So way back in South Africa, I was supposed to become scuba certified so I could go with a group of friends down to Sodwana Bay and dive. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, I got a free trip back to the US for training and missed my classes. When the time came for our trip, I ended up sitting around on shore, drinking with my colleague Paulina, chasing pesky vervet monkeys out of our tents, and having to listen about what a glorious time the divers were having. Flash forward about four years and here I am, sitting (close) to the Red Sea (one of the top diving destinations in the world), and I decided not to let this opportunity pass me by again. One of my many long weekends, I hopped on the French Casa plane for a weekend in Sharm El Sheikh. I decided not to stay at South Camp (due to their midnight curfew, I mean really, a curfew? I'm almost 41…) and opted for a hotel smack in the center of Naama Bay.
The first morning, I hoped out of bed, grabbed my mask and fins, and headed out to the beach. I walked to the end of the pier, jumped into the warm and crystal clear water, dunked my head under and was blown away. Within like 20 feet of where I was floating around, there were literally hundreds of fish, everything from the spiny lion fish, iridescent parrot fish, big long trumpet fishes, puffer fish, butterfly fish, etc. I've snorkeled in off of Key West in Florida (which sucked) and in Thailand, but even that paled in comparison to what I saw within my first two minutes. I ended up spending over three hours swimming around the bay, and by the time I finally came ashore, looked like a very wrinkled and burnt prune.
Other than the great snorkeling, I'm not a huge fan of Sharm. It's a major tourist trap on the southernmost tip of the Sinai Peninsula. There are easily over one hundred hotels in the area, some very nice (Ritz Carlton, Four Seasons), some mid-range and fairly unmemorable, and the majority dodgy with questionable cleanliness. There is a main "boardwalk" along Naama Bay and a couple bustling shopping/pedestrian streets packed with restaurants, bars, souvenir shacks, shisha lounges, etc. During the winter months, it's a haven for thousands of Russians escaping from the cold and dark north…enough said.
After the great experience snorkeling, I did some research online and decided to do my training in Dahab, about 50 km north of Sharm. There are dozens dive centers and plenty of good of dive sites in and around Sharm and Ras Mohammed, an Egyptian national park and ocean sanctuary, including a handful of WWII wreaks are off the coast that you can dive down to. The only problem is that at any given time there are probably 100+ dive boats out on the water lugging people and all their equipment to somewhat overcrowded sites. I opted for the more laid back and less populated scene in Dahab, and it really was a great decision. A group of us drove down over Thanksgiving weekend and did our Padi open water certification through Poseidon Dive Center. To be honest, prior to doing this I was a little anxious about the whole breathing underwater thing and was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to regulate pressure in my ears. All I remembered was being unable to dive 14 feet to the bottom of the Oakwood YMCA pool and this worried me.
I won’t lie and say that it wasn’t scary at times, but our instructor, a young lady from Scotland, really did a great job of lowering our anxiety level and giving us a solid foundation. We did about 10 or 12 dives that weekend, which included our “confined space” dives which basically taught us technique and safety. These are normally done in a pool, but we just walked out into the sea and did them all in about 20-30 feet of water. The deepest we went was on our final day at about 60 feet or so. Since we had to drive over passes upwards of 3,000 feet to get back to north camp, we had to make sure we gave ourselves enough time on the final day not to have problems with too much nitrogen in our bloodstreams.
We went back down to Dahab for our advance open water certification a month or so later. There wasn’t as much technique in this training, but we did have to do open water navigation which was a bit disconcerting to say the least. The problem some people get into with diving is losing their sense of direction, particularly in open water. You really can’t tell which way you are going and can get hopeless lost, not something I’d relish. We had to work with a compass and do all kinds of things including swimming a perfect square in the big blue (open water with no visual markers on any side or below you. It freaked me out a bit, but I muddled my way through it. We also did a night dive which was also something I wasn’t quite sure about. A group of 5 of us went out to a dive site just as it was getting dark with flashlights and lights to hang off our kits so we didn’t get separated from each other. Night diving is very different from diving in the day because lots of fish only come out at night and you can only see where you have your flashlight pointed, otherwise it is a big black void. One cool thing is that the plankton which you can’t see during the day becomes photo active and makes thousands of tiny electrical flashes when you clap your hands or move your hands quickly through the water.
