Diving in Aqaba

I'd been looking to forward to diving outside of Australia - everyone had said the Red Sea was amazing and it was - so I dragged Mel out for a day trip to the Gulf of Aqaba.

After some scary driving (it's seriously much better not to watch the road), we arrived at the Saudi Border. I had a personal guide who made me do some skills again, then took me on a tour. It was beautiful - I never know how to describe what it's like underwater... doesn't help not knowing the names of anything. But we saw a turtle, huge parrotfish, see through pink things with legs, coral that looked like brains, spiky red things, long flat creatures that camouflaged in the sand and jumped when you went near them, creatures with long, thin tentacles that retracted when you went near them (my guide had an obsession with making things move), blobby sea cucumbers, huge schools of fish that made up a circle, coral shaped like a statue of a sad boy, Nemos and more.

It was freezing though - they gave me 2 wetsuits for my second dive. Time flew while I was under though... apparently we were underwater for 1.5 hours altogether and it felt more like 1/2 hour.

That evening, the dive shop owner, Ash (very funny guy) took us out for some local food - and there was a lot of it. He ordered one of everything so we could try it: salads, dips (& fries) for entree, then platters of meat for the main. Simple, but very nice food!

We ended up at a bar of his Canadian cousin's, where we heard about female Japanese rapists, learnt about Jordanian marriage proposals and tried to decide whether Ash or Mel would have the best island (not so sure about using elephant trunks instead of blenders...) - naturally, it was all settled with an arm wrestle.