Scuba Diving!

Okay, my scuba diving adventure!

I had four days in Dahab and as wonderful as the town is I was afraid that sitting around by the pool all day wouldn't be enough to entertain me, and seeing as I was among one of the best diving locations in the world I decided to take my Open Water Diver Certification.

This is my diving buddy and I getting into the water.

I never realized how heavy the scuba gear was until I tried it on for the first time. I almost fell over when my instructor let go and let me feel the whole weight of it. Getting into the water is a nightmare. First of all it is hard enough staying upright and balancing when walking over an uneven surface with the weight of an elephant on your back, and secondly, it is ridiculously hot. The heat was bad enough in shorts and a t-shirt, but the tight scuba suit that was created to insulate made it almost unbearable. Those few minutes before entering the water are close to torture, but it makes entering the water all the more sweeter.

Here I am with my diving instructor Ibrahim.

Ibrahim was a great instructor, but very bad at rock, paper, scissors. After a dive you have to be careful not to ascend to the surface too quickly, otherwise the excess nitrogen that has built up in your body during the dive will not have enough time to escape properly. This can lead to the nitrogen bubbling up in your veins which rumour has it is not a very comfortable experience. To avoid this we ended each dive by waiting for a few minutes about five meters under the surface, and to make time go by we would play games, such as rock, paper, scissors. He would also make my diving buddy and I do the walk like an Egyptian dance during every dive too... although I think he mainly did that to get back on us for beating him every time.

Here are a couple of pictures of the fish we saw taken with the underwater camera.

The underwater camera could only go down to ten meters and since we dived till eighteen we didn't take it with us on the actual dives. But I saw so many wonderful creatures! So to give you a little taste of what I saw I have googled you some pictures:

A couple of times during my dive we saw octopus!... octopei? They were hidden in the coral both times and I never would have noticed them if Ibrahim hadn't pointed them out to me... It would have been wonderful to see them out in the open but I was happy enough to see them at all.

Then there were the beautiful stonefish. The two ones I saw weren't quite as disgusting as this one, but they were really wonderful to look at. I was a little nervous since I had not quite learned how to move properly under water and the stonefish are poisonous if touched. It was my lack of coordination that was the only thing that made me nervous. A couple of times I was so amazed by what I saw that I began to drift towards the coral. When I realized I was a lot closer than I wanted to be I always felt a little panicky that I would be unable to get away from it in time. Luckily, I never did come in contact with the coral.

On my last dive I got to see a blue spotted sting ray. It is really beautiful, as you can see from the picture. The colours are absolutely amazing. My sting ray was just chilling out underneath a little coral bush.

I managed to spot the puffer fish all by myself. It wasn't puffed up but there was no mistaking the spikes and bubbly eyes. I was very tempted to give it a little fright to make it puff itself up but I decided against it.


This fish is called a cornetfish. The first time I saw it I saw a big one, followed by a smaller one, followed by a tiny one... It was cornetfish family! Super cute! And then on another dive there was a cornetfish that followed us around for five-ten minutes. It seemed really curious and was probably just as fascinated at the sight of us as we were by it and everything around us. At one point it seemed like it was only a very few centimeters from my face. The face of it was almost puppyish.

Diving was amazing! I really want to go back to Dahab and experience all this again before I go home to Norway! It was like being in the movie Finding Nemo. I think I saw most, if not all, of the character from the movie. One of the divers told me that sometimes she saw the clownfish circling their anemnon...aneme... anemone... anyway, circling their home and she would try to get closer because it usually meant that there would be little baby clownfish there. I tried this when I saw them circling their home and I did in fact see little baby Nemos!

It was an amazing experience, and although it may be unique in its own way I really hope that it will not be the last of its kind! Diving is like entering into a completely new world, soundless and beautiful and, for me, unexplored and full of wonderful adventures waiting to happen!