Egypt, a destination filled with history and wonder. I destination that was not actually on my bucket list. I mean it would be cool, but never a place I ever really needed or intended to go to. Some of you are probably thinking, “but what?”. I mean, I love the history part and it fascinates me, but this part of the world doesn’t intrigue me so much. I don’t know what else to say other than that.

Nonetheless, the opportunity presented itself and so to Egypt I would go. What opportunity? Oh, just that my visa was expiring around the same time (aka I had to leave the country) and my dive company said there was 1 available spot left for diving in the Red Sea. If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been having a hard time saying no to diving opportunities. And honestly, I didn’t have any plans (really, beyond April in the South Andaman Sea, to go diving). And now, I’m going diving WAYYYYY more than planned for the year. Oh well, YOLO (but not really, I’m just making the most of my time left on this side of the world).

I have a feeling that once I’m back in the states, I will definitely NOT be diving this much. It’ll probably be more like once or twice a year at most. And there are A LOT of good dive sites on this side of the world. We’ll get to those later, but let’s talk about this trip to Egypt that just happen to come up.

A quick wrap up of the trip. Arrive in Cairo (by way of a layover in Doha) and spend the night in an airport hotel to catch a flight to Marsa Alam (where we board the M/Y Blue – our liveaboard boat, in Port Ghalib). With it being a desert country (and really, everything is BROWN or TAN), it’s quite humid – this wasn’t completely expected. We spend 7-8ish days on the boat having an amazing experience and seeing some really cool large sea animals (dugong, spinner dolphins, hammerhead sharks, longimanus and the oceanic manta ray…the tunas are fairly large as well). The boat was fantastic and the stars were beautiful (extremely clear skies).

Once back to Port Ghalib and back to the Marsa Alam airport, we headed back to Cairo to play tourist for about 1.5 days. We spent an entire day playing extreme tourist (3 museums and a set of pyramids), and the largest mall in Egypt. Yup, we did all that and before dinner at 6pm…and starting around 9am. Super, super productive day!

HIGHLIGHTS:

The sea animals and the liveaboard.

LOWLIGHTS:

The level of hospitality – in that there didn’t seem to be much in certain places (the InterContinental Hotel).

The blatant asking for money or tips.