Trip report: Hurghada Egypt, September 2005
by Amy
Posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 at 8:58 pm CET
From 17 to 24 September we went to Hurghada in Egypt to dive. It was our first diving trip after getting our PADI Open Water certificates here in the Netherlands in July. We made two dives a day for five days with Colona Divers, a Scandinavian dive center, and saw giant morays, a sea turtle, stingrays and millions of colorful reef fish and corals.
See our related photoalbum for more photos
Saturday 17 September
We left the house at around 18:15 and walked to the bus stop at De Kooi. The bus came at 18:30 and took us to the station, where we made the 16:44 train to Schiphol. We picked up our travel documents at the Sky Tours desk and were directed to the wrong ticket gate to check in our luggage. After waiting in the wrong line for about 20 minutes we were directed to the right place, where we waited a further 30 minutes before we could check in our bags. Many other travelers had scuba-gear bags and there were quite a few surfboards being checked in as well. Our bags were slightly overweight, but since they contained scuba gear we were allowed to be a bit over the limit.
After the bags were checked, we found a place to sit outside of the gates area and ate our homemade egg salad sandwiches and blueberry muffins. Our flight boarded a bit late and we took off about 30 minutes after our scheduled departure of 22:00. The old MD had seen better days and made quite a racket during takeoff. Applause erupted when we were finally airborne. The cabin crew was very nice though.
From 17 to 24 September we went to Hurghada in Egypt to dive. It was our first diving trip after getting our PADI Open Water certificates here in the Netherlands in July. We made two dives a day for five days with Colona Divers, a Scandinavian dive center, and saw giant morays, a sea turtle, stingrays and millions of colorful reef fish and corals.
See our related photoalbum for more photos
Saturday 17 September
We left the house at around 18:15 and walked to the bus stop at De Kooi. The bus came at 18:30 and took us to the station, where we made the 16:44 train to Schiphol. We picked up our travel documents at the Sky Tours desk and were directed to the wrong ticket gate to check in our luggage. After waiting in the wrong line for about 20 minutes we were directed to the right place, where we waited a further 30 minutes before we could check in our bags. Many other travelers had scuba-gear bags and there were quite a few surfboards being checked in as well. Our bags were slightly overweight, but since they contained scuba gear we were allowed to be a bit over the limit.
After the bags were checked, we found a place to sit outside of the gates area and ate our homemade egg salad sandwiches and blueberry muffins. Our flight boarded a bit late and we took off about 30 minutes after our scheduled departure of 22:00. The old MD had seen better days and made quite a racket during takeoff. Applause erupted when we were finally airborne. The cabin crew was very nice though.
[...] Today we had a practice dive in the Oostvoornse Meer, here in the Netherlands. We hadn’t dived since Hurghada in September 2005, except for Nemo 33 in Brussels two weeks ago. The visibility was 3 to 5 meters, which was better than when we did our PADI Open Water dives in this same water in July last year. [...]
[...] Last week we had our second excellent experience with Colona Divers, this time in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. Colona is a Scandinavian dive operator with shops in Hurghada (where we first dived with them in 2005) and El Gouna in addition to Sharm. We did dives 22-30 with Colona from October 10-15. We should have started our diving on the 8th but I was feeling ill (heat exhaustion) on the evening of the 7th so we decided to join Colona as snorkelers for our first day. Unfortunately there was some miscommunication between the dive shop and the dive masters on our boat. We enjoyed our first snorkeling stop but the next two stops were for drift dives (we were the only snorkelers on the boat) and we were not informed of this - in fact the dive briefing indicated the boat would remain stationary. At the second stop, after swimming around a bit, we noticed the boat had moved quite far away - to the other side of the reef! Alarmed, we quickly aborted our snorkeling and swam quickly to the boat. The divers had a third dive but we stayed on the boat. In retrospect we could have also probably cleared up the confusion at the time but we were spooked and actually not too happy with Colona after that day. [...]