Our final two dives were the deep water dive and a dive where we had to identify species of fish. The Red Sea is a unique environment due to its higher salinity and warmer temperatures. Because of these two things and its relative isolation (due to the fact that it only connects to the Indian Ocean through a small channel down by Djibouti), there is a phenomenal amount and diversity of aquatic life. Since water from the Indian Ocean cannot go in or out easily and the temperature is so high during the summer, a significant portion of water evaporates each year which increases the amount of salt. The water level evens out each winter, but this is one of the reasons why it’s so nice to swim and dive in the Red Sea, you float. The higher temperature is due to the Great Rift Valley which starts way down in Kenya and ends up in Israel/Lebanon/Syria and goes right under the Red Sea. The Gulf of Aqaba is freakishly deep considering its size (several thousand feet in areas versus the Gulf of Suez which is only a couple hundred at most) and amazingly warm. The water is crystal clear and the temperature is the same at the surface as it is thousands of feet down.
Anyway, I digress. So our deep water diver took place at “the canyon” a famous (and quite crowded) site where there is a literal gash into the floor of the sea which drops down to about 100 feet below the surface. It was pretty cool because you were deep enough that certain colors start to disappear from the spectrum (red goes at this point). Once we were down in the canyon you could look up and see the sheer walls on either side of you that in some areas you could touch with both hands and then see the brilliant blue water above where it opened to the light. I was pretty tense about going so deep, but it was so beautiful that I quickly forgot. The one disadvantage of deep diving is that you go through your air much quicker than normal. I usually can get up to 30 minutes on a normal 10 liter tank, whereas on this dive I had a 15 liter tank and made it only 23 minutes.
Our final dive was at the infamous Blue Hole. If you do a Google search on this, you will read all kinds of terrifying things, most of which are true. There is basically a coral shelf all along the coast that starts at the shore and stretches out into the water up to 100 feet+ in some areas. When the coral stops in this area, there is a literally a 1500 foot drop straight down to the bottom of the sea. The blue hole is just that, a big hole 300 feet wide cut into the coral shelf which is about 330 feet deep. About 150 feet down there is a small tunnel which runs from the blue hole through the coral about 75 feet into the open sea. The problem is that a bunch of dumb ass people who are not trained properly and/or don’t have the proper equipment or air mixture attempt to swim the tunnel and die doing it. The Egyptian government admits upwards of 40 people have died here, but they estimate it’s probably several times that many. There is a memorial on one of the hillsides with plaques to the people who have died; it’s sobering to say the least. There really isn’t anything to see in the blue hole, so we started our dive not far from it at a place called the bells. This is a gash in the coral that starts at the surface and drops about 90 feet down before going under a coral bridge and then dropping you in the open water against the coral cliff. It’s so narrow that your tanks will sometimes hit the sides, hence the name “the bells.” I was pretty anxious but decided to go face first because at least then I could see where I was going. Once you exit the bells, it is really amazing and terrifying because on one side is this huge cliff teaming with fish and on the other is a vast blue nothingness. We swam diagonally up the cliff until we reached an area called the saddle which brings you from the cliff into the blue hole. It’s only about 10 or 15 feet below the surface and it is like something from Jacques Cousteau, thousands of soft and hard corals of every color imaginable covered with fish, definitely an awesome way to finish our trip.
So this is going on too long, but we did a couple other dive trips down to Sharm El Sheik and made it to Ras Mohammed which, aside from getting horribly seasick on the boat in choppy water, was amazing. We hit it just at the beginning of spawning season so there were large schools of fish arriving to the reefs. Although we didn’t see any hammerhead sharks or turtles, at one point I looked up and saw dozens of tuna (at least 6 feet long) hovering right above me. We also saw big-ass barracudas swimming around a ship wreak that was carrying toilets and bathtubs to the hotels being built in the area. The sea floor was covered with toilets, and people had gone down and arranged them like modern art installations, very funny to see.
As you see, I can go on and on about diving, but I won’t subject you to anymore of it. My last blog update on my time in the Middle East will be on my trip to Jerusalem and northern Israel.
05 January 2011
Lame after-the-fact updates
As most of you know, I actually left Egypt four months ago today. Before departing, I wrote, but never posted several blog updates. Not quite sure why I never got my act together to get them on my website, it wasn’t like I was overworked or anything. Nevertheless, before I start reporting on my new adventure in Botswana, I figured I should really close out my time in Egypt. There are several parts which I may break up into a few posts so it’s not too long. So here we go with biblical floods…
Torrential rains and the desert aren't two things that I think normally go together, but in keeping with the strange weather around the world, the Sinai had record amounts of rain and biggest floods in over 50+ years. Normally February is the "rainy" month, but we started with the never-ending and very annoying sand storms in the fall instead of the winter and the rain early in December. We had about three solid days of rain just after the New Year which didn’t seem like to big of a deal since we were not out doing missions, and I was holed up in my hooch.
I never really thought about it, but when you get rain in the desert, it really doesn’t have anywhere to go. Put that together with the “wadis” all over the Sinai which are basically dry valleys cut into the landscape during these rare events, and you have a big problem. Since these types of rains only happen once in a generation, people tend to forgot and build their homes and plant orchards right in the middle of the wadi (sounds very familiar to all those people in the Mississippi flood plain, hmmm…).
