Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt ~ Deep Blue Adventures

Hello again! You've landed on the third post in a series about our 2012 trip to Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt! To start back at the beginning, click here!

At the end of the second post, we had caught the dive company's shuttle to our first day of diving! The reason we had come to Sharm El Sheikh at all was to go SCUBA diving in the Red Sea. A gentleman that we met at Disneyland Paris had told us that one of the most amazing places to dive in the world was Sharm El Sheikh, and from that point Austin had been doing a ton of research about it and had "liked" Emperor Divers on Facebook.

Then, one day while surfing Facebook, Austin saw that they were having a buy one get one free dive trip sale, which is an incredible deal! Without much hesitation, he booked a five-day, ten-dive package (and thus got one free), so we built our vacation around diving with Emperor!

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Saturday 30 June 2012

10:03

Our first day of diving went fairly well. We were on the boat called the Delphinus, and our guides were Elise and Saad with Jonathan teaching an AOWD class.

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We did what they call "local" dives. Our first dive site was called Ras Katy (which is so cool!). I went through my air really fast and that dive was only about 35 minutes for us. The boat was doing three dives, but our package only covered two (the third would have been an extra 20€ per person), so we skipped the second dive which was on a site called Temple and snorkeled instead.

There was a Swedish family on the boat whose six-year-old came along for the ride. His parents took turns watching him and alternated so they both got to dive throughout the day. The mother, Susanna, and the little boy, Kasper, were on the boat while we were as well as a family from the Netherlands. We snorkeled for about 30 minutes and ate our sack lunches that the hotel had packed for us.

When the rest of the crew came in, they ate their lunch and we waited while they completed their surface interval. Then we moved on to our final dive site of the day, Ras Umm Sid. R.U.S. was a gentle drift dive and we saw some really fun fish against a coral reef wall. Lion fish, angel fish, zebra fish, sergeant fish, parrot fish, the huge schools of these tiny little silvery/turquoise fish and lots of fish that look like gold fish. Austin also saw a big Moray eel and a huge manta ray. Air consumption went much better that time, and my dive was exactly 45 minutes.

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Following that third and final dive, we packed up our gear into the crates provided by Emperor and labeled with our names while the boat chugged back to Naama Bay.

Since we were to be diving on the same boat, the Delphinus, the next day, all of our gear remained on board and we just took the small backpack back to the center with us. Back at the dive center we waited for about half an hour for the transfers to start back to the hotels.

On the dock in Naama Bay!

Susanna was an underwater photographer, and in the bus on the way back she mentioned that they may have gotten some good pictures of us! She gave us her husband's business card so that we could get in touch via e-mail. I'm really excited to see how they turned out!

We got a new key when we reached reception, requested a lunch box for the next day and tried to explain that we wanted more food. The man at reception recommended that we speak to guest relations, and the petite, blonde Russian woman who worked in guest relations told us that we needed to speak with the head of food and beverage, but he wasn't in yet.

16:17

At that point, we went back to the room, Austin showered and we went back to the restaurant for dinner. After dinner we met with the head of F&B and he was incredibly accommodating. He basically let us special order whatever we wanted and arranged to meet with us every evening after dinner to make sure the lunches were sufficient! Pretty amazing! With that sorted, we retired to our room (by way of the bar where we watched the bar tender make a fake beer for a little girl by creatively mixing several different sodas together). I showered and we washed out our salty swimming clothes and we went to bed around 21:00.

Our comfortable room!

Saturday morning, June 30th, we were up, packed and ready to go, and eating breakfast by 7:00! We refilled waters, grabbed our sack lunches (which one of the kitchen workers, Mohammed, proudly told us he had made personally at 6:00 :D) and waited for the bus to pick us up in front of the hotel.

While we were waiting, two other similar buses came to retrieve other people from our hotel. The first was obviously not going diving, and when I asked the driver of the second if we were on his list, he said, "I have one Russian, ma'am. You are English."

We had a pretty good chuckle over that, at which point I began exercising my Russian vocabulary to Austin. Many of the guards were apparently on break at the same time, and one of them came over and greeted us in Russian. Eventually we got around to the point that we are from Germany*. Obviously, the only topic of conversation to have with a German is EuroCup football. Around that point, the Emperor bus arrived and we were on our way back to the Dive center.

Being our second day, we knew the drill and checked in with our boat crew. We were on the Delphinus again but our guides had switched to Kirstie, and Jonathan had a couple of AOWD details to finish up, but he kind of doubled as the second guide.

Kirstie and another diver preparing to enter the water!

Our first dive of the day was on a site called Ras Burg. It was a full drift dive with a fairly swift current. We popped into the water, our group was led by Kirstie and we went in first. We made our descent (no ear problems at all! Praise the Lord!) and the very first thing we saw was a huge manta ray - like he was our welcoming committee :) We saw a lot more of those tiny silver fish in the big schools (which I did learn the name of today and then promptly forgot again), and some large parrot fish. The dive was next to a coral wall that dropped down 800 meters! There were also some bat fish, but I didn't see them.

lion fish, angel fish, zebra fish, sergeant fish, parrot fish, fusiliers, anthias, moray eel, manta ray
(from top to bottom, left to right)

We managed a 41 minute dive despite me sucking down air like someone three times my size, but we were the first divers back to the boat. We switched our kit while the deck was empty and headed upstairs to await the rest of the group. They came in and we had a significant surface interval (close to two hours). Lots of chatting and napping in the sunshine. Austin and I had lunch part one. About an hour into the interval the boat crew served everyone else their lunch, we napped a little more and them we got briefed on the second dive.

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Our second and final dive of the day was on a site called Shark & Yolanda. We were with Jonathan's group for that dive, and jumped in second. The current was considerable, but we tucked in tight next to the reef wall and dropped down with the Shark reef on our right side. We descended into a HUGE school of medium-sized silver fish (snappers I think) and made our way along the reef wall at about 15m depth. We saw a lot of butterfly fish and the fish that look like goldfish and one big moray eel on that wall. When we got to the saddle, Jonathan tried to fin around and up it, but the current was too strong. After a couple of minutes, he turned us around and we headed to the back side of Shark which was a fairly shallow (about 8m) coral garden. We saw a TON of unicorn fish an a couple of big stone fish. When we got around the far side of Yolanda we met up with the first group an saw a bit of the wreck for which the reef is named. We didn't get to see very much of it before we were being led around the front of Yolanda reef. Another big school of snappers, lots of butterfly fish and our second big moray eel, and by that time I was out of air. I go through air considerably more quickly than Austin does, and that really frustrates him because it shortens his dives even though he isn't out of air.

butterfly fish, stone fish, snappers, unicorn fish

Now we're headed back to the Naama Bay Marina. Tomorrow we're going to be diving Tiran. Looking forward to showers and dinner :)

17:23

They're fusiliers! The ones we've seen have been the Lunar fusiliers (silver with the blue/turquoise sheen) the Suez fusiliers have a darker blue stripe between their dorsal fin and their tail. Interesting fact about the fusiliers: they always point into the current!

I hope you enjoyed this installment in the Sharm El Sheikh series! I'd love to hear what you like, what you don't like, what you'd like to see more of, and what you're seeing too much of in these posts! Please let me know in the comments!

His,

*NOTE: At this time, we were living in Germany. It was also not a super-safe time to be an American in Egypt (the week after we were there an American man was kidnapped). The dive company listed us as "British" on all of their paperwork, and it was safer for us to be identified as either British or German in all public situations. Thankfully most people who do not speak English as their primary language don't immediately recognize the difference in accent between American English speakers and others.

Click here to read part 4!

To see a list of ALL of our travel stories, in chronological order, click here!

Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt ~ Relocation and True Beginning

Welcome back! This post is the second in a series of posts about our 2012 trip to Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt! To start back at the beginning, click here!

At the end of the last journal entry, Austin was on the phone with hotels.com. Again. And I had just discovered ants in our hotel room! I didn't get a chance to update the journal again until the next evening:

Friday 29 June 2012

17:46

Wow! Long break between journaling on a day when A LOT happened! Let me explain, no there is too much. Let me sum up:

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We spent about an hour and a half looking for a different hotel, and ended up finding an amazing deal on a Melia! (You'll remember we stayed at a Melia in Cozumel in 2009) Unfortunately that deal was on hotels4you.com and was more than a thousand dollars less than Hotels.com's price. We were afraid that Hotels.com wouldn't back us up with our cancellation at Sol Y Mar if we booked through someone else, so we booked on Hotels.com hoping they would do a price match. Hotels.com really didn't like the idea of a price match in excess of $1,000, but they let us cancel that booking, honored their cancellation assistance, and gave us $250 for our trouble, and we booked the Melia through the other site.

Throughout this whole process we spent a considerable amount of time on the phone with Hotels.com - always calling their international collect number. This is important later in the story.

We headed to reception to check out (probably one of the shortest recorded hotel stays in history!), and the desk manager looked at our charges (we knew we would have to pay for Internet time), and his eyebrows shot up to about his hairline.

"You made many International calls?" He asked us.

We explained that we had called an international collect number, but apparently they registered in the hotel's system as international calls - running up a bill of more than $450 in international phone charges!

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I sat on those ^^^ steps and cried while Austin attempted to Skype Hotels.com from the iPad. He managed to connect long enough to ask someone to call the hotel, then he explained the problem and e-mailed them a picture of the bill (which thankfully detailed the number proving that it wasn't our error). They promised to reimburse us in full. We paid the bill and walked out to the street (past the guard shack) to hail a taxi.

The guard helped us flag down a taxi and we got into the cab of the first driver who would accept 30 E.£ to take us to our new hotel, the Melia Sinai.

At one point the driver got a phone call, then a short time later we were pulling over in a more residential area next to three of his Bedouin buddies. (I don't know if they were actually Bedouin, I just like the alliteration.) He stopped the taxi, handed one of the three - who were peering into the back seat at us through the open passenger-side window and smiling creepily at us - a plastic grocery sack. At that point he suggested that we switch from his marked blue and white taxi to a large white van that was parked there. Austin said an unequivocal, "No!", and, in spite of the driver's best persuasion attempts, insisted that we move on to the hotel right away.

20:32

Notwithstanding that frightening episode, we made it to our new hotel safely (holding the door locks locked the whole way)! And in time for dinner!

A welcome oasis!
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We checked in, called the dive center to inform them of our hotel change, met the very friendly reception staff, and were shown to our beautiful room. We dropped off our stuff and hurried to dinner, which was light years away from the lunch we experienced at Sol Y Mar.

Unpacking and getting settled in went very well, and we thoroughly enjoyed our evening - even though we had a few engineering hiccups (this is Egypt). We visited the bar and caught part of the EuroCup game - Germany played very poorly and ended up losing, we found out in the morning - which was being projected onto the side of the hotel next to one of the pools!

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Upon returning to the room for the final time, we showered and readied for bed. I fell asleep in the shower and could barely get myself into bed. I definitely slept through the engineering crew that came to fix our air-conditioning.

This morning (Friday), we rose bright and early, ate breakfast, picked up our sack lunches from reception and went out to meet the bus with all of our scuba gear (Austin did have to run back to the room with a maintenance man to get the lock/key situation figured out and to close our room safe), and enjoyed the air-conditioned bus ride to Emperor Divers dive center.

There you have it! Finally in a great hotel and ready to start an incredible vacation!

See you next time!

His,

Click here to read part 3!

To see a list of ALL of our travel stories, in chronological order, click here!

Cozumel Memories

I've been digging through the archives! So many pictures and memories! And I promised you travel adventures, so here it is...

The Trip That Started It All ~ Cozumel, Mexico ~ March 2009

(That may be a bit of an unfair title since our first international trip together (the one that planted the seeds of a passion for missions in our hearts) was a summer missions trip to France with a group from our college, but this was our first international trip as a married couple and included so many other firsts: Our first all-inclusive resort stay, our first SCUBA experience, etc. And it was on this trip when the adventure bug bit us both -- in a big way!)

In the late winter of early 2009, my frugal, brilliant husband was looking for a warm destination. The Iowa winter had been long and brutal, and we were dying to relax in the sunshine! He did quite a bit of research, and ended up finding a great deal on Orbitz where he was able to package our flights and our all-inclusive resort stay for a significant discount! (He's a keeper!)

When the day before our flight arrived, we packed up the car and headed to Des Moines. We spent the night before our early-morning flight at the Hampton Inn in Des Moines. We chose the Hampton because they had a continental breakfast, an airport shuttle, and we could park our car there until we got back! In my journal I recorded, "The desk manager was a card, so he and Austin got along great, and the room was very luxurious and comfortable - an excellent start to our long-awaited vacation."

The next morning, our requested 3:30am wake-up call did its job, and we caught the shuttle to the airport. Once there, we retrieved our boarding passes, checked our baggage, and sailed through security. Then we both slept most of the way to Atlanta.

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Once there we made our way to our next gate, then decided to do lunch at the airport version of TGIFridays. I love eating in airports because it is the most wonderful excuse to people watch! The Atlanta airport - reportedly the busiest airport in the world - boasts some pretty interesting characters, too.

It is always hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that there are literally billions of people all over the world living out their life stories simultaneously, and nowhere is that more apparent than in a bustling airport. I think too often we find ourselves operating in a “Truman Show” mentality, as though ours is the only play on the stage and everyone who passes through it are just extras and stage technicians - there for our benefit.

Image credits: image 1, image 2

Anyway - back to Atlanta - after lunch we trundled ourselves back to our gate and waited for our boarding call.

When we booked the trip, we did not realize we would be traveling during spring break season, and the throng of already-intoxicated college students at the Cancun gate made us pretty nervous. There did not seem to be any rowdy patrons at our gate, or on our plane as we boarded, so that put our minds at ease.

We were delayed by almost 30 minutes in Atlanta, so we hit the ground in Cozumel nearly simultaneously with two or three other large planes - which made for quite a mess in their small customs area. We snaked our way through a line that filled the large room and extended out the doors to the tarmac for nearly two hours.

Once we cleared customs and retrieved our check bags, we stood in another security line, which, once cleared, popped us out into the beautiful Mexican sunshine!

When we reached the resort, the Melia Cozumel, we entered the gorgeous lobby area that was 1000x more beautiful than the pictures on the Internet. We stepped into the lobby through automatic sliding doors and directly in front of us, through another pair of doors, we could see a gorgeous swimming pool - complete with royal blue lounge chairs, a swim-up bar and towel stand, and steps down to the breathtakingly beautiful beach - perfect white sand and startlingly clear turquoise water.

We tore ourselves away from the view long enough to check in. At the front desk we were welcomed with stemmed glasses of jamaica water, presented with room keys, maps, activities schedules, all-inclusive wrist bands, and cuisine/entertainment schedules. A quick and friendly porter whisked our luggage onto his cart and led the way to the elevators. In his broken English and our broken Spanish we learned that the elevators were new, and that he had been hauling toursits’ luggage up and down the Melia’s stairways for thirty seven years!

He was the first of many incredible and obliging staff members that we met during our stay! Throughout our time there, we had the same server for most dinners, and by day two he had our drink orders down so that we never had to ask, and the housekeeping staff kept our room immaculate - cleaning twice a day - and our mini-fridge stocked with complimentary sodas and bottles of water!

The Melia is located far enough away from downtown Cozumel so as not to be negatively affected by traffic noise or the late-night party scene, but close enough to be a cheap taxi ride in to enjoy any of the touristy attractions on offer.

The activities staff were all the perfect combination of engaging without being intrusive and overbearing if you just wanted to sunbathe instead of participate in whatever was going on! And there was always something going on! From beach volleyball tournaments to sand sculpture contests to dance lessons to water aerobics, there was something for everyone. And it was a true all-inclusive so whenever we got hungry or thirsty, there were several different choices available!

On the first day, on the shuttle from the airport, we met a group of students from Hampton University in Virginia who had chosen Cozumel and the Melia as their spring break destination. We spent most of our resort time, and a couple of days in town with them, and had a great time making memories (as you can see in the pictures below)!

Most of our days were spent either hanging around the beach and the resort or strolling and shopping in downtown Cozumel, but one thing both Austin and I had always wanted to do was SCUBA dive, and Cozumel has some of the most incredible diving in the world.

We asked at the hotel's activities desk, and they were able to set us up with a "Discovery SCUBA" trip which was fantastic! "Discovery SCUBA" is a dive for people who have either never been diving before or who have no diving certification. Since we met both of those criteria, it was perfect for us! (Although, if we were on this trip now, we would probably shop around more and book independent from the hotel because the concierge is usually not the best deal.)

Our dive trip was with Dive With Martin, and since neither of us had ever been diving before, we went with an instructor and only two other divers. The took us to the Palancar Reef, which we found out later is one of the most incredible reef dives in the world. The instructors gave us a short tutorial on the boat ride out, and then we hopped out of the boat and began our very first descent.

After a brief panic on my part at the top, we both were able to descend without too much trouble and commenced with one of the most magical experiences we had ever had! SCUBA is an incredible sport, and little did we know that this dive would be the beginning of something wonderful!

When we surfaced after our second dive - after seeing the beautiful reef and all of the life it housed, including some of the beautiful sea turtles Cozumel is famous for, we were both very clear about our opinion of the sport: We LOVED it! We would definitely be doing that again!

Our fun and funny dive guides got us back to the dock, and along the way regaled us with stories of other dives and divers in the area. It was a wonderful first SCUBA experience, and one that would set the tone for the rest of our diving adventures! We were thoroughly impressed with Dive With Martin, and would use them again if we were diving in Cozumel!

The group from Hampton University had to leave the day before we did, so we spent our final resort day, just the two of us, bumming around. I finished reading a book by the pool, we played some beach volleyball, I'm sure there were other activities that day, but the biggest thing I remember is that it was the only day that we did not apply sunscreen. At all.

I remember that because by the end of the day we were incredibly sunburned. (See the above collage, bottom right. We snapped that selfie in the Cozumel airport waiting for our departure flight.) We were both so sunburned that during our overnight layover at a hotel in Cincinnati, OH, we took advantage of the two double beds and each slept alone so as not to bump one another in the middle of the night!

But the pain was worth it to have some incredible color when we got home and went back to work! There's nothing like looking like a beach bum in the middle of early-spring Iowa!

So, that was our trip! Little did we know that before the year was out we would be starting on an adventure that would take us to a total of 15 countries by way of 38 different flights and have us sleeping in 58 different beds. But that's another story for another time!

Thanks for stopping by! Hope you have a great Monday!

His,

To see the original blog post from 2009, click here!

To see a list of ALL of our travel stories, in chronological order, click here!