Scuba diving in the Sinai

If you are ever traveling through the Taba border crossing between Israel and Egypt, and you think there is even a one-tenth of one percent chance you will want to go diving at the Ros Mohammed nature park outside Sharm el Sheik, learn from our mistake: Buy a visa.

When we started this adventure, we planned on just diving in Dahab, which is further north. Our tour book and the signs at the border all say that foreigners get a free 14-day visa, good for anywhere in the Sinai; since we weren’t going into Egypt proper, we turned down the $15 visa that covers the rest of Egypt.

Upon hearing how much better diving in Sharm was, however, we ended up going further south – and it wasn’t until we actually started diving that we were informed that the two hottest dive sites in the region (the nature park and the Thistlegorm shipwreck) were considered part of “mainland Egypt” and required the special visa. Yes … very convenient bureaucracy that one. Basically, the whole thing is just a tax on scuba divers.

Most divers fly into Sharm, not Tel Aviv like we did, and they automatically pay for the visa upon entry. Since we had not, we heard conflicting reports on whether we could go to the airport in Sharm and buy the necessary visa – or whether we’d have to go all the way back to Taba (a full day’s bus ride away) to fix the problem.

Why would we have to do the latter? Isn’t one border patrol the same as another border patrol? Apparently not. Sharm and Taba are in two different districts, and, it was explained to us, there are apparently turf wars going on. One person thought the fact we had Israeli stamps would be a problem. Another person thought the presence of UN peacekeepers in Taba was the source of the difference. Another person thought the two coast guards just didn’t like each other and by refusing to amend the other group’s work, communicated their indigence. In short, no one really knew.

It would be ridiculous to lose a whole day of diving to go back to Taba, so we really only had one option: Go to the airport and give it a shot.

I’ll save you the long drawn out story of what happened next, and simply say this: After talking to about 40 people; being shuttled through every building of the airport over three hours; forking over $30 for the visa stamps (which were put in our passport); and arguing with the bank tellers who tried to refuse our payment in Egyptian pounds (wanting dollars instead, which we didn’t have) – we were told that we would NOT get the visa. They would not put the official ink stamp on the two paper stamps, which is what would render them official.

The only way to get the ink stamp was to work through an official tour operator (which we didn’t have), or go back to Taba. Oh, and by the way, we wouldn’t be getting our $30 back either.

Our only recourse was to call our dive shop and see if they knew a tour operator who could help us, but all the phones in the airport were broken. We tried calling from the desk phone at the information counter, but the line was so bad, we couldn’t hear each other. The men working there just shrugged and said “Yeah, it’s always like that.”

There was reputedly a set of phones beyond a security checkpoint that worked, but after standing there for 10 minutes with one guy after another passing around my passport and talking furiously in Arabic, it was returned to me with a firm “no.” I would not be allowed to pass to use the phone. I had nothing on me, and all I wanted to do was make a phone call, but no, I could not do so.

Only then did we spot a group of British tour guides sitting in a café, waiting, apparently, for their tour group to arrive. They leant us their phones, which patched us through to the dive shop – but another hour of phone calls by their local contact person to various bigwigs at the airport ultimately didn’t help us either.

Finally, at nearly 10 at night, we went back out to argue with the taxi drivers to get a reasonable fare back to Na’ama Bay. Naturally, as is par for the course in Egypt, when we were still several miles from the bay, the driver tried to tell us that we were “already there” (which we knew damn well we were not). When we told him the name of a hotel we wanted dropped off outside of, he tried jacking up the price another 10 L.E. ($2) to take us there. We argued the entire rest of the way to the bay, and in the end basically had to jump out of a moving taxi when we got to the hotel, me tossing the agreed-upon price at him through the window.

Are you ready for the final irony?

We dived both Ros Mohammed and the Thistlegorm wreck. For the former, the coast guard did do the passport check as we boarded the diveboat, but either they didn’t look closely enough – or they were satisfied with the paper stamps. And for the latter, at our 3:30 am departure from the dock, they didn’t check our passports at all. We walked through metal detectors, and that was it.

Ros Mohammed and the Thistlegorm are, hands down, the best diving in the Sinai, and probably among the top recreational diving spots in the world. If you ever go there – don’t miss it!

It’s now time to go back to Israel. For pictures of the Sinai Adventure 2007 (including the adorable kittens we rescued off the street), send me an email and I'll send you the link!