Camel diving

Backtracking here a bit but Dahab deserves more comment. The eight full days we had in Dahab were amazing. Unfortunately, we don't have that many photos. The best things to take photos of were under the sea. The other time I would have liked to have got a few photos was when we were on the camels but it's a little tricky to juggle a camera and ride a camel. Well, I figured it would be for me. However, our dive guide was able to read a book and smoke a cigarette simultaneously while riding her camel! The diving and snorkelling was amazing. For those that know the area we snorkelled at the Lighthouse on the first day. This gave us a chance to make sure masks, fins and snorkels were in good order. The Lighthouse doesn't actually seem to have a lighthouse near it. It's merely an area in front of the main broadwalk where the cafes are. I was quite amazed to see so much sea life so close to everything. Diving wise we dived at the Canyon a couple of times and at the "house reef" - that is, just in front of the hotel. This reef isn't dived very often as it's only really accessible when the tide is high and there's no wind. We also snorkelled at the Bells and the Blue Hole. The Bells were great. Not really any divers around but lots of sea life. We saw these cornetfish hunting smaller fish. The cornetfish are very long and thin and would make sudden darts into these schools of fish. Mel believes that the little fish were trying to stay close to us as this kept the cornetfish away. The Blue Hole is a big hole! It's blue because it's full of water - d'oh - and because of the way the light shines into it. It's very pretty but is notorious for divers being idiots and trying to dive through an archway at 52 metres. That's well beyond the limits of recreational diving but people still try to do it. Some succeed, some don't. The best dives were 1) the last one of our training. This was when we were surrounded by fusilier fish - as I mentioned in an earlier blog and 2) the second dive on the camel safari. Yep, we loved the camel safari. It was an early wake up but it was definitely worth it. We took all the gear out to the Blue Hole where the locals loaded it on to camels. They then walked the camels over the first, very steep, hill. We then hopped on and rode the camels for over an hour. Then we relaxed for a little bit in a so-called Bedouin village. It was more a bunch of beach shacks. Some of these were more protected from the elements than others. Not quite what I'd imagined for a Bedouin village but then again it was perfect for the local environment. We only saw a couple of other groups of divers entering the water and didn't see anyone but our group once we were under. The dive was very nice and we had to wind our way between different coral formations. Lots of different sea life again. I looked up a few but the diversity is overwhelming. Our second dive was a bit further up the way. We loaded our gear on to a jeep to get to the site. This slightly spoilt the illusion of being away from everything. Certainly, you can't drive to these locations from the south but you can from the north. Still, the location of the dive was indicated by a large boulder on the shore and a barnacle covered rock in the sea nearby. This site is known as Triggerfish reef. Funnily enough, it's called that because of the large number of Triggerfish. These are quite unusual looking in that they have tails shaped like a magnet and are a very dark blue, nearly black colour. There was lots else to see here that we hadn't seen before including a ray of some sort hiding under some coral and a nice big octopus. He was just staying in his spot in the coral so we didn't get to see him swim but he was impressive all the same. I can see why people get hooked on this diving lark.