Sharm-el-Sheikh, meaning "Bay of the King" is a desert oasis on the Sinai Peninsula of Eastern Egypt. It has often been referred to as "The paradise of Egypt" or my personal favorite, "The City of Peace" for the numerous peace conferences that have been held here over the years. From the shore I can see the lights of Saudi Arabia, and that is one of the few reminders of my geographical place in the middle-eastern world.
Amidst this Utopia, where the endless sand stretches straight to the crystal coast of the red sea, it is easy to become lost beneath the sun swayed into tranquility by an ever flowing light ocean breeze. I however was blessed with the meeting of Muhammad my first day here, a scuba instructor turned friend who patiently opened up the real Sharm to me, via local Bedouin friends, Egyptian barbeques, and desert treks to places unknown even to locals. But first, he showed me the world beneath the surface of the Red Sea and that has made all the difference. SCUBA- Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus…..ok, so you learn some acronyms, strap on an air tank and jump in the ocean, ya?
No. First there is the fact that that the air tank is attached to a complicated vest of gages, breathing apparatuses, pressure valves, and emergency pulls, plus about nine different buckles just for shits and giggles. But before you get anywhere near THE VEST, you must take knowledge review quizzes, followed by a 40 question exam, followed by a 50 question final. There are gizmo’s and charts that you must learn in order to calculate just how much nitrogen you’re holding in your body after each dive (because the air tanks are comprised of 79 percent nitrogen, your body absorbs a shit ton of it beneath the waves). Based on those calculations you can determine just how long you must stay out of the water between dives, how deep you can go on dives two and three, and how long you can stay down there before your body hits what's called "decompression limit". Tricky… and kind of important if you don’t feel like dying from nitrogen bubbles in your blood…BUT, then you get in the water. Strapped up, tanked up, and jazzed up, you take that first sip of air, and realize that you are breathing under water. By the end of day one I was 40 feet down and frolicking among the neon corals of the red sea, by day two I was 60 feet down mastering the art of underwater boyancy, and by day three I was swimming with sting rays and napoleon fish 70 feet deep.
A week later I’m hooked on the Egypt that I have discovered outside of Cairo and Alexandria. This is a place where locals want you to know their land and their people because they would die for each grain of sand. This is a place where the biggest concern is what flavor Shisha to smoke tonight and how much sugar to put in your Bedouin tea. And it is a place where churches and mosques are built within 50 feet of each other, because the people of the desert seem to understand that there’s just one life, why waste it hating each other when you could be scuba diving?
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