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Owned and run by very professional Bedouins. They offer social diving holidays which combine safety and fun whilst experiencing a whole different culture in a truly unique atmosphere. Their groups are always small and there is a very high personal attention to all the divers.
It is just a few masonry foundations, but this was once a major port receiving spices and other valuable goods from India. From here goods were taken overland to Petra then onward to Gaza for shipping across the Med. The Nabataeans emerged as an independent Arab nation in the 4th century BC, for long acting as a buffer state for Rome then annexed into the Roman Empire in 106 AD, and disappearing by the 5th century AD. Just peer through the railings on the prom, you havve seen enough.
Bedouin palm-tree oasis. Can be busy in the day. To see it at its best, include in a longer desert safari and stay for dinner and overnight.
Right next to Ain Khudra.
Mainly a day trip. If you would like to combine as part of a longer desert safari, be sure to have a full Egyptian visa as it is often needed for the best route.
A nature reserve with camping and snorkelling. No road so you need a boat or camel to get in; few bother so it is a quiet spot.
The signature dive at Dahab. It is safe and enjoyable provided you are sensible about depth limits, but the layout creates a temptation to dive deeper. Much deeper. Much much deeper and then it is curtains. This area has cafes and toilets but no dive shack, bring all your own kit. It can get crowded, as excursion buses often come from Sharm-el-Sheikh. The "hole" is a sinkhole some 100 m across and just over 100 m deep, surrounded by shallow reef, and with a "saddle" 6-7 m deep between the hole and open sea. The deep sheltered waters make it popular with freedivers, and it is often good for snorkelling and diving on windy days when other sites are too rough. Divers typically swim underwater across the hole, with the Arch glimmering far below (this would be a really bad time to lose a weight-belt). There is not much coral within the hole so they then cross the saddle to explore the better stuff outside.
The Arch in the side of the Blue Hole is the killer if you are not geared up for a technical dive, and sometimes even if you are. It is a tunnel between hole and open sea that glimmers temptingly. "Aw c'mon, just a quick extra descent to look-see, can't hurt?" But it is deeper than it looks, with the entrance at 55 m. And it is not a simple archway but a 26 m tunnel. "Still, now we're here . . . " then it springs its trap: the tunnel roof slopes down to 85 m before trending up again into the open sea, while its floor drops away below 120 m. If you come down here breathing air or even nitrox, you will be as drunk as a skunk in a barrel of moonshine. And your air consumption is 9+ times faster than on the surface; if you are only toting a single gas tank, it will last less than ten min—not enough to get back, let alone for the considerable decompression period you have incurred. Technical divers with rebreathers and trimix gas also sometimes perish here, but their kit is inherently more hazardous, and it is not clear whether they suffer more accidents in the Blue Hole than at similar depths elsewhere.