Got up at a ridiculously early time, because of not knowing how the system worked, plus not sleeping terribly well, being too tired to sleep sort of thing.

The food at the Hilton is rather different to the food I’m accustomed to in Egypt, and I’d kinda spent the Christmas festivities assuming that I was going to lose weight here. I’m now thinking that my wetsuit may instead be shrinking by the day.

After a lovely breakfast, we picked up our lunchboxes (which, due to translation difficulties turned out to be breakfast boxes) from reception, decided that we could get another half hours dozing in, then dragged ourselves to reception from where our dive bus collected us.

Aquarius Dive Centre, with whom I’ve always dived in Sharm, is based at the Sheraton, but they have a second office now at the Coral Sea, and it was to this that we were taken.

We did a check dive on the house reef which had all the wildlife coming out to say hello, and really made me feel like I’d come home.

A pair of surgeon fish greeted us on the shot line. A couple of large clown fish showed us their tiny, tiny babies in their anemone. Baby dominoes popped out of coral, a puffer fish did a barrel roll, saying ‘look at me, look at me!’ A napoleon waved in the distance, while a clearfin lionfish poked his head out of a hole to ask if we’d be joining him on a night dive. A goat fish stirred up some sand with his whiskers to wake up some baby lizard fish for us and after a big red anemone waved, a tiny baby red anemone made itself known, so small that only one protuberance could call itself a tentacle. Oh, and some small clams blew raspberries at us.

The centre has its own speedboat moored at the Coral Sea which, as it’s located opposite Tiran Island, meant that a trip to the Tiran reefs was just eight minutes away. So we dived Woodhouse reef. There’s a current full-time at this time of year, but it’s a good one. And here some of the bigger stuff made us welcome. An enormous great napoleon did a fly by, while a string of large batfish paraded themselves before us, and a titan triggerfish jumped out and said ‘Boo!’. The dive was finished off with a big blue spotted ray that showed us how pretty she was.

And the piece de resistance was keeping low to the sea bed, hovering very slightly as we snuck up on a colony of garden eels. We managed to get close enough to see their eyes before they disappeared into the bed as if they’d never been.

The people we met were real characters. From Rose, the teenaged, highly enthusiastic diver who couldn’t dive because she’d had flu but was dying to get in and brought us all burgers and coke. To Olga, the Russian young lady whose English was much better than she thought it was, and when she came out of her shell, was absolutely lovely. And our dive guides, Hoss for the first dive, who’s just a little bit crazy, and Samir, who took us for the second dive and seemed quite protective of Olga both in and out of the water.

We came back to the hotel, but took back roads for some of it, which was a little disturbing as in this highly tarmacked desert oasis, we were taking dirt tracks through building sites. We joked with the other passengers on the bus about one of us staying in a hotel that hadn’t been finished yet. And were somewhat surprised to find that it was us. The plot next door to our hotel is currently being developed. As each hotel is a walled community, we were not aware of this. We are now.

We have just had a lovely Italian dinner which was finished off with Chocolate Salami. Despite the name, it really was gorgeous. It looked like brown salami. But it was made of very rich chocolate.

I’ve ordered the lunch box for tomorrow, while Chris is having the breakfast box, so that we can contrast and compare. Then discovered wifi, and here we are.