Dahab's Eel Gardens

Wow, what a month. I can't stop fantasizing about Dahab, where I spent August bartending, swimming and scuba diving. Bumming around Cairo waiting for my English and environmental teaching jobs to start just doesn't make up for the lack of swimming in my daily life.


I really felt Ryan and I hit the jackpot from the moment we discovered the coral reef called Eel Gardens, a peaceful area with luxuriously cushioned cafes on the shore, exotic green and blue waters, and an orange mountainous desert backdrop. Snorkeling there, the undulous current swished us around in the shallow sand and emerald grass beds, over corals and urchins and deadly stonefish so shallow I had to flatten my body on the surface and cautiously kick toward open water, where eventually a mini coral-smattered trench appeared to guide us to the reef shelf. After a few minutes of fighting the current to freedom, reaching that smooth vast blue of the open sea provoked an honorary sigh of awe. Laid out before me, in all its natural perfection, was a densely colorful wall of red blue orange white pink lavender honey peach - some as swaying soft corals or bumpy hard corals, others as frenzied schools of fish, gliding lionfish or territorial damselfish - every piece of the scene bursting with life.

Where the coral wall ended just 5-6 meters deep, a smooth stretch of pure white sand dissected the coral and the deep sea like a freshly laid cement sidewalk, but with the aesthetic touch of the current's wavy lines in the sand. I was embarrassingly transfixed by this simple scene, imagining God's own gentle fingers raking the lines into the white sand, painting the wall of royal blue like a curtain veiling the contents of the immense sea beyond my eyes' reach. Thin white eels slivered and twisted from holes in the sand, their tails rooted to the ground like headless flower stems wavering in a breeze. They retreated cautiously when I dived down to look into their beady eyes. Some days a sea turtle or eagle ray glided by and entranced me like a loyal child to the Pied Piper. Even waves rolling over me and the noisy ticking sounds of fishing crunching coral couldn't change the way I always felt swimming there, as if I'd left the warring world behind to float forever in serenity.

Of my few days of scuba diving, during which I got the Advanced certification and jumped on a three-dive boat trip, the most flooring experiences were those from 100-115 feet below the surface. Diving head-first or flattening our bodies like skydivers creating drag, we descended through narrow rocky shafts to hover cautiously above the next 150 feet down or to kneel on the sandy canyon floor in the face of a gaping cave. The cave looked so similar to something you'd find in a cliff on the shores of the west coast U.S. that I had to suppress the urge to stand up and waltz around as if gravity was still on my side. As Ryan described, leaving the canyon felt like sprouting wings and flying up through a valley into the sky, forgetting which side of the water's surface you were on.