Giftun Island Snorkeling & Parasailing Trip from Sahl Hasheesh

You came to Sahl Hasheesh for the sea, and so far you have seen it from a sunbed. Out past the last hotel the shelf drops away into the reefs of Giftun Islands National Park, where the water runs clear enough that the boat looks like it is hanging in mid-air. This is the day you actually get in.

The first stop is the one people talk about afterwards. You go over the side, put your face in the water, and the engine noise simply stops, replaced by your own breathing and a wall of fish with no interest in you whatsoever. Somewhere in there you stop checking your mask and start following one parrotfish around a coral head, and half an hour goes by like ten minutes. The second reef has a different cast entirely.

What makes it worth the boat ride is that any of this is still here. The reefs closest to town took the worst of Hurghada's building boom; Giftun's did not, because the islands were protected as a national park in time. The fee collected at the island is what pays for that protection. For one day you are not only looking at the reef, you are part of the arrangement that keeps it alive.

Then it is lunch on deck while the boat repositions, and a long, unhurried stretch on the sand at Orange Bay: swim, sleep, or do nothing at all. The parasail comes last. The line pays out behind the speedboat, the noise falls away beneath you, and all at once you can see the whole day in one frame, the island, the boat, the pale shelf of reef you were swimming over that morning. Most people go up nervous. Nobody comes down that way.