Dahab and the Gulf of Aqaba

Dahab — Egyptian Arabic for gold — sits on the south-east shoulder of Sinai, on the Gulf of Aqaba. It was a Bedouin fishing settlement of the Muzeina tribe; it became a backpackers' town during the Israeli occupation of Sinai between 1967 and 1982, and it has been a diving town ever since.

The geography is what makes it. The Gulf of Aqaba is a flooded section of the Dead Sea Transform, a strike-slip fault system, so the seabed drops away almost immediately: there is a narrow reef flat, then a wall. Nearly everything is a shore dive. You walk in off a coral shelf, turn left or right, and the wall does the rest. That is why the site names read like a list of places along a road rather than a list of boat moorings — the Lighthouse, Eel Garden, the Islands, Golden Blocks, Moray Garden, Three Pools, the Caves, Umm Sid, and north to the Canyon, the Bells and the Blue Hole.

Two sites on that coast are genuinely dangerous and famous for it: the Blue Hole, with its Arch at 55 m, and the deep end of Gabr el Bint. Everything else is forgiving.