Port Ghalib, Southern Egypt Now don’t get us wrong this is a very good destination for those who have recently learnt to dive, The Coral reefs are beautiful, all-be-it decorated from the shore line with local fisherman’s broken fishing line, so don’t get in the water with out a small knife or line cutter. We found little or no currents to be concerned with and the hard boats are a good introduction to this form of diving. We just found the lack of variety of local sites a little tedious by the end of a few days. No walls, caves, canyons, or currents to get the adrenalin going. We saw a few very nice specimens of Turtles, Morays, Rays, Parrot and Triggerfish, not to mention clouds of smaller species amongst the colourful Coral heads. Then most disappointing of all was the litter in the water, after a few dives we had taken to collecting the plastic bags floating in the water, they looked just like jellyfish, Turtle food, except the bags kill the Turtles! This takes us to our next point, Port Ghalib, or to be more precise the beach closest to both our hotel and the Harbour Masters post (Port Ghalib opening page). The hotel is called “The Coral Beach Hotel”, we renamed it “The Building Site Marina”. The hotel was “nice” enough for a it’s location, the staff were all polite and helpful, and the food in the restaurant looked great, but that didn’t stop a number of guests requiring quantities of Imodium in order to continue their holiday… The building works were going on around this massive site 24 hours a day, which made for an interesting back drop to ones evening meal, out side on the pool terrace with a back ground noise of hammering and ready mix concrete being poured. I’ll leave the rest to your own imagination.This leads us to our last point, who is to blame, shall we start with ourselves? If we didn’t go to these places the developers would be moving in to cash in on the possibilities of making it a resort. But then if the developers hadn’t built anything in the first place tourists wouldn’t have anywhere to stay. Then we find there is a local environment tax imposed on anything diving related, but what is it being spent on? Certainly not looking after the local marine environment! We take our diving very seriously and are proud to be apart of earthdive and implore all divers to adopt there code of practice. eCORD - Code of responsible diving |
