Date: Feb 12-14 1998 (2 very cold cloudy days and one normal, sunny winter day)
Tour organizers: Aqua-Sport Eilat
Sites dived: Ras Mamluch, Small Canyon, Abu Helal, Club Red, Pools, Common Market
Description: Never big fans of the Aqua-Sport dive club in Eilat because of their consistently horrible service we nonetheless went on one of their jeep safaris simply because they are one of the few organizations in Israel that have regular jeep safaris to Sinai. We often go on boat safaris but we wanted to get to some of the sites in the Nuweiba and Dahab areas that you can't get to by boat.
Well, going with Aqua-Sport was a huge mistake.
I've never come back from a dive trip angry before but this experience left me seething mad for an entire month. I wrote their manager about the whole horrible experience and he didn't even have the courtesy to reply.
Not to be completely negative, I'll start with the good things. The Egyptians organization that Aqua-Sport works with was fine. The cook was excellent and our driver seemed like a really nice guy. One of the jeeps broke down the first day but that's the kind of thing that happens in Egypt and the Egyptians dealt with it without inconveniencing us too much. And the dives themselves were beautiful (see our logbook page for detail). Even Aqua-Sport can't ruin the Red Sea. Well, that's about it for the positive.
Guy and I have been to Sinai on our own before so it isn't that we were expecting to be babysat through the entire trip. In fact, we were pleased that at least we weren't forced to dive with the herd like the others in our group. All we wanted from the trip was a few good days diving, some time to enjoy the beauty of the Sinai desert, and to avoid the hassles of having to lug our stuff around on buses and taxies. But we ended up with twice as many hassles by going with Aqua-Sport, it cost us significantly more money, and we didn't get to do nearly as much diving as we would have if we'd gone on our own. And instead of enjoying the beauty of the desert, I spent most of my time crying over the garbage groups like ours were leaving behind.
The trip consisted of 3 days in Sinai with a stop to swim with the wild dolphin in Nuweiba, 2 beach dives a day, and nights spent camping in the desert. But the place we camped was literally shit-covered and never once did the guides explain to the group how to dispose of their toilet paper and other garbage. I strongly suspect they didn't know themselves. Nor were they much more caring about the underwater environment. The guide I went with never explained the underwater dos and don'ts and on the first dive one of our group was already breaking coral and harassing a turtle.
Having been to Sinai many times before, Guy and I were well prepared. But we went with a large group of Europeans who were never told by the Aqua-Sport staff that they'd need to change money at the border and so we were only an hour into the trip and already there was trouble when some of the Europeans didn't have Egyptian money to pay for their swim with the dolphin in Nuweiba. Both guides claimed they had no Egyptian money to lend these people. A typical example of failing to attend to details that I didn't find at all acceptable from an organization that runs this same trip several times a month.
We then wasted hours every day running into Dahab so one European or another could go to the bank or make a phone call. Each time we arrived in Dahab I'd ask if I could do some quick shopping and each time I was told they'd make time for that later in the day or tomorrow. So there we'd be standing around in Dahab for a half-hour or an hour just waiting. And in the end. the promised free time in Dahab never materialized.
Or we'd wake up at our camp in the desert at 6 am as planned. But instead of getting a good start on the day we'd find our guide too hung-over to move. Hours later we'd still be waiting for her to come back from a "quick" trip to Dahab for new tanks. Of course she would come back with a couple friends in tow and more beer and cigarettes so you knew what you'd really been waiting for all morning. Funny that the guides always found time to go to Dahab for beer and cigarettes but there was never time enough for us to spend an hour there doing our own bit of shopping.
On the final day, I was still being lied to about free time in Dahab. That turned out to not be a problem though since while we were underwater doing our final dive of the trip the guides decided to send one of the jeeps to Dahab so some of the Europeans could make phone calls. Of course they sent the jeep that had my money, camera, passport, and other valuables inside. When they got back most of my money was missing. Well, at least I wasn't left entirely without warm clothes for that hour like one of the other divers who's stuff was also in the jeep (and it was cold when we did the trip so coming out of a dive with no warm cloths to change into could not have been very pleasant).
