Egypt Guide
The Red Sea Coast and Eastern Desert
Dive sites
1 Abu Hashish Cave An underwater cave in the reef, once used as a dope-smugglers' cache.
2 Abu Ramada Three coral blocks covered in psychedelic-hued soft corals, off Giftun Island.
3 Abu Ramada Gota Amazing standing ergs and 1500-year-old stony corals, with a profusion of bannerfish, sweetlips and spotted groupers.
4 Brothers Several ergs emerging from the deeps of the Red Sea, 80km northeast of El-Quseir. A popular liveaboard destination, now open only to boats with permits.
5 Careless Reef North of Giftun Island, and only accessible in mild weather conditions, this reef is the home of an extended community of moray eels.
6 Dolphin House A horseshoe-shaped reef 15km south of Mersa Alam, widely used by dolphins as a nursery for their young. HEPCA has recently installed buoys to prevent boats from entering. An excellent site for snorkelling.
7 El-Fanadir Beautiful reef slope and large table corals, to the north of Sigala.
8 El-Fanous Coral gardens just off Big Giftun Island, good for snorkelling as well as diving.
9 Giftun Island Most of the reefs on the Big and Small Giftun have been ruined by years of dive boats dropping their anchors onto the coral, and are now mostly visited by craft packed with snorkellers (€25/US$32 per person including equipment and lunch, but excluding entrance fee). Two notable spots are the Small Giftun Drift (fine reef-wall and lovely fan corals), and the Stone Beach on the northeast side of Big Giftun.
10 Shadwan Island Halfway to Sharm el-Sheikh, so out of day-trip range. Sheer walls and deep trenches here attract reef and oceanic sharks. Its lighthouse was of keen interest to de Monfried, when he navigated his boat through these waters in the early 1920s, with six hundred kilos of hashish secreted in its hold.
11 Thistlegorm This wreck is cheaper and slightly easier to reach from Sharm el-Sheikh.
12 Umm Gamar Island Sheer walls and caves, brilliant for drift diving. You can swim through a cave filled with thousands of silvery glassfish.