Whale sharks swimming through the waters of Ras Mohammed National Park. — Ocean Image Bank/The Ocean Agency
The stonefish rests on a slope 28m deep, unimpressed by the divers who float down from above like astronauts. Only when one produces his camera does it stir and turn its back on him, sending sediment trickling to the seabed.
Fish and other sea creatures seem quite indifferent to the many humans who plop into the Red Sea day after day with their clunky equipment – in stark contrast to the delighted gesticulations of the tourists as they explore Egypt’s underwater realms.
A dive in these silent forests full of colourful shoals swirling through corals that are hundreds of years old is like “swimming in an aquarium”, says one photographer.
The main gateway to this dazzling other-world is in Sharm el-Sheikh, a tourist centre on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. The resort was developed in the 1980s while still under Israeli occupation.
After Israel withdrew its troops, Egypt rapidly expanded the number of hotels, and online travel agency Expedia now counts around 450. Many are beside dive shops or have their own in-house providers and offer packages for novice or experienced divers and snorkellers.
The sea flashes white in the morning sunlight as dive guide Saif gathers his guests at the hotel and dozens of diving boats with names like “Captain Morgan” and “Nemo” wait in readiness. This is the start of the marine protected area at Ras Mohammed National Park, which the International Union for Conservation of Nature or IUCN describes as “Egypt’s underwater paradise”.
It is one of the best protected marine environments in the world. The reef, a complex ecosystem for countless species, is the largest in Africa and stretches over 2,000km from Egypt to Sudan and Eritrea.
In Naama Bay in Sharm el-Sheikh, sometimes you don’t have to dive deep at all to find some aquatic company.
Finally the tourists dive, taking draughts of oxygen from their compressed air tanks and allowing themselves to sink, salt water filling their neoprene dive suits and warming and enveloping their bodies.
The bulky gear they had clumsily staggered to the edge of the boat in turns into a supple summer jacket, and the fins into powered socks. Weightlessly the divers glide away in 4m, 7m and then 12m of water.
Around them clownfish play hide and seek, metre-long moray eels meander between rocks, and a poodle-sized parrotfish casually carries its rainbow colours along the bottom. The stars down here are the fish and turtles, some of them endangered species, but dolphins, whale sharks and oceanic whitetips also put in an appearance on a good day.
However, this spectacle is only complete against the backdrop of magnificent corals, which according to Professor Anders Meibom, a researcher of the Transnational Red Sea Centre, are unparalleled anywhere in the world. He even describes them as “hope for mankind” because they are particularly resistant in times of climate change.
“The Caribbean is more or less extinct,” Meibom says of the corals there, while the Maldives in the Indian Ocean are also in “very bad shape”. The coral triangle around Indonesia and its neighbours is also “under enormous pressure from pollution and sewage”, while the warming of the world’s oceans is accelerating the bleaching process and is unstoppable on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
Corals are also threatened in the Gulf of Aqaba, a kind of secondary bathtub of the Red Sea with Sharm el-Sheikh at the plughole. At this point they have unique defences against higher temperatures, likely due to the last ice age some 18,000 years ago, after which the corals slowly spread here. Because areas with higher temperatures lay in their path, the heat-resistant specimens survived.
“This kind of resistance to warming does not exist anywhere else,” says Meibom, who was out with a team in the Gulf of Aqaba a few months ago. Formed in some cases more than 50 million years ago, the fascinating formations resemble luminous shrubs, flower meadows, broccoli fields and fossilised brains.
It’s hard to believe this ancient underwater growth can be viewed by simply walking to the jetty in a wetsuit, but that’s the reality. In Sharm el-Sheikh and further north in Dahab and Nuwaiba, the snorkelling and diving experience can literally be started on foot from the shore.
If you want to avoid the large hotels, warm desert air blows in visitors’ faces in Nuwaiba’s thatched hut camps, and the pastel colours of the mountains alternate between brown-grey and beige every few hours, depending on the position of the sun.
But a much heavier price is also being exacted for the enjoyment of all of this natural splendour. Tourism has also caused serious damage to the region and it’s getting worse, especially for the coral riches.
Together with oil and heavy metal pollution and coastal development, tourism is one of the biggest stress factors for corals, says Jessica Bellworthy, a researcher at the Coral Biomineralisation and Physiology Laboratory at Israel’s Haifa University.
“If we can’t limit the local damage to our coral reefs, and quickly, their outstanding heat resistance won’t matter,” Bellworthy warns. – dpa