I was already in a really bad mood long before this incident. Most of it came from the hostile attitude of one of the guides. For 3 days we had to put up with her obnoxious comments about a certain segment of Israeli society. I would have found her less offensive if she was talking to Israelis but it was disgusting watching her trying to pass on her prejudices to a group of tourists who knew nothing about Israel, Israelis, or the problems of Israeli society. I just can't believe Aqua-Sport lets people like that guide foreign tourists! The same guide also refused to stop smoking in the jeep so the group could be more evenly distributed between the 2 jeeps (7 of us were in the non-smoking jeep and only 3 in the smoking). I didn't care so much about the crowding in the jeep but the Europeans who were squished in there with us complained all the time so we had to deal with their hostility on top of that of the guide.
On the last day, we got back to the border hours later than the scheduled return time (mostly due to the late start because of the hung-over guide and the usual disorganization). At the border we were met by a surely driver who resented having to work so late and yelled at me when I didn't take my equipment to the club. I tried to explain to him that the equipment belonged to me and not the club but he was too busy being nasty to listen. I'll give him credit for eventually apologizing -- the only person associated with Aqua-Sport to do so. And though they opened the club to take back the rental equipment, nobody had a key to the office where our dive cards were being kept. Guy and I had to do the long drive home across the desert late that night without them. We were lucky we weren't planning to dive elsewhere that week and that we weren't foreign tourists flying on to some other destination.
A lot of my disappointment with the trip comes from being spoiled from having been to Sinai with really good guides. I could see that several of the people on this trip were enjoying themselves well enough. Most of them were there more to drink than to dive, so as long as there was a supply of beer, they were happy. But I kept seeing the things they were missing out on that would have made their trip so much better. For example, I had a good book on Red Sea fish life with me so I didn't need a guide with knowledge of marine biology. The others, however, didn't have either a book or a knowledgeable guide. When one of them asked what coral was, the guide didn't have a clue as to how to answer. Is it too much to expect that your guide bring along a book on the local fish life on an organized trip like that?
I guess I just expect a trip I pay for to be better than a trip I could organize myself. I expect to be treated like a paying customer when I am one and not like I'm some sort of freeloader who's just along for the ride and who's getting in the way of the guide's own fun. I guess I just expect the guides to give a damn -- about their customers and about the environment. Well, I guess I just better not dive with Aqua-Sport.
Date: Sep 4-7 1998 (hot, but not disgustingly hot, late summer weather)
Tour organizers: YamBaTeva (formerly Shneor Divers)
Sites dived: Temple, Jackfish Alley, Alternatives, Thistlegorm, Shag Rock, Sha'ab Surir, Small Passage, Dunraven, Quay, Anemone City and Shark and Yolanda Reefs, Ras Gozlani
Description: This was a almost a typical Shneor boat safari except for it's most unusual ending. I went on this trip alone without Guy because I just happened to have this Egyptian visa I didn't know what else to do with.
The trip actually started out almost as badly as it ended since I had to meet the group in Eilat at the Egyptian border at 4 in the morning and had no way to get there except by public transit which dragged the 4-hour drive out to 6 hours and got me to the border at 1:30 am where I had to wait all night for everyone else to arrive.
But when the others turned up I was pleased to find that my guide was Sonia, a great guide who'd come with us on the trip to South Egypt in July (since I don't feel like writing a report on that trip I'll only say that it was the only Shneor trip I wasn't crazy about, the most expensive we've ever gone on, and I would have liked it somewhat better if Shneor himself hadn't come along and if he'd charged us less).
After crossing the border, we took a comfortable bus down to Sharm el Sheikh (an improvement over the days when Shneor would send us down in jeeps) and I finally got to catch up on some of the sleep I'd missed.
The trip was a 4-day liveaboard on the King Snefro III with 4 dives a day except for the last day when we did just 3 dives. The boat is what Shneor classifies as "medium". That means it's a nice air-conditioned boat but without private bathrooms in each room. I would have been just as happy without the air-conditioning. Though it was still hot on land, we had a nice breeze out at sea and I had the beginnings of a cold which the air-conditioning just made worse. Still, it was a nice boat with beautiful, highly-varnished wooden floors and a very comfortable saloon and deck.
Our cook made the real "homey" kind of Egyptian food that I like and was very good about providing something at every meal for those of us who don't eat land animals. I especially appreciated this after our South Egypt trip on the Fortuna where the cook really resented having to prepare anything for the vegetarians and so mostly didn't.
This was my first trip to Sinai with my new underwater camera and I was a bit worried about who would help me with the camera as I entered an exited the water. The crew were very good though and helped out a lot. OK, they did knock the camera down on one occasion when joking around but they didn't break anything and were much more careful from then on.
