I'm in the moo-hoo-hood for blogging; weblogging... if I could remember the rest of that song I'd try to extend my sentence and keep the rhythm going. But I can't. So now I'll just shut up & blog.

Where were we? Ah yes, we were just about to set off for a week's diving in the Red Sea! Well, that's what we did. Christian, Tom, Bettina & I met at the airport on the morning of Monday 23rd June, checked in at the TUIfly desk, and headed straight to the Airbräu, the airport's own microbrewery and restaurant. The beer is SO good and SO cheap, I'm tempted to go to the airport just for that!

It was only the second time that Christian & I had met Bettina; Tom knows her from a previous diving trip a few years ago. She is a busy lady, working in customer services for the sport shop SportScheck by day and running a private mobile fingernail salon in the evenings and at weekends. I always enjoy getting to know someone from a completely different walk of life, and the next seven days certainly gave us all plenty of time to share stories.

The diving itself was fabulous! The water was even calmer than last year and the visibility was astoundingly good. There are going to be some choice photos on my site as soon as we've had our photo-swapping barbecue party (which is next week, so not much longer to wait, folks!). We didn't see dolphins like we did last year, but instead we had a close encounter with a turtle (which was busy munching soft corals and didn't take the blindest bit of notice of us) and saw some sharks off in the deep blue.

It was mad: we had the whole boat to ourselves. There had I think been some sort of cock-up, and the dates of our trip were never put up on the organisers' website, so we weren't joined by anyone. There was more crew on board than paying passengers! It made for a very relaxing, spacious stay. I haven't slept that long or that often in ages & ages, so I felt very rested at the end of the week, even though diving is a strenuous activity.

One evening a big wind blew up off the deserts to our northwest, and lasted all night long. It was a bizarre and, frankly, disturbing experience. The water was calm, but the hot dry wind was howling around the masts and blowing our sleeping bags away (we of course slept up on deck every night, to enjoy the stars and the cooler night air). That was one night where I didn't get much sleep. But I'm glad I experienced that wind. I just love a good force of nature!

There was one sad thing that happened on the trip: my nice underwater camera that Rainnie gave me last year in the Philippines gave up the ghost - and really early on too! So I couldn't take nearly as many pictures as I had hoped, and ended up bringing seven unused rolls of film home with me. Luckily, Christian's digital camera survived the trip this time, and he's got loads of photos from many of our dives.

Oh, actually, I just thought of another sad thing: we didn't do many night dives this time. Still, in hindsight that might have been a good thing, because it meant we had the energy to do all three daytime dives each day. I still remember a few occasions last year where I was just too knackered to go down with the others - and of course those were the dives where they saw sharks...

And then we were on our way back to Munich, happy in the knowledge that we'd just had a bewitching week of underwater wonderlands.