I remember when the desire to dive first came over me. I was in Baja California, kayaking and wild camping my way around Espiritu Santo Island, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve just north of La Paz. While I was snorkeling in Los Islotes—a small island home to a large colony of sea lions—a pup sea lion bit into my life jacket and tugged me towards him. He tugged twice more before diving to the sea floor, far deeper than I could reach on a single breath. The pup, his whiskers comically long for his face, looked up at me with wide black eyes. “Why aren’t you coming down to play with me?” he seemed to say. I promised myself in that moment that I would learn to dive one day.
Five years after my sea lion encounter, I’m finally taking my first breath underwater. I’ve come to Egypt’s Red Sea—one of the best places in the world to dive with turtles, dolphins, sharks, and the rare dugong—to get my PADI Open Water Diver certification. But things aren’t going as I’d hoped. The water is murky with sand kicked up by my fins—I can barely see one meter in front of me—and I’m being pushed and pulled by the waves like a ragdoll. All I can hear is my panicked, Darth Vader-like breathing. I’m only one metre below the surface, but I feel trapped and starved of air, like I’m being buried alive. Every fiber of my body is screaming at me to get out.
I breach the surface like a drunken whale, ripping my regulator out and gasping for air. I’ve managed just a couple of minutes underwater. “I can’t do this,” I say to my PADI instructor. “I need to get out.”
Earlier this year, on Earth Day, the world’s largest scuba diving organization, PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) and marine conservation organization The Reef-World Foundation launched PADI Eco Centers, a collection of 11 verified dive centers worldwide that allow recreational divers to not only dive responsibly, but to experience what PADI calls regenerative diving—essentially, leaving the ocean better than you found it.
One of these is Red Sea Diving Safaris, in southern Egypt, near the coastal village of Marsa Alam. The company’s three properties—Wadi Lahami, Marsa Nakari, and Marsa Shagra—operate on a strict minimum-impact policy, limiting guest numbers not according to the amount of land the hotels take up, but to the maximum capacity of their corresponding reefs. This is the only way, founder and CEO Hossam Helmy tells me during a recent visit, to help marine life here stay healthy.
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“The Egyptian Tourism Development Agency told me I had to build 900 rooms in Marsa Shagra or they would fine me,” says Helmy, who opened Red Sea Diving Safaris in 1990 after more than a decade of living in a tent and diving along Egypt’s southern coastline, an area that had been a militarized zone. “If I’d said yes, there would be no reef left.”
Helmy’s aim was to develop the region’s untapped tourism potential and create jobs for local Bedouin and fishermen, but without damaging the environment. In addition to limiting tourist numbers and protecting its house reefs, Red Sea Diving Safaris fought for nearby dive sites such as Shaab Sammadai (Dolphin House) and Wadi El Gemal to become protected marine areas. Minimalist rooms—the signature accommodation is a 3.5 x 3.5-meter tent right on the shoreline—are powered by solar energy; food for guests is grown locally in desert greenhouses; and there’s an on-site wastewater treatment system. But even here, where sustainability efforts are exemplary, the ecosystem is changing.
“I wish you could see how it was when I first arrived here. It was like landing on the moon,” says Helmy from his home in Marsa Shagra, built on a hill overlooking the reef, where his tent once stood. “The beaches were empty, and the reef was much more colorful. And the fish! There were so many fish. It’s not the same anymore.”
After three days of beginner’s training in the shallows, we drive to Nakari village, 30 minutes south of Marsa Shagra, and board a zodiac to Sha'ab Samadai (Dolphin House), a horseshoe-shaped reef famous for its spinner dolphins. Any signs of civilization disappear within minutes. Emerald green and teal blue sparkling under the blazing sun is all I can see. At the count of three, my knees trembling, I roll into the water backwards and let the weights around my waist carry me to the bottom of the Red Sea.
What I see next takes my breath away. A sheer coral wall, its oldest structures dating back thousands of years, plunges 30 meters into a dark blue abyss. The reef is so colorful and intricate it looks like it’s been sculpted by an artist: there are pastel pinks shaped like human brains and scarlet red tubes that look like organ pipes. There’s honeycomb, mushroom, and feather-looking corals, too. Living here are shoals of technicolor fish, some the size of a fingernail—like the baby clownfish hiding in gently swaying anemone—others larger than a human, like the giant moray eel coiled around net fire coral. On the sea floor, a blue-spotted stingray buries itself in the sand.
In that moment, I feel any lingering fear leave my body like air from a deflating balloon. I’m at 18 meters—the deepest I’ve ever been—but I feel a sense of calm and weightlessness, as if I’m floating on a cloud.
“Diving is about experiencing nature,” says Ebbo once we reach the surface an hour later. Once you see what’s down there, you never forget it.”
