The shades of ocher in the Egyptian desert at sunset.
Definition
Village on the southern coast of the Egyptian Red Sea, which has become over time one of the hot spots for recreational scuba diving.
Synonymes
El Quseir | Al-Qusair | Al Quseir | El Qoseir
Starter
The blue polka dot ray: the emblem of the Red Sea?
Inexorably, in the drafting of our Scubabecedaire, we have come to Q. And the trouble begins: impossible to find a quality diving term beginning with the Q! The impossible quiz. Especially since this article is neither the fourth nor the fifteenth and has long since exceeded this quota. Who, what, what, what, when? Not a (fish) tail. So many unanswered questions and I hear your jokes from here. Almost every day. I am good at doing the quest, I give you a receipt for it. Beg; sometimes…
Head in the Q!
It would be an article on quantas, I would talk to you about quarks, qbits, quartz crystals, quantification, at a pinch of quasars. A paper on geography and here is Qatar, the quataris, Quebec, the Quechuas, Quito ...
On a sports bet: the quarté, or the quinté, of course; on vegans, quinoa. But these are parochial disputes.
The truth is, I am a quiche! I am looking for the quintessence but in vain I squint on my Qwerty keyboard, luck has left me, I doubt my IQ, I have lost my peace of mind: everything is falling apart. Head in the Q! A shot at committing suicide with quinine. And, if I dare to write, this story of Q is starting to take my mind!
The Rohannou Beach Hotel, one of the two Wonderful Dive centers in El Quseir.
Main course
Although… Who knows? Once is not customary: what if we were talking about a dive site? One of those phonetic words from before Arabic, bite me Bedouin? One of those insignificant desert villages that the practice of recreational diving, precisely, has brought out of anonymity, propelling it into the first pages of the tour operator's destination guides? You are burning… It's in Egypt… Qoseir !
Everyone knows today this site of the Red Sea which was already frequented 5000 years ago in the middle of the Ptolemaic period; this ancient port of Myos Hormos at the outlet of Wadi Hammamat which crosses the Egyptian desert and which gave access to the pharaohs, beyond the Red Sea, to the mythical land of Punt and undoubtedly to India. Yes, dismantled boats from the Nile crossed the desert to the sea, their image sometimes immortalized in low reliefs carved into the limestone walls of the canyons ... El Qoseir is therefore located on the coast, 138 km south ofHurghada and 68 km north of Marsa Alam, details that nobody cares about, but that's just to say.
Wonderful dive!
It is an excellent dive site, admittedly less known (and therefore less frequented) than the two high places mentioned previously but for which I have a particular tenderness due to the fact that there is the excellent hotel Rohanou and the no less famous diving center Wonderful Dive administered under the leadership, among others, of the semillant Olivier Dandois, and for which I created the website. It creates links ...
Comfortable launch at the end of the pontoon.
The legendary comfort of the Rohanou hotel which has kept on a human scale (yes, it's advertising).
At the end of the pier: the “house reef”.
Dessert
The Red Sea is rightly considered one of the “must” of diving and the French are very lucky to be able to soak in it at the cost of a short flight and with almost no jet lag. All for a more than reasonable price. Probably the reason for the (over) frequentation of the premises?
But it was not always so. Even before the advent of the diving tourism industry, these places were already very popular; I remember, it's not that old,Hurghada which was only a fishing village, populated by goats, the starting point for adventurous cruises to the Brothers Islands ...
The "handsome" Elie Boissin on the shores of the Red Sea, at the time almost unknown ...
It was the favorite destination for adventurers of all stripes. History has retained Cousteau's first films aboard the Calypso, of course, but we must not forget the Austrian pioneer Hans haas and his wife Lotte aboard their ship “Tarifa”. Authors of more than 30 books, they dived with oxygen rebreathers and received the first prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 for their film “Under the Red Sea”. They then created for the BBC the series “Diving to Adventure” in 1956 and “The Undersea World of Adventure” in 1958.
We also remember the reports ofYves gladu and his wife in the magazine “Oceans”, went down to dive in their little 4L car and camped in the middle of the desert on the shores of the Red Sea.
And how not to quote the eternal young man Elie Boissin, our traveling writer from Mazargues to Marseille, one of the first freediving champions and champion of “free diving”, who surveyed the shores of Sinai before all of us? Good news: the last time I dived there, the Red Sea was still blue! Go ahead and… go back!
See you soon for a new definition of Scuba Bécédaire. The irreverent lexicon of diving, but not only. Because sometimes ...
Francis Le Guen
Café
Return on the “World of Silence” of JY Cousteau, film which received the Palme d'Or for documentary at Cannes in 1956. Images which unfortunately cannot be shared here for obscure reasons (follow this link) but mostly toured in the Red Sea. And, same causes same effects, the eternal sequence of “Jojo the grouper”Which is now part of the collective unconscious.
And for the atmosphere, a few underwater images among many others, shot in El Quseir. But the best is to go!
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