one of the rest areas.

The Egyptian government takes the tourism industry very seriously and realizes that if this industry collapses the country and millions of Egyptians will suffer, so they do everything they can to prevent violence towards tourists.  For example, as we left the airport on our arrival in Cairo we had to check in with the Tourist Police, tell them our nationality, give them the license plate number of the car and tell them our destination.  If we didn’t show up at our destination in a reasonable amount of time a search would be initiated.  This was the same procedure at most of the other big tourist sights.  We never felt like we were in danger whether we were in this caravan or shopping late at night in Cairo.  We would even say that it felt as safe as any part of Singapore.

14 Days in Egypt: Part IV The Nile

 

A rare bit of relaxation on our cruise.  This is shot from our balcony one afternoon as we leisurely cruised from Edfu north to Luxor.

 

One of the shop keepers near the Valley of the Kings.

Our third and fourth days on the Nile were not much different from the first two.  Every day was exhausting.  Each morning we’d wake up as late as possible, rush down for breakfast, and then go on another tour of amazing Ancient Egyptian sights.  Since it was the off-season it was easy to get around the sights and see everything without waiting in lines, but the extreme heat of the desert and being exposed to the sun for 6 – 8 hours would take its toll each day.  Appetites were low, but water consumption was way higher than normal.  It was nearly impossible to drink enough. 

These homes were along the Nile between Edfu and Luxor.

Our fearless leader and guide telling us about the Temple of Karnak.  If I remember correctly it was Ramses II that like to carve his name and heiroglyphics so deep into the stone.  The Temple of Karnak was enormous.

We would return to the boat around 4PM and take a short nap before getting cleaned up for dinner.  The cruise had a nice mix of buffet lunches and ala carte dinners.  We really enjoyed the discrete service we had on the ship.  The crew and staff were always there when you needed them, but were never seen when you wanted some privacy.  The Nile is full of cruisers and we felt very fortunate choosing the Oberoi cruise as some of the other ships looked quite run down.

Laura taking a break and finding some shade.

Steve doing the same thing.  The small wood box with brass fixtures is my pinhole camera.  I haven’t developed the film yet, but when I do I’ll post them here.

Laura in the early morning at the Valley of the Kings.  Getting there as the sun was rising didn’t sound fun the night before, but it was a great idea for beating the heat.

Gimme more water! 

The Valley of the Kings and Queens was interesting in that there was nothing spectacular about any of the tombs here.  After all of the previous Pharaos had their tombs robbed by tomb robbers the idea of being buried in a nondescript place became very popular.  There are 62 tombs in the Valley of the Kings alone.

A beam of light streaming into the temple.

And finally this interesting sight in the Temple of Luxor.  This mosque was originally built on what was thought as ordinary level land.  You can see the door to the mosque about 25 feet in the air.  Afterward it was discovered that the mosque was actually built on top of the Temple of Luxor.  As excavation began they started to realize the extent of the temple and shut the mosque down to finish working on the excavation.

 

One of the most remarkable things that we saw were the colors inside of a tomb in the Valley of the Queens.  It looks like it was recently painted, but this color and paint dates back thousands of years.

In all we had seen 13 different monuments, temples and mosques in our first seven days in Egypt.  We were getting exhausted, but things would soon change as we headed over to the Hurghada for the nest 7 days.

Temple of Luxor
Temple of Edfu
Valley of the Kings
Valley of the Queens
Temple of Karnak
Falucca Botanical Gardens
Great Pyramids of Giza
Step Pyramid in Saqqara
Cairo Museum
Closse of Memnon
Aswan Dam
The Citadel
The Alabaster Mosque

 Next stop: the Red Sea.

14 Days in Egypt: Part III The Nile

Boarding our Egypt Air flight to Aswan.  Domestic airfare was ridiculously inexpensive.  The one hour flight to Aswan was only $20. 

Leaving Cairo, a city of 20,000,000, for the relative calmness of sailing down the Nile was starting to sound pretty good after some very busy days touring the city.  We boarded our US$20 flight to Aswan early one morning and arrived in Aswan before 9AM.  We were on the boat and in our cabin by 9:30 and felt like we already had a long day.  The boat was designed to carry just over 100 guests, but only 15 were on our cruise so crowds were never a problem.

This was the staircase that took us down to the dining room.

Coming down for the costume dinner.  I was not too thrilled to wearing this green outfit at first, but I quickly changed my mind after finding out how comfortable it was.

This was our first cruise so we were not sure what to expect.  By the end we found out that a cruise is all about service and food.  The Oberoi Philae was no different than any other Oberoi hotel; it was a perfect home away from home.  The boat would be home for the next four nights as it sailed downstream from Aswan to Luxor with one stop in Edfu.

While we were still in Aswan we boarded a small sailboat and sailed around Falucca, the largest island on the Nile.  This was a view from Falucca looking west into the beginning of the Sahara Desert.

Cooling off in the Nile.

Hoisting the sails on our way to Falucca.  The sailing around Falucca and the visit to the gardens was one of my favorite excursions.

Muslim man at prayer in Aswan.

This was the first temple we saw on our cruise.  It was a remarkably well intact temple in Edfu.

Here’s some of the heirogliphic writing on the walls of the temple in Edfu.

 

We loved watching the sunsets on the Nile.  The extremely hot days would quickly go away as the sun went down.  The evenings were surprisingly comfortable.  Cruising the Nile is a perfect way to see the slower pace of life outside of Cairo.