Photo : patano — CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
Sharm el-Sheikh · Sharm el-Sheikh
Ras Mohammed National Park
Egypt's first national park, at the tip of Sinai, where two gulfs meet.
The park occupies the southern tip of the peninsula, some twenty kilometres from Sharm el-Sheikh, where the Gulf of Suez meets the Gulf of Aqaba. That crossing of currents feeds the Shark and Yolanda reefs, among the best-known dives in the Red Sea: a wall dropping sheer, shoals holding themselves against the current, and the scattered cargo of a wrecked freighter — bathroom fittings, so that you dive between lavatory pans on the floor of the Red Sea. On land the park is more than a departure jetty: a mangrove channel, a cliff called the Shark Observatory, a hypersaline lake and walls of fossil coral, in bare desert. Protected since 1983, it is a reserve: you take nothing and touch nothing.
The extra bit
Without tanks a car is enough: the mangrove channel and the Observatory cliff give you the landscape, and you can fin in from the shore to see the drop-off. Shark and Yolanda, though, are reached only by boat, and the boats leave in the morning.
Know before you go
Paid entry per person and per vehicle, passport required at the checkpoint. The "Sinai only" stamp issued on arrival at Sharm el-Sheikh is not always enough to enter the park: put the question to the centre selling you the trip, before you pay for it. Nothing is sold inside — water, hat, shade, you carry it all. The currents where the gulfs meet are strong: these are not beginners' dives, and a serious centre will tell you so.
