Cairo - Warm, gin-clear water. Silence. Coral reefs and crazy fish. Perpetual blue sky, blue sea. Evening stars and lullaby waves.
There’s nothing quite as chilled or as picture-postcard perfect as a liveaboard scuba diving holiday, especially when it’s in the unspoilt St John’s National Park in the deep south of the Red Sea.
Our itinerary read: “It’s a remote, spectacular virgin wilderness where reefs rise up from an enormous undersea plateau, sheer walls plunge away sharply, teeming with shoals of fish and masses of soft corals. Sharks are commonly encountered, including hammerheads, threshers and oceanic white tips.”
What it didn’t say was how totally spoilt you are. How for six glorious days the most you have to do is dive four times a day, if you like. Or, if you prefer – after a raucous night toasting the rising moon on the top deck – do absolutely nothing at all.
The beauty of a diving holiday on a luxury liveaboard is that everything gets done for you and everything is included. So for six days you get a slap-up breakfast, hearty lunch and a delicious dinner, with snacks in the late afternoon and tea, coffee and soft drinks served all day.
Your tanks get filled, your gear is always ready and waiting for you, and the most effort required is to stand still long enough for a dive assistant to strap on your fins before you step off the boat’s dive platform into the azure blue of the Red Sea.
And that’s where life as you know it stops and a whole new world starts. It’s a strange, beautiful world of kaleidoscope corals on reefs that appear out of nowhere. One minute you’re diving through pinnacles followed by inquisitive raccoon butterfly fish and then you’re in an amphitheatre swimming through schools of blue-striped snapper. Out in the “deep blue”, barracuda torpedo past you shadowed by a stealthy white-tip shark.
In the coral garden at Abu Galawa Soraya, moray eels come out to play, in stark contrast to the glass fish swarming over the wreck of a private sailing boat. Parrot fish pose for pictures and boxfish flitter about while a turtle takes a lazy cruise in search of an afternoon coral cocktail.
At most of our safety stops we were joined by friendly Napoleon wrasse and even the resident triggerfish were unusually laidback.
It’s hard to choose a favourite, but of the 12 sites we dived St John’s Caves wins by a whisker. Cracks in the coral plate have created intriguing tunnels and gullies that meander through a wonderland of shade and light, almost like a mini underwater maze. It’s a shallow dive so you have time to explore all the nooks and crannies, each one unearthing another small wonder.
And did I mention that you can do all this in baggies or a bikini (if you’re really brave)? With the water averaging around 30ºC, no wetsuit required – not once during the entire holiday, and that includes night dives and the deeper wreck dives.
These you do on the last day as you head for an overnight stay in the bustling seaside city of Hurghada. The early morning dive is on the Salem Express, a ferry that sank after hitting the Hyndman reef on December 17, 1991. The ferry was carrying passengers returning from Hajj and while the official loss of life was 470, it is believed about 200 more people died on the overcrowded ferry.
With so much still preserved on the ocean bed – suitcases, children’s toys, TVs, radios and life rafts – it is a poignantly eerie dive and treated with deserved respect by the local dive guides.
With the mosque on the shores of colourful Hurghada in sight, the last dive is on the wreck of the El Minya, a minesweeper that was bombed by Israel at the start of the Six-day War.
Both wrecks are teeming with corals and sea life, but it is their tragic history that leaves a haunting memory.
Our trip, organised by the ever-efficient Durban Underwater World and facilitated by Pro Dive (Port Elizabeth), began with an Air Egypt overnight flight from OR Tambo International Airport to Cairo, where we spent a day in a five-star hotel before leaving on a domestic flight to Marsa Alam.
Arriving at midnight, we were very happy to meet our guides, Hanni and Mohammed, from the Excellence, one of the luxury boats in the Sea Serpent fleet, for our bus transfer to the marina.
The somewhat chaotic transfer from the bus to the inflatable boats which delivered us to the Excellence raised a few red flags. But the 21 tired tourists who stepped on to the boat and were immediately relieved of their shoes for six days, were soon placated.
Toasted cheese sandwiches and coffee – or ice for those celebrating their arrival with harder tack – set the scene for a quick safety and “housekeeping” briefing before blissful bed.
And in the morning, with the rising sun streaming through our cabin portholes, it was time for the adventure to begin. A new day heralded by dolphins frolicking in the boat’s wake. Smiles. And coffee. And anticipation. - The Mercury