manta ray

There’s a certain high involved for us city dwellers in seeing wildlife in their natural habitats. It is addictive. Once you’ve achieved your first high, you keep going back for it again and again.

The ten-hour bus trip from Cairo to Marsa Alam, a ridiculously small town on the Red Sea in the deep south of Egypt, was

Dive boats moored at Daedalus Reef in the southern Red Sea.

boring, but it passed. I managed a couple of hours of restless sleep and then slept for an additional three hours on the boat when we arrived.

Day 1 of diving at the dive site of Shaab Marsa Alam the following morning was uneventful and not very interesting. It was a necessary day, though, of check diving. We needed to make sure our gear was in order for the more adventurous diving we were to undertake the following two days. (more…)

I’ve had dreams of sea creatures the past two days.

Yesterday, a huge manta ray kept flying into my apartment through a window. It was an air-borne manta ray. The reason it flew into my apartment was that it was attracted to light and I had a light on. It would fly through the window and then cloak itself around the ceiling light fixture I had in the room. It would stay this way for as long as it wished and then it would fly back out. My husband and I watched this happen several times in awe. We then decided to try turning off the light to see what would happen. The manta ray still flew into our room. Apparently, it was so sunny outside that our room was flooded with light. The manta ray was still attracted to our home. Finally, we shut the window. The manta ray still flew towards us and stuck itself to our window on the outside while my husband placed his hands against the inside, pretending to feed it and watching its mouth make cool circular movements of trying to eat. It was all so awesome.

Today I dreamt that we had all gone to Alexandria to go fishing. (more…)