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| Blue Hole Dive Site-Dahab |
Dahab is different-it's a sleepy bedouin town on Sinai. Its name is Arabic for gold and it describes the color of the rolling hills of the Sinai Peninsula that crash into turquoise waters of the Sea of Aqaba...from the shores of Dahab you can see the red sands of Saudi Arabia. Two hours drive away is Mt Sinai where you can hike to the top to where Moses supposedly received the ten commandments. Dahab is notorious for people going for weekend and then staying for a month. That happened to me twice. In those times I would dive in the mornings and then experience the 'chill factor' of the place which consists of laying around, being lazy, drinking Sakaras and smoking sheesha (Egyptian for narghila and hookah for all of my friends in the States).
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| Saudi Arabia in the distance |
I was warned when I was certified for diving in Egypt that I would be spoiled for the rest of my life due to the amazing dive conditions in the Red Sea. The water is crystal clear, the reefs are full of marine life and schools of fish are everywhere. It's like the cast of the Little Mermaid dancing around every time you dive.
So I wasn't entirely surprised that the diving in Sri Lanka is not up to par with Dahab...nowhere else I've been ever has. I went with a Canadian woman working with an NGO that de-mines areas of conflict. She too, had been to Dahab in the past when she was working in Oman. Our dive master was an ex-sailor named Fernandez who has been diving since 1983. He was probably the most professional dive master I've been with in that he actually verified our certifications--you can seriously walk into dive locations around the world and pretend you're certified without anyone questioning it. Dahab is one of these places that don't really care. This is no good because people can and have die as a result of not knowing what to do.
The boat used for diving did not represent the same caliber as the instructor. It was a little, rickety boat that can fit four people at most. We had to gear up, prop ourselves up on the side and then do a back flip off while making sure we didn't bang our head off the side of the boat. We stayed down for nearly an hour. When we surfaced there appeared to be a storm out at sea with five foot waves making us bob around. We were supposed to do another dive to a ship wreck, but the wave were too rough. Instead we went back to the dive center and do the ship wreck tomorrow. The ride back had us going up with each wave and then crashing down sharply. It's a good thing none of us got seasick.
And then I was introduced to the docking methods used by Sri Lankans. Instead of slowly approaching shore and tying the boat to something-the captain kicked up the motor to full gear and went full throttle onto the beach...seriously we hit ground and after a huge bump were on land. We stayed for lunch and Fernandez asked my friend about the demining situation in Sri Lanka. It seems everyone keeps comparing the mines here to the situation in Cambodia. It is predicted that it will take another 20 years before Cambodia is free of mines. In Sri Lanka it remains unknown.
Fernandez then shared with us some stories from war times and was saying how much happier he is now that it's over. It also became apparent that he is not Tamil, but Sinhalese. Until 2009, if he tried to run his dive shop the LTTE-Tamil Tigers-would harass him and demand money for him to run the business. He described them as 'pistol gangs' that would shoot anyone who didn't pay up. Despite being Sinhalese, he said he didn't like the label of terrorist being put on the Tigers. He said as a result the Sinhalese government always looks at the Tamils with a suspicious eye.
We finished up lunch and then some of his staff drove us across the lagoon to show us where we were to meet them for our dive tomorrow. The landmark we chose was a bent palm tree. My friend and I decided if we ever open a bar then that is going to be the name of it.
