We are back in Tel Aviv now for another six days. I have a few days worth of tales to share.
This tale I call Sharing Breakfast with the Fishes.
Our next destination after the Bedouin camp was Eilat. Eilat is a desert beach resort on the Red Sea at the bottom of Israel. I can’t say I loved Eilat. It had about 3 or 4 giant Vegas-style hotels which were fully booked. The town was jammed (or should I say crawling) with people on vacation for Passover. We ended up paying $400 a night for a so-so room in a second-tier hotel. It was so hot, we couldn’t even tolerate sitting on our balcony.
The only reason I included Eilat in our itinerary was to go scuba diving. I grew in a water sports family and became a certified diver at the age of 13. I have not dived again since I was 16, but it was a big part of my youth. DH has never dived. I wanted him to have the opportunity to experience what I had experienced. In Eilat, they have dives for people who are not divers. You get a 30-minute lesson and a 30-minute dive with a dive instructor at your side for the whole time. The dive instructor keeps you from doing something to hurt yourself. All you have to do is keep breathing and pressurize your ears as you descend. I thought that would work for him and he agreed.
In Eliat, there is a coral reef about 30 feet off the beach. That, in itself, is amazing that the reef is just right there. Historically I have to take 20-100 mile boat trips to get to reefs. We took a taxi to the dive shop. The driver tried to drop us off at “Aqua Store” instead of “Aqua Star”. After multiple times of having taxi drivers try to drop us at the wrong location in various countries, I have learned to use Google Maps to study the route and the related pictures to identify my destination. If it is not a match, I don’t get out of the cab.
We get to the shop. They suit us up in wetsuits, give us the lesson, drive us to the entry point, put the equipment on us, and lead us into the water.
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My instructor and I go into the water, but I did not see what happened to DH. My whole goal had been to see DH enjoy the coral and the fishes. My instructor drug me around, controlling my depth with the air vest and leading me through passages in the coral. She turned me in some awkward angles which made me uncomfortable. I did see an amazing number of tropical fish. In my youth, I dove in some exotic locations and was familiar with all the types of fish there. At one point, I knew all their names. I have seen clearer water, better coral, but never the quantity of tropical fish as in Eilat. The instructor took the pictures, and she did not really capture the spots teaming with fish.
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About 20 minutes into the dive, I started feeling nauseous. I am highly prone to motion sickness, but I had never been motion-sick underwater in my previous diving. I think, this time, it was because the instructor was controlling my movements and positions. I was happy to return to the surface and find out how it had been for DH.
When we surfaced, I felt really sick. The instructor asked if I was ok and I pointed to my stomach and made the gesture that I thought I was going to up-chuck. I fought it, but not successfully. I was in the middle of a bunch of divers, but not close to them, and I lost my breakfast.
Initially, I was mortified. But then a swarm of black and yellow striped fish appeared and gulped down my breakfast in a nano-second. It was like those pictures you see of piranhas eating a cow. Everything is gone in an insant.
I staggered to the shore. There was DH all smiling and happy. He had chickened out. He tried sticking his head underwater 3 times, decided he didn’t like it, and decided not to do it. It was another plan that did not work out quite the way I imagined, but it was still all ok. It is another laugh at our crazy travels.
