After visiting Jordan and Egypt a few years back, I knew I wanted to return to the Red Sea to do some serious scuba diving- and it happened to be my birthday. I’d already dived in Jordan. This left only one option- scuba diving in Dahab, Egypt!
I LOVE Egypt. I’ll cover more on how our recent trip was in a later post, this one’s all about the diving! We started out staying at a cheap hotel in town, but it was pretty bad and we knew we wanted to move to a spot that had great rooms and discounts on diving. After some searching, we ended up at the Bedouin Moon Hotel & Reef 2000 Dive School. This hotel & dive school isn’t on the ‘strip’ in Dahab, so you’ll need to taxi from town to get there- but its close enough to be a cheap taxi ride away. The oceanfront views and clean rooms, plus the kindhearted staff made it clear that I’d be having a great birthday if we stayed here. So we did. Ocean in the front, and tall sandy mountains in the background, this place had all kinds of great views.
We scheduled in lots of scuba diving and the weather was perfect in September- hot and breezy. Ocean temps were spot on- not too cold. Oh what I’d give to be right back on that warm beach right now! I rented a small camera with housing and tried my best to take lots of underwater shots, which sounds easy but underwater photography is incredibly hard and editing the photos- at least for me- even harder.
We spent our days diving and relaxing at the hotel, eating most of our meals there as well. The food was freshly prepared and the menu was varied enough that we never got bored. Our nights were spent drinking, relaxing and trying to find the elusive new ‘tattoo guy’ who had just set up shop in Dahab. After a few searches, I found him- and he created the most bad ass leg piece that took about 7 hours….I’ll be writing all about it very soon.
This part of Egypt in general is safer than Cairo and although there weren’t as many tourists as we hoped, we remain positive that the tourism will pick up and give some work to these people who want so desperately receive visitors again. The red sea is a perfect spot for diving, the waters are clear and warm for a good part of the year.
Reef 2000 is 5 star PADI dive resort with friendly dive instructors who love what they do and are happy to share their favorite dive spots. When it was time to leave we were really sad as over the week we’d become so attached to everyone at the hotel/dive school (our dive instructor Noeleen was awesome!). We paid a really reasonable amount for the diving and the room and the vibe at the hotel was relaxed and enjoyable. The best part is, I know we can always go back.
Want to contact the Reef 2000 Dive school? Click here. Interested in the Bedouin Moon Hotel? Click here.
I’ll have part 2 of our Red Sea dive post next week in case you’re still not convinced that diving in Dahab is worth it- we dive to a cave system that is shaped like South America- but more on that in the next post!
So tell us- Have you dived in Egypt? Interested yet?
The post Scuba diving Egypt’s Red Sea- Part 1 appeared first on Travel This Earth.
