Jordan

Photo: Paul Kay Photo: Paul Kay Photo: Paul Kay Photo: Paul Kay

Great diving, hospitable people and the chance to visit ancient ruins, all combine to make Jordan an excellent diving holiday destination. Four DIVE readers give their verdicts. Interviews by Kate Quarry. Photographs by Paul Kay


Picture perfect - Tony Vernon-Riley

Tony Vernon-Riley is ‘over 50’, runs his own business and lives in Stoke-on-Trent. He’s been diving for 30 years and is a BSAC club diver. He visits Aqaba several times a year with his wife Chris, who also dives.

We first went to Aqaba through Aquatours just after the Gulf War, and altogether we’ve visited between 15 and 20 times. During our first trip, only a few weeks after the end of the war, you could see people’s eyes popping out of their heads, as if they were thinking, ‘Good God, a tourist!’ Now it takes us two hours to walk from one end of town to the other, as we know so many people.

We always stay at the Alcazar – never anywhere else – and dive with Seastar, the dive centre in the hotel. We’re spur-of-the-moment people and tend to arrange trips at the last moment, sometimes taking up cancellations. Aqaba’s not exactly Ibiza – it’s not the social centre of the universe, but now when we visit, most of the time we eat out at friends’ houses. I even enrolled at our local university and took levels one and two in Arabic, as I think it’s only polite to be able to say a few things in the language of the country you’re visiting. I’ve found trying to speak Arabic good fun – shopkeepers and café owners are quite surprised when you speak a bit of Arabic to them.

The diving is exceptional. I’ve done a lot of diving – the Middle East, the Far East, the Caribbean from Cuba to Venezuela – and I rate Jordan very highly. The visibility is good, as is the marine life. There’s not as much big stuff as there used to be, which I think is due to ecological changes and alterations in migration patterns. Even so, I’ve seen eagle rays, white and blacktip reef sharks and whale sharks. I’m a keen marine photographer, so it’s perfect. Marine photography is not a group sport: Chris and I work as a team. She’s the producer and director, and I’m just the chap who presses the shutter – I use a Nikon 90 in a Subal housing – although we do argue about the correct lighting techniques.

Aqaba’s particularly good for photographers because you can dive at any time of day from the shore as a pair or part of a group. You can spend an hour round one pinnacle and only see a bit of what there is to see.
This year we’ve been to Jordan twice and may go again. I get withdrawal symptoms if I don’t dive. I’ve got a back condition, but two dives and I’m back on my feet again.


Desert skies - Teresa Elliot

Teresa Elliott, 45, is a nursery-school teacher, and lives in Kingston-upon Thames, Surrey. She learned to dive five years ago, and dives with her partner, David.

David and I have been to Jordan four or five times, always through Aquatours, and our most recent trip was last October. We always stay at the Alcazar Hotel and dive with Seastar. To coincide with school holidays, we usually visit in either April or October, both of which are good times to go, although I loved seeing the flowers at Jerash during a springtime visit. The first time we went there we combined a week’s diving with a week exploring Jordan, during which we were driven around in a taxi and visited Jerash, Petra, Wadi Rum, Amman and the Dead Sea. Since that trip we have been back to Petra and Wadi Rum, where we did a camel ride and on one occasion slept in the desert – you could choose to sleep under cover or completely out in the open, and the stars were out of this world.

Underwater, it’s wonderful! All the sites are good, and you get to see walls, pretty corals and the wreck, the Cedar Pride. We’ve done courses there, including an underwater photography course. Jordan’s a paradise for the photographer. One of the best things we did was a clean-up dive when we stayed during New Year 2000. All the divers collected litter that had washed onto the corals from boats and off the beach. It was good to see in the New Year while doing our bit for the environment.

The hotel’s beach club is a nice feature and it’s also good for non-divers too, because you can spend the break between dives with your diving partner. The hotel puts on evening ‘dos’ there, which are good fun. In the water the visibility is always good, it’s reasonably warm and the coral’s very good. I have visited other places and seen dead coral, but there isn’t any in the waters around Aqaba. There’s so much to see, I don’t know where to start – everything from morays and garden eels to lionfish and anemonefish.

There’s no single reason why we keep returning to Aqaba. Part of the reason I like the Seastar is that the staff are very helpful and supportive, and I’m a bit of a nervous diver, so it’s nice to know you can have confidence in the people you’re diving with. But it’s the whole thing, really – I always recommend it to people. As soon as you arrive, you immediately feel relaxed, and the Jordanians are so friendly, which I think is very important these days.