Red Sea Diving Safari’s regenerative mission reaches above ground, too. That evening, I travel into the desert with Bedouin guide Eid Saeed for an Astro tour, an initiative by Red Sea Diving Safaris to help local Bedouin communities benefit from tourism. While we wait for the skies to darken, we stop at Eid’s uncle’s house for coffee and barbequed kofta with tahini. As we sit on hand-woven carpets, Eid prepares our coffee the Bedouin way: raw beans imported from Sudan are roasted over an open fire and ground with ginger, before being filtered through dried palm leaves.
“Some of my family members—I have more than 400—have gone to live in Marsa Alam or moved to Europe for work,” says Eid, who also runs the Bedouin cafe at Marsa Shagra. “I don’t like that they’re doing this. I am Bedouin—the desert will always be my home.”
We drive in darkness to the observation deck, a mini-amphitheater at the top of a hill with mattresses to lay on. It’s so quiet up here I can hear my own breathing, like being underwater. Eid wheels out an enormous white telescope, gifted to his family over 20 years ago by a Dutch astronomer named Karen. We don’t have a clear evening, but the clouds part long enough to see a shooting star, the Milky Way, and Saturn, its grey-pink rings shining bright.
“Bedouins move from camp to camp to find water. We’ve used the stars to navigate for many years,” says Eid. “We have different names for stars here. For example, we call the North Star ‘the goat’ in our language. Karen taught us the Western names so we could run tours. Tourism lets me be in the desert and provide for my family. I like it.”
The next morning, I sign up for PADI’s Advanced Open Water Diver certification, which will allow me to dive to 30 meters. As part of my training, which requires at least three specialist dives, I enrol in Dive Against Debris, a speciality PADI certification added to Red Sea Diving Safaris’ dive program two years ago. The course trains divers to safely collect and track ocean debris on the PADI AWARE app, used by NGOs to fight for the protection of marine areas around the world.
“We [the staff] could just go out and clean the reef ourselves, but that isn’t the point,” says Hossam Abdelaziz, PADI Course Director and Dive Against Debris instructor at Red Sea Diving Safaris. “The point is to encourage divers to take action. The first thing I taught my kids when they learned to dive was to collect rubbish. It’s every diver’s responsibility to clean up the ocean.”
Underwater, Hossam—who only learned to swim at 16, but now holds PADI’s highest level of certification—shows me how to check plastic bags and glass bottles for marine life. As he turns one bag gently upside down, a baby triggerfish the size of my fingernail swims out of the bag. Had we stored it without checking, we would have killed the fish. We find fishing lines and metal rods wedged between corals that Hossam signals not to touch. Removing them could damage healthy coral.
“People think collecting rubbish from the sea is simple,” says Hossam. “But if you’re not properly trained, you can do more harm than good.”
But the worst comes as we swim a little further out, where Hossam points to a dark mass floating near the surface. At first, I think it’s an enormous shoal of fish, but as we get closer I realize it’s all plastic, brought here by a strong onshore wind. There’s so much of it it’s casting a dark shadow over the reef, almost blocking out the sun entirely. We collect as much as we can—cans, water bottles, razor blades, old lifejackets—but our mesh bags are full before we’re able to make a dent.
Plastic isn’t the Red Sea’s only problem. On my final day in Marsa Shagra, I join marine biologist Micol Montagna on a turtle survey in Abu Dabbab, a nearby seagrass bay. She’s the project coordinator at Turtle Watch, an NGO fighting to protect Egypt’s endangered sea turtles with the help of data collected by snorkellers and divers in the area. They also train boat captains and dive instructors how to operate safely in turtle-breeding areas.
“All of this should be a protected area,” Micol says, pointing to the resort-lined shores of Abu Dabbab, where turtles and dugongs—a relative of the manatee, only much rarer—come to feed and breed. “Right now there are no restrictions on the number of people who can dive and snorkel here. We also have problems with inexperienced boat captains injuring turtles. If we continue on the path we’re on, turtles will disappear.”
The sea floor should be carpeted in green, but prolonged high temperatures this summer have killed much of Abu Dabbab’s seagrass. Despite this, we soon spot a large female green turtle coming up for air. “I think that’s Miriam!” says Micol, jumping in to take a photo for the Red Sea Turtles Database. I miss Miriam by the time I get in the water, but up ahead is a 3m-long, 500kg dugong, close enough for me to see its puffy face and moss-covered tail, which is fluked like a whale’s. They say dugongs may have inspired fishermen’s tales of mermaids and sirens. Today, in a world where only around 30,000 dugongs remain, they’re in danger of becoming a myth once again.
With the immense privilege of underwater exploration comes a sad and deeply worrying realization: our oceans are dying. Plastic debris, overfishing, and climate change are decimating life in the underwater world at a faster rate than ever before—and humans are to blame.
But despite all this, visiting has granted me a renewed sense of hope. The efforts being made here to protect endangered species, remove plastic waste, and train divers to become ambassadors for the underwater world are nothing short of incredible. I may be leaving Egypt with a new appreciation for our oceans—but more importantly? A better understanding of what we must do to protect them.