As for the diving, it was generally quite good. I didn't get to any place new except the Alternatives which I found disappointing due to poor visibility and a huge concentration of crown-of-thorns starfish. I was also a bit disappointed with the night dives but we went to some great spots for the day dives (see our logbook page for detail). These are pretty much the standard spots you go to on a boat safari in this area.
We had quite a rough sea on our second day out when we dove the Thistlegorm and a couple people got seasick. But though the sea was rough, the visibility was the best I've ever seen it at the Thistlegorm and I had a really good dive.
The next couple days, the sea was calmer and one afternoon we were treated to the sight of the southward stork migration. There was a band stretching across the sky from horizon to horizon made up entirely of storks. We watched them, went diving, came out and they were still flying past. I don't know how long it took for them all to fly over us but it was a long time.
The last day of the trip, we did a few beautiful dives at Ras Muhammed, and then sailed back to Sharm where we left the boat in the afternoon and got back on our bus for the trip back to Israel. On the way we stopped in town to drop off a few people who wanted to stay longer in Sinai and then we headed north.
Now's when the real adventure starts. We were about an hour from Taba (the Egyptian border) when something on the bus goes boom. The guys sitting near me thought it was a tire blowing. My first thought was that it was an axel since it sounded just like the broken jeep axel we'd had on the Aqua-Sport trip from hell. We never did find out what broke.
By the time the bus driver pulled over to the side of the road, there was a strong smell of burning rubber. The driver opened the front door (I was sitting by the back door), and the people sitting up there got down. They immediately came back on and yelled that we all had to get off the bus. Those of us sitting in the back were still thinking along the lines of flat tires so though I grabbed my camera bag (it goes with me everywhere!) I didn't take the heavier day pack that was in the seat next to me. I got about half way up the aisle before I saw the flames climbing up the outside back of the bus. By then it was too late to turn back for the other bag. The aisle was narrow and there were people behind me and everyone was sure the bus was going to explode.
By the time I got out the front door, the gang sitting in the front rows had already pulled all the bags out of the luggage compartments and we all just grabbed anything in reach and ran up the road with it. When the smoke got thicker and we were still waiting for that big explosion, we decided we'd better get even further away and hauled all the gear with us down to the beach by the side of the road. Then all we could do was sit and watch the bus burn which it did completely. I once saw a bus that had been blown up by a bomb and it looked in good shape compared to the blackened hulk we left on the side of the road that day in Sinai.
While the local Beduins came out to watch the fire with us, the driver's assistant stopped a car and went off in search of help. Eventually, but much too late to do any good, a fire truck showed up and trickled some water over the conflagration. The police eventually came in black pick-up trucks and a new bus was produced to take everyone up to the border.
Because I'd lost a bag in the fire (which contained my old logbook as well as the arm that attaches the strobe to my camera and several other things that have proven very expensive to replace), I had to jump into the back of one of those black pick-ups and go to the police station in Nuweiba to make a report. I was accompanied by someone else who'd lost stuff and Sonia, our guide.
The police, of course, took hours over the paperwork and in the end didn't even give us anything to take home to our insurance companies (though they promised something would be sent on in a few weeks). It was 1:30 am before we finally got across the border at which point we still had that 4-hour drive home ahead of us. I was fortunate to get a lift home this time because there were certainly no buses leaving Eilat at that hour. I still didn't get home till 6am since we just had to stop on the way and rest and I was way too exhausted by the time I did get home to go to work so ended up having to take the day off to sleep and shop for replacements for the things I'd lost.
It was definitly a most memorable trip but it really was the kind of adventure I could well do without.
Date: Dec 22-25, 1999 (4 mostly cloudy days)
Tour organizers: YamBaTeva
Sites dived: Temple, Alternatives, Thistlegorm, Small Passage, Sha'ab Surir, Beacon Rock, Lonely Mushroom, Shark Reef, Quay, Jackfish Alley
Description: Having reached almost 6 months of age, Yasmin decided it was time for her first dive trip. Actually, her parents decided it was time for her first dive trip and once again wound up on the King Snefro III where Yasmin quite enjoyed the special attention she got from the captain. We'd brought along Yasmin's uncle Tal to keep her occupied while we were under water but after Tal had done his first intro dive, it became hard to keep him out of the water.
It was a pretty laid back and uneventful trip for all of us if you don't count the speeding ticket we got on the way to Eilat or the passport that was an hour late arriving at the border or the dissapearance of yet another of Michal's logbooks.
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