At The Red Sea

In addition to being the Biblical place where Moses parted the water, the Red Sea has amazing coral reefs for scuba diving and snorkeling. Unfortunately, on our first day at the Red Sea, Kelsi finally took her turn going to a medical clinic after slipping on wet tile and slamming her knee into a tile ledge. In our 8 or so months out we've only had one major medical situation with Rusty's kidney stone in Nepal. Fortunately, the x-rays of Kelsi's knee didn't show a cracked patella and the gash did more smashing than slicing so stitches weren't required - AND the budget hotel even covered the bill as it happened on their patio. They also comped Kelsi one free dive in the Red Sea! Nevertheless, we lost our first day of diving, which left us some time to photograph the area...

"No Camels and Horses"... only on the Red Sea!

From where we stayed in Egypt, we could look across and see Saudi Arabia. At different places, you can see Jordan, Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. The landscape in all directions was strikingly barren desert leading up to the Red Sea, which was full of great underwater life.

The town of Dahab Egypt had a really nice atmosphere with beautiful restaurants lining the ocean side.

Aside from Dahab Egypt, we also spent time in Aqaba Jordan. We tried the diving in both places, which was really spectacular! Kelsi felt like a mermaid princess during a dive in Dahab called "The Islands" where we swam up and down and through this wall and that wall of absolutely beautiful pastel colored corral after entering the dive through a cave. This site is named "The Islands" because of all the corral formations that are like a bunch of underwater islands. It was the most beautiful corral Kelsi had seen. Rusty thought is was a spectacular dive as well though the corral was more pastel than his liking of brilliant. There was more live corral in beautiful formations than either of us had ever seen though. One amazing brain corral that was crayola blue (the brightest of the corral on this dive) and enormous in size had resident clown fish swimming around in the anemone on top. It's called brain corral because it looks like a brain. There was also soft corral that Kelsi called popcorn corral because there were tons of little round balls opening and closing.

The dive company required that we do an easy dive before this one to make sure we had good buyancy in the water since there were many tight areas where we swam around corral and sometimes we'd be down at 40 feet then we'd swim over a formation at 15 feet, so you had to be careful not to bump into anything nor to pop up to the surface before the safety stop. It was quite an adventurous dive. Unfortunately, we don't have pictures since our waterproof camera broke in New Zealand, but the google picture below may give an idea of what the formations looked like that we were swimming through.


In Aquaba, Jordan, we did a 260 feet long shipwreck dive in amazing visibility. Notice the diver at the top of the ship. Picture from google:


Our second dive in Aquaba, Jordan, we saw the highest concentration of Lion Fish (picture on our Sulawesi blog) we'd ever seen: 10+ at one corner of corral as well as two creepy (and dangerous to the touch) stone fish that looked like the "Pirates of the Caribbean" Black Pearl Pirates. See google image below: