We are beginning another adventure abroad in winter. We started our journey on the 25\11\14 and we will return in April next year. This year we have come to Egypt in North Africa.

It’s a five hour flight to Sharm El Sheikh (a touristy place on the Sinai peninsula of Egypt which is part of Africa and Asia) from Manchester. Once we were flying over Egypt you could sense the dryness in the air and see the rock mountains of the desert with the setting sun shining on them and making them a red-gold colour.

As we enter the airport,you can tell they have copied the colours of the desert in red,orange,yellow,gold and some white.

We collected our luggage and got into a small mini bus and a man drove us to Dahab which is an hours drive from Sharm El Sheikh. The man didn’t speak any English but to be fair we don’t speak any Arabic.

After 10 minutes or so we stopped when we reached a security barrier and the man left us without saying a thing for about half a hour. We were waiting it seemed to go through to Dahab in a police convoy as we saw a police van with a man with a machine gun in the back and worked it out.

When we reached Dahab in the dark a friend of the owner of the house we had rented came to meet us on the main road to show us the house. We’ve rented a house in Mashraba (an area in Dahab) for 3 weeks.
The house (Dahabitat) has 2 living areas, a kitchen, bathroom and two bedrooms, one with a double bed and one with 2 single beds. The house also came with three bikes. Dahabitat also had a reasonable sized garden and a good sized roof terrace (great for stargazing).

It is all lovely.

For the first couple of days we explored the local areas by foot until we found a baby seat for our bikes in Assalah (another area of Dahab where the Bedouins live. The scarred desert landscape of Sinai is home to the Bedouins. Who are the Bedoins? -Originally nomadic people, they have changed with the times and now many of them live in and around Dahab. The Bedouins in the Dahab area are called Muzeina and are an important part of the area.)

From that point onwards we cycled most places.

Another part of town called La Laguna

-or Dahab Bay- was where all the windsurfers and Kite surfers practiced,either in the ocean or in the bay.

It seemed like the locals had tried to make Dahab into another Goa (tourist place in the south of India) or another Sharm El Sheikh but it seems to have backfired (maybe due to the political unrest of Egypt in recent years). There are semi built concrete hotels on the front near the sea, seemingly abandoned. There are also 50+ restaurants around Mashrabah but they were all empty.

There was a few tourists about but mostly they just hung out around the main package tourist area of the lagoon . This is also a massive diving area with diving shops everywhere you go.

The ultimate traveller (a.k.a Ian Dixon) brought a 3D, bright, good quality kite with him so we had a go at flying that. I got the hang of it quite quickly.

If you go to the lagoon area (the lagoon at the time had a few Jellyfish in the water and out)

there’s a lot more wind than where we are.

So since the wind was strong it pulled you along with a lot of strength. It was a lot of fun.

We went to the lagoon area again another day to discover what the coral ,sea and fish was like. We picked a bit of a windy day to go snorkeling but it was okay once you were in the the water.

Unfortunately for me I forgot my snorkel so I had to keep taking a breath every 10 seconds. But apart from that I saw a medium sized fish with fluorescent orange stripes and silver vertical stripes. I also saw a Puffer fish. The rest were just small unidentified fish (to me). The coral could have been better but it still had it’s unique colours in some places. Once we reached the breaking point of the coral it was too shallow to swim so we turned back. I will never forget my snorkel again- trust me.