Dahab - Day 4 

Dahab, Egypt

As is commonly the case in mass market resort hotels, breakfast is a buffet and is also oftenly the case, what starts out at the beginning of the week as a delight starts to become old after a few days. The restaurant at the Iberhotel is pleasant, however with seating inside and outside. It serves a few Egyptian dishes such as Foul. One can also find the typical Mediterranean breakfast ensemble of cucumbers, tomatoes and olives.

After breakfast I head down to the windsurfing hut on the beach in front of the hotel to find out when my windsurfing lesson will take place for the day. Today the lesson was at 10:00 a.m. Today's lesson was about the "water start". This is the holy grail of windsurfing skills and I set the mastery of this as a goal for my trip to Dahab.

Today there's a different teacher, a polish guy, I think his name is something like Thomas or some Polish equivalent. Rob has been the instructor up until now and we have been practicing mostly beach starts. Rob is from the U.K. but is multilingual. He speaks to me in English. Thomas doesn't speak English so we communicate in German. The number of other people in the class can very from day to day as new people come, others leave to return home, and some decide to do some other activity for the day. The attendees are for the most part German or Eastern European.

The lessons last for about 2 hours. At the end of today's lesson, the water start remains elusive. I'm too tired to continue windsurfing and there is too much wind to go snorkelling, so I decide to do something different.


(Mountains west of the hotel)

I have another hobby which is called Geocaching. It's something like a treasure hunt in which you use coordinates posted on the internet along with a GPS device to find a hidden container called the cache. Weeks before starting my vacation, I have found a cache using the internet which I reckon is within a reasonable walking distance from the hotel. The cache is located in the mountains west of Dahab. Today I decide to go hunt for it. It takes about 35 minutes to reach the cache by foot from my hotel. The last stretch requires scrambling over loose rock and rubble but the cache is easily found. The location provides a good view over Dahab and across the gulf of Aqaba to Saudia Arabia. It's a very peaceful pause in the rugged desert. Lucky for me civilization is not far away because the vegetation is almost non-existant and without a good supply of water on hand, one would rapidly die of thirst. At the end of the day I'm happy to have been able to accomplish this little secondary mission which I had set for myself.
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