Roman ruins - Delia Graham

Delia Graham, 44, lives in Leicestershire and works as a primary-school teacher. She and her husband, Tony, learned to dive two years ago because their youngest son, Patrick, was ‘desperate’ to learn to dive and, at 14, needed an adult to dive with. Their trip to Jordan with Regal was their first experience of warm-water diving.

We’d decided we wanted to dive in warm water: anything that wasn’t Stoney Cove, really! What made us choose Jordan, rather than Egypt or Israel, was the chance to visit Petra. The trip to Petra was part of a two-day excursion after we’d finished diving, and we also saw the Dead Sea and Jerash, a Roman city near Amman. We booked it all before we left the UK, but realized it would have been quite easy to organize a trip to Petra once we were out there.

We were in Jordan during August and it was very hot, but everything was air-conditioned, so it wasn’t uncomfortable. We stayed in the Aquamarina City Hotel in Aqaba – they also have a beach hotel – and the dive centre was next to the hotel. We dived twice a day, coming back by minibus to the hotel for lunch between the dives. The dive centre uses a boat to get to the dive sites, and although we wondered if it would have been better to drive along to the coast and then shore dive, which is what the other dive centre [the Seastar] does, we decided in the end that we were glad we’d gone for the boat diving. The afternoon dive was quite hot, but sitting there in the breeze after the dive and chatting with other divers on the boat about what you’d seen was good.
We thought the diving was marvellous, but then we weren’t objective, not having done that sort of diving before. We did 11 dives in total, including two on the Cedar Pride and one on the German tank.

We didn’t do a night dive because it’s a politically sensitive area and the authorities need four days’ warning if you want to do one. The coral pinnacles were fabulous to explore, and the dive guides were very good at showing us things we’d never have noticed by ourselves. My husband saw a barracuda near the Cedar Pride, and we also saw boxfish, scorpionfish, frogfish and even a seahorse.

The visibility was very good during the first few days but then reduced – perhaps because of the coral spawning at the full moon. Towards the end of the holiday we did a wall dive at the Power Station, but we weren’t as impressed with that as with other dives, partly because the visibility wasn’t that good, and also because the animal life wasn’t as stunning as on the other sites.

We had bed and breakfast at the hotel, and in the evening we tried out some of the places the locals recommended in town. Aqaba is so nice and everyone’s very friendly – I’d recommend it to anyone.


Bedouin barbecues - Helen Thompson

Helen Thompson, 30, qualified as a diver in 1996 and is now a BSAC club instructor and dive leader. She is married, lives in Lincolnshire, and is a company director. She organized a trip to Jordan in July 2001 for a group from Ampleforth SAC.

I ended up going to Jordan by accident: I’d organized a club trip to Grenada, but the airline pulled out, so two months before departure I was looking around for somewhere else to take the group. I’d used Scubaway in the past, and I got on the phone to them and they came up trumps. We stayed at the Alcazar Hotel in Aqaba for a week, and dived with Seastar, the diving school at the hotel.

It was all shore diving. The sea is a short minibus drive away, and between dives we had lunch and relaxed at the Club Murjan on the coast, which is owned by the hotel and has a pool, watersports and access to the beach. I was very impressed with the diving. The people in the group had a wide range of experience levels and the diving was suitable for everyone, especially as there weren’t strong currents. It was really good fun. As it was July it was very hot, and in general I’m not good with the heat. But, because it was a dry heat, I didn’t even notice it. When we were diving, we put on our kit quickly and got in the water as soon as we could. I wore a 3mm shortie, but by the end of the week people were just wearing swimming costumes and T-shirts – the water was so warm.

In some areas there was coral damage. But we saw some stunning marine life – nothing big because the size of our group probably scared off larger fish, but a wide variety of fish. I’m a big wreck fan, so my two favourite dives were the wreck of the Cedar Pride, where we saw barracuda and the wreck of a tank in shallow water, which was ideal for training drills with students. It even had hoops to help people learn buoyancy control.

I’m not easily pleased but I was very impressed with the whole trip. The dive staff were very good and exceptionally helpful – they gave thorough briefings and were very safe without breathing down your neck on dives. As we were staying on a full-board basis, we spent most evenings around the hotel pool, but on the last day there was a trip to Wadi Rum, which was great fun. We went bounding over the sand dunes in four-wheel drives, and then came back to a barbecue set up by the hotel staff to look like a Bedouin camp in the desert. We watched the sunset and in the darkness the stars were incredible. Everyone had a great time and I’d definitely go there again.