Dahab Day Thalatha: The End

So I woke up this morning ready to attempt Diving round 2. When I got to breakfast and had a look out at the water it was just about as bad as yesterday, but at this point I had resigned myself to my fate and was ready to dive whatever the conditions. I had the Egyptian breakfast again, because it's delicious, and was joined by one of the many furry inhabitants of Dahab who just plopped right down next to me and eventually went to sleep on my bag without bothering me or my food.

If you don't think this dog is adorable you can just git out

Ocean spray was everywhere. But it was so worth it.

And then some. Can't wait to dive in this....

After a scrumptious breakfast I headed over to the dive shop, Deep Blue Divers..

Got all my gear together...

We then loaded ourselves (six of us, including the dive guide) into this truck:

Except that there wasn't enough room inside the truck, so I sat in the back with all the gear and Zizo, the dive guide.

Zizo has very capable biceps.

Seriously, I love Dahab.

There were six of us diving: Me; Zizo; a father and son from Switzerland who came to Dahab just to dive, they're staying a little over a week and will have completed about 12-13 dives by the time they leave; and a couple from Holland, NOT Germany. They educated me quite a bit on Dutch-German relations and I am much wiser now than when the trip began.

(L-R) Dutch#1, Me, Swiss dad, Swiss son, Dutch#2 and Zizo took the picture

So we arrived at our first dive site, The Islands:

Dive plan for The Islands (which now that I look at actually doesn't look all that accurate)

We then disembarked from the truck and put all our gear on, ready to make our entrance via shore..

The Islands was a very cool dive consisting of three separate 'Islands' of coral all teeming with a huge variety of extremely exotic looking fish. We came face to face with about three different schools of large fish (and many more of small fish) on this dive, one of which was an extremely large school of menacing barracuda. We all swam away with limbs intact and at the end of the dive made a very very cool exit through a tunnel of coral. To be clear about the whole tunnel thing, I could see the sky, I just wouldn't have been able to access it should I have desired to do so.

We headed back in the truck, except this time we were all forced to sit in the back because the driver was very protective of his leather interior.

When we got back to the shop the manager determined that conditions were too dangerous to proceed with our planned second dive at the Eel Gardens, so we were dismissed till later that evening. In the interim I came back to my hotel, which is basically across the street, lounged around in the pool, snacked, and wrote the previous blog post. At four I returned to the shop, did all the gear stuff over again and after waiting for about an hour for our driver to show up headed to the Eel Gardens...

Eel Garden entrance point in background

The Eel Gardens are of course famous for the incredible amount of eels that are dotted allover the slopes of sand. I don't have underwater photography capabilities so I took the liberty of finding a picture of the gardens online, they looked just like this:

After this last dive I headed back, filled out a dive log for each dive and got it stamped. After begging the shop owner to have mercy on me and knock 30 pounds off the price of the dive he consented and I handed over the remaining Le200. (I need every piaster I can get). Fast forward to the evening when I met up with everyone to celebrate/mourn our last night in Dahab. We at a fine dinner at a restaurant called shark, complete with vino and a couple temperamental shisha

The guys

The girls

A few hours later we weren't quite ready to call it an evening so we sought out another location to order some shisha. During the search I had the bright idea to run back to my hotel where I know they serve tea, coffee and shisha. I asked Emad if it would be ok for me to invite some friends back to smoke and they'd pay since they weren't staying at the hotel, he said of course and that they wouldn't have to pay. Once they arrived he treated us to not one, but two shishas.

Bedouin lounge at the hotel

And a couple free smokes

This guy is seriously amazing, just like Dahab. Anyway I'm pretty exhausted right now since I've been traveling all day back to Cairo- we left at 1230 and after last night I really needed some sleep, which was hard to get on the bus. So the Eid is over and its time for classes to start again.... can't wait....