On the morning of the third day of rain, we heard that the flooding along the Israeli-Egyptian border was so bad that an Israeli Defense Force armored vehicle actually washed across the border into Egypt, and the two soldiers inside had to be rescued by the Egyptians soldiers. Funny when you think it was the first time the Israeli military crossed onto Egyptian territory since the peace treaty, but I guess it doesn’t count in this case. We heard that bridges had washed away on the Israeli side, that roads were closed all the way down to Sharm El Sheik, and that we were trapped on in north camp due to the flooding in nearby El Arish (with the only major road back to Cairo).
When the rain finally stopped on the fourth day, we decided to hop into the Blackhawk helicopters and get a birds-eye view of what was going on. As we flew westward down the coast of the Mediterranean towards El Arish I saw the ocean turned to a strange brown color with a significant amount of flotsam when were within a few kilometers of the city. We were all a bit perplexed until we got closer and realized that a “no longer dormant” wadi running through the middle of the city was now a raging river about 100 meters wide destroying everything in its path, including about 5 bridges, countless homes, and even several four story apartment buildings (there was video on YouTube of an actual building collapsing into the water). It was really shocking to see, and as we followed the wadi south, we saw that most of the roads in the area were totally destroyed. A river cut across one we regularly drove eroding the one side into a 10 foot waterfall. The destruction to the orchards was really heartbreaking to see. So many people depend on agriculture for their livelihood, and I’d guess thousands of olive and peach trees washed away into the sea.
To say that the Egyptian government was unprepared for destruction on such a vast scale is an understatement. They attempted to provide some displaced person camps (i.e. army tents) in some of the worse affected areas, but it was too little too late. Of course the Bedouins living out in the desert were the most affected, and since there isn’t any love lost between them and the Egyptians, the aid was even slower in coming than it would have been for a similar event west of the Suez Canal. As for the damage to infrastructure, I’d guess it will literally be years before things are back to the way they were, if they ever again.
Torrential rains and the desert aren't two things that I think normally go together, but in keeping with the strange weather around the world, the Sinai had record amounts of rain and biggest floods in over 50+ years. Normally February is the "rainy" month, but we started with the never-ending and very annoying sand storms in the fall instead of the winter and the rain early in December. We had about three solid days of rain just after the New Year which didn’t seem like to big of a deal since we were not out doing missions, and I was holed up in my hooch.
I never really thought about it, but when you get rain in the desert, it really doesn’t have anywhere to go. Put that together with the “wadis” all over the Sinai which are basically dry valleys cut into the landscape during these rare events, and you have a big problem. Since these types of rains only happen once in a generation, people tend to forgot and build their homes and plant orchards right in the middle of the wadi (sounds very familiar to all those people in the Mississippi flood plain, hmmm…).
On the morning of the third day of rain, we heard that the flooding along the Israeli-Egyptian border was so bad that an Israeli Defense Force armored vehicle actually washed across the border into Egypt, and the two soldiers inside had to be rescued by the Egyptians soldiers. Funny when you think it was the first time the Israeli military crossed onto Egyptian territory since the peace treaty, but I guess it doesn’t count in this case. We heard that bridges had washed away on the Israeli side, that roads were closed all the way down to Sharm El Sheik, and that we were trapped on in north camp due to the flooding in nearby El Arish (with the only major road back to Cairo).
When the rain finally stopped on the fourth day, we decided to hop into the Blackhawk helicopters and get a birds-eye view of what was going on. As we flew westward down the coast of the Mediterranean towards El Arish I saw the ocean turned to a strange brown color with a significant amount of flotsam when were within a few kilometers of the city. We were all a bit perplexed until we got closer and realized that a “no longer dormant” wadi running through the middle of the city was now a raging river about 100 meters wide destroying everything in its path, including about 5 bridges, countless homes, and even several four story apartment buildings (there was video on YouTube of an actual building collapsing into the water). It was really shocking to see, and as we followed the wadi south, we saw that most of the roads in the area were totally destroyed. A river cut across one we regularly drove eroding the one side into a 10 foot waterfall. The destruction to the orchards was really heartbreaking to see. So many people depend on agriculture for their livelihood, and I’d guess thousands of olive and peach trees washed away into the sea.
To say that the Egyptian government was unprepared for destruction on such a vast scale is an understatement. They attempted to provide some displaced person camps (i.e. army tents) in some of the worse affected areas, but it was too little too late. Of course the Bedouins living out in the desert were the most affected, and since there isn’t any love lost between them and the Egyptians, the aid was even slower in coming than it would have been for a similar event west of the Suez Canal. As for the damage to infrastructure, I’d guess it will literally be years before things are back to the way they were, if they ever again.
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