Dahab

Dahab is what Sharm was before the hotels: an hour north, a village on a bay with cafés on the beach, a dive centre every fifty metres and a reef you walk into from the shore. You do not come here for all-inclusive but for a week with a mask, and it is cheaper than anything else on the Red Sea.

You walk the town and that is the whole logistics: a promenade along Mashraba bay and the Lighthouse, with cafés whose cushions lie on the sand, shops of Bedouin jewellery and dive schools all on the same street. Accommodation is small hotels and camps with rooms around a courtyard, a third of Sharm's price, and almost all without a beach — because the beach is not the point here. The Sinai stamp covers Dahab too, so you arrive without a visa if you fly into Sharm and stay on the peninsula.

Diving is the point. The Blue Hole, ten kilometres north, is a hole in the reef over a hundred metres deep that you enter from the shore; for snorkellers it is a swim along the rim above the blue, for divers the most famous dive in Egypt and one of the most dangerous if you go deeper than allowed. The entry and fees are paid at the checkpoint, around twenty-five dollars a head in several parts, and in cash. The Canyon, Eel Garden and the Lighthouse are the other dives, all from the shore, no boat — which is also why a course here is cheap.

The afternoon is for wind and mountains. The lagoon south of town is one of the best places in the world for kitesurfing, thanks to a wind that blows constantly and water that is knee-deep a hundred metres out. Behind the town are mountains where Bedouins lead you by camel or jeep to a night under the stars, and the road to St Catherine is shorter from here than from Sharm — an hour and a half to the monastery.