Dahab

A day here is organised around a pickup truck rather than a boat. Tanks are loaded at the centre, driven up or down the coast road, and unloaded at the entry point, where divers kit up on mats beside a Bedouin camp and walk in across the reef flat. Two dives with a long break between them is the standard shape, and lunch is eaten at the same camp. Because the water is a few steps from the vehicle, plans change late: when the afternoon wind gets up the group moves site rather than cancels.

The coast is a narrow fringing reef, lagoon then reef flat then a wall dropping away within swimming distance of the beach, so most dives are an out-and-back or a slow traverse at a chosen depth. What changes from site to site is the break in the reef: a sinkhole in the top, a fissure whose entrance sits near 20 m and whose floor runs past recreational limits, a sand slope with garden eels, a sheltered lagoon of coral heads. The in-town entries, Lighthouse above all, are shallow and forgiving, so they carry most of the courses.

The signature dive is the route around the deep passage rather than through it. Divers enter at a break in the reef north of the sinkhole called the Bells, drop through a chimney that opens onto the wall near 28 m, fin south along the wall and cross into the Blue Hole over a saddle around 6 m deep. Dived that way it stays inside recreational limits, though most centres want some deep-dive experience for the drop. The memorial plaques on the rock above are generally read as a warning about the other way of diving it, and not all of them mark deaths at this site.

Dahab suits divers who want volume rather than logistics: unlimited shore-diving packages, long bottom times and easy repeat visits to one site to work on skills or photographs. The town also carries a large freediving scene alongside the technical one, so a single car park can hold three sports at once. Macro shooters do well on the sand and the reef tops, and night dives are simple when the entry is metres from the road. Anyone after wrecks, big-boat comfort or reliable pelagic action should look elsewhere on the Egyptian coast.