Red Sea (Egypt)

2 spots in Africa.

El GounaEgyptKite
The wind here keeps an appointment it has kept for millennia — a northern breath sliding down the length of the Red Sea, steady as a habit, side-on and unhurried. You wade out across warm shallows, sand pale beneath you, until the lagoon opens flat and wide enough to forget where the edge of your own ability used to be. There is no drama in this water, only patience: it asks you to read the tide, to wait for the hour the sea gives back its depth, and it rewards the reading. Summer arrives loud, twenty knots and climbing, for those who want the sea to argue back; the shoulder months come quiet, and teach instead. What lingers is not the ride but the rhythm — desert light, salt-flat calm, a wind that was already blowing long before you learned to lean into it.
SS ThistlegormEgyptDive
Few wrecks give you what the Thistlegorm gives: a cargo ship that has rested on the floor of the Strait of Gubal since October 1941, still loaded with the war it was carrying to the front. You drop down the line — there is almost always current — and the hull rises into view, BSA motorcycles lined up in the holds, trucks, rail cars, ammunition. This is not an artificial reef gone soft under coral; it is an interrupted moment, and that is the whole difference. With 30m at the deepest point, penetration, and current that can turn within minutes, the Advanced card here is not paperwork. Go by liveaboard if you can: arriving before the Sharm speedboats, with clean visibility and an empty deck, is what separates the Thistlegorm you remember from the one you share with a crowd.