TURNING ON THE SHARM
With Egypt now on the Government’s travel green list. RACHEL O’DONOGHUE dives into one of the country’s most sunsoaked resorts
JUMPING backwards off a boat into the dazzling blue waters of the Red Sea is a thrilling way to start my first ever diving adventure. Kitted out in a wetsuit, flippers and breathing equipment, I swish my way down into the deep, adjusting to the pressure before relaxing into the dreamlike ecosystem that lies beneath.
The rich waters around Egypt’s Sharm El Sheikh resort – at the sundrenched tip of the Sinai Peninsula – are famed for their towering coral reefs, climbing like psychedelic ivy from the sea bed.
With an eye-popping array of colours and shapes, from folded brain corals to elegant sea fans and absolutely teeming with marine life, it is known as one of the great natural wonders of the underwater world. While PADI (professional association of diving instructors) is renowned for its scuba certification programmes, its PADI Travel branch offers a range of divingthemed holiday packages, now on sale again after Egypt was moved off the Government travel red list last month.
From hotels to day excursions, equipment and dive guides, everything is taken care of.
In Sharm El Sheikh, PADI Travel partners with a selection of hotels on the shoreline, including my base for the week, the Reef Oasis Blue Bay Resort. This five-star, all-inclusive spa hotel with its own stretch of white beach, has an array of restaurants with chefs hailing from Thailand, India and Italy.
When you’re not exploring the silent underworld, you can spend blissed-out days around the lagoon-like swimming pools, and the well-staffed bars are perfectly placed for mojito-sipping at sunset.
The most appealing part of this hotel for me, however, is its superbly organised dive centre, the Reef Oasis Dive Club. Its expert instructors’ in-depth knowledge of the area’s best dive sites means you will see everything Sharm’s marine magnificence has to offer. I booked on to two full-day dive trips from a boat which started at 8am – and they are well worth getting out of bed for.
After a five-minute minibus transfer to Sharm harbour, I boarded a two-deck cruiser with a dozen or so other divers.
There are plenty of instructors on board too, which means each trip caters for mixed abilities, as well as complete newbies such as myself.
On my pre-pandemic trip we visited some of Sharm’s most famous dive sites across two days, including two of the Straits of Tiran’s four reefs, Jackson and Gordon Reef. Sadly, we didn’t get to see either the hammerhead or white tip sharks that some lucky visitors to Jackson have seen, but the stunning coral garden, alive with vivid reds and oranges, more than made up for this.
Although you can fit in at least three dives per day from the boat, most opt for one or two, instead preferring to take it easy in the afternoon, going for a snorkel.
Lunch on the boat is an impressive affair considering the size of the kitchen, with a dozen dishes on offer such as minced lamb, rice, potatoes and local salads. The veterans of Sharm diving on my boat were quick to recommend visiting the wreck of the SS Thistlegorm – a British Second World War armed merchant ship that sank in 1941 near Ras Muhammed – described as a submerged museum.
Marooned at a depth of just 100ft, you can swim among the wreck’s cargo which includes trucks, motorcycles, aircraft parts and guns. The equipment is largely intact and remarkably well preserved.
It is also worth taking a trip to some of the areas surrounding Sharm El Sheikh, such as Dahab. An hour-and-a-half drive away, this picturesque coastal town is famed for its cool, hippyish vibe with a mishmash of hookah bars, Egyptian restaurants and market vendors.
Dahab is also a great place for shore diving. Here you can pull on your wetsuit, get your tank secured and wade straight into the sea.
The PADI-linked Dahab Divers Hotel & Dive Centre, which also has 30 reasonably-priced rooms if you fancy staying a night or two, is close the water, and can organise excursions to Dahab’s world-famous Blue Hole and The Canyon. Not for the faint-hearted, The Blue Hole is a dramatic 330ft sinkhole and should only be attempted by more experienced divers.
For this reason, I gave it a miss and instead saw The Canyon – a dazzling underwater ravine that you can dive right into or float just above, while being mesmerised by the sight of oxygen bubbles from the divers below escaping from this dramatic crack in the Earth’s crust.
If you decide to stay in Dahab for dinner, you’ll find some of the best food around. Shark is an adorable
little eatery right on the water that serves platters of fresh fish, mixed grills and homemade flatbreads with an assortment of dips.
While most trips out can be organised by the team at the Ocean Bay with just a day’s notice, some outings, however, require a little more fore- thought. For example, a trip into the Peninsula interior to Mount Sinai – popular with pilgrims looking to trace the steps of Moses – had recently tightened its security. But measures like this were visible all across Sharm, including the wall erected around the entire perimeter of the city to facilitate security checks on every vehicle that arrives at a hotel. I was among the first British tourists to fly direct to Sharm from the UK when flights resumed – just before Covid brought the world to a grinding halt – following a five-year hiatus after the tragic events of 2015 when 224 people were killed after a bomb brought down a Russian airliner.
Significant improvements have been made at the airport and the increased security checks are reassuring. Normally hundreds of thousands of European sunseekers head here annually, so those five years with barely any travellers were tough on the local community, with some hotels closing for part of the year following the decline in custom.
Covid, of course, only exacerbated the problem.
However, fewer scuba diving and snorkelling tourists for those years have allowed the corals to blossom.
PADI Travel is keen to ensure the reefs stay this way. Its open water certification programme starts wannabe divers in a swimming pool before they are allowed into the open water – and even then, they first practise in the house reef just off the hotel’s jetty.
After seeing this aquatic paradise for yourself, you’ll understand why it must be preserved.