The Bunnie Blog
Living and Diving in Sharm el Sheikh
Well I am getting to know the beach better than my own hand!!! Another day another dive at the beach. Whilst I am the last to complain that I am working and doing the job that I love. It is that little bit more like hard work off the beach. Being of slight build, just the trudge up and down to the water is knackering… then throw students into the equation, you have to carry extra weights, sometimes have to head back to the kitting up area (when someone drops out, or forgets something!), so it can all be fun and games. Just to get from leaving the kitting up area to making that initial descent somehow seems to take 15 mins!! It does! I have timed it! So timekeeping becomes an issue too.
Anyway, I shall stop right there. There is some great life to be seen down there, and there is even a big fat stone fish sitting in the middle of a sandy patch which looks quite cool. Sadly the eagle rays seem to have moved off for a bit. I think they hang around in the mornings, then move on once the divers start kicking about and messing up their water.
So tomorrow I am at the beach again, let’s see what we see. The really good thing is that it is very warm, so it is shorties all around, and for me to get into a rash vest and shorts, well that is really saying something.
Oooo thank god that is over… I hate being ill at the best of times, but when it lingers on, that is really depressing. I was in bed for days!!
Anyway, I’m back on track now and back teaching Open Water… different students of course!
And the water is warm warm warm, even hot in places!!! Even I was ok in just a rash vest and surf shorts!!! Coool, we like that. Didn’t get a chance to see much other than a parrot fish, a few seargent majors and a box fish, but we haven’t been in open water yet, so roll on tomorrow. Let’s hope something turns up to wow my newbies.
Well after a great Open Water course that was leading on to an advanced course, that 39ºC seemed to have got the better of me. I went to bed that night, thinking I was a bit on the dehydrated side
After many bottles of water and a good few rehydration salts, I began to realise that this was no dehydration, I wasn’t well, but couldn’t really pin point anything more than a blinding headache and very tender back. The downside was that there was no way I could dive today, so my course had to be handed over to one of our other instructors.
Well that was all nearly a week ago, most of which was spent in bed in a darkened room! I did manage to drag myself to the doctor on day two, but at that stage it was too early to tell what was wrong. Not long after that, it was soon pretty clear that I had caught a tummy bug. Oooo, not good.
At one point my husband even took the day off to look after me… I must have looked bad. Of course he wanted to take some rather lovely photos of me with my head down the loo, but I think he felt too sorry for me.
As you can imagine, since then I have eaten very little and been dosing myself up with anti vomiting drugs, antibiotics and brufen. Even Clare came round and performed her party trick of giving me an injection to stop me throwing up. In truth by then, the urge had gone, but we’d already bought the phial (mad what you can just go and buy here), and there was no harm in taking it anyway just in case the vomiting returned. I must say, hats off to Clare, it was completely painless… better than many a doctor who has had to give me a jab. (it was Clare that had to inject George last year, and had taught me to do the same when his knee was beyond painful). Thankfully the drugs seem to have done the trick and today for the first time all week, I have begun to feel human!!! I have since found out that I was certainly not the first of our team to be struck down with it. Sounds like it has done the rounds through not only a few of our guides but quite a few of the guests in one of the hotels here (not one of our hotels, I hasten to add!)… not good.
Having lived here for 3 years you do tend to get a little complacent, you start to think you’ve seen and done all the bugs that can hit you, so have an ingrained immunity, but… no once in a while you get reminded of just who is boss. Thankfully being a country used to stomach bugs etc, there are some great treatments that really do work.
I think it will be a couple of days before I’m back in the water… not soon enough at this time of year! It is shark season big time so the diving is spectacular.
Oh yes, it is hitting 39ºC in the shade every day now… I can’t imagine what the temperature is in the sun, and don’t really want to leave my phone there, just in case it melts (it has a thermometer… just in case you were wondering)! And that means that the water is gloriously warm at 28º hmmmm in places it feels like a warm bath. We love summer.
I have even been in shorts and a rash vest in the pool with that being a roasting 32ºC!
All very cool, and of course the life that we are seeing is matching that summer temperature. ANY dive site is spectacular. I even saw my first ornate ghost pipe fish (a big one) on Middle Garden today, beautiful.
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