R&R on the Red Sea

Dahab means "gold" in Arabic. For us, our time in Dahab was indeed a golden stay. After a long bus journey from Suez, we chanced upon the Star of Dahab Hotel. That night Lachlan persuaded me to enroll on a PADI dive course to become certified open water divers. For the next 4 days Lachlan and I went back to school and studied buoyancy, air pressures, hand signals, dive tables to calculate residual nitrogen etc etc. We also did 4 confined water dives and 4 open water dives. It was fantastic and we are very proud that Lachlan passed, especially as he is 11 and only just qualified to sit the course. Mr Ramollo would have been very proud!


Scuba diving is an amazing experience, and Lachlan took to it like a . . . well a fish to water. He was very calm and and in control, and never panicked. 10 metres from the beach the reef starts and immediately you are surrounded by a huge variety of tropical fish. I won't even start to name all the species we saw, but Lachlan did see a Giant Trevally which was about 2 metres long. I was on my guard as I kept expecting to see Emilio Largo and Sean Connery come round the corner with spear guns.

Iona and Gilleasbuig also took a fun dive, complete with full Scuba equipment and oxygen tanks.



While Lachlan and I were on our course, the rest of the family relaxed and swam. The children really loved snorkeling as they could just swim out and float over the reef, looking at all the fish beneath them.


Morag too had a ball just snorkeling on her own out to the reef.



In total we spent 6 days at Dahab, unwinding, swimming and enjoying the stunning scenery. Across the Strait of Aqaba from Dahab is Saudi Arabia and every evening we would have dinner and watch the sun set over the mountains in Saudi.


Our last day there was Elspeth's birthday and the hotel covered the restaurant in balloons and baked a cake. The children decorated the little tree with balloons which made it look like a c----m tree (censored by Elspeth).

All in all a wonderful way to end a great stay.