After yesterday's sleeping effort and drinks last night, I had a little trouble getting out of bed this morning. Not enough for the Hawaiian shirt to make an appearance, but I was uncomfortable.

We got picked up for our snorkeling trip at 8:15am, and then the driver of the minivan picked everyone else up, the slow stupid way. Oh my god, I'd forgotten about that. We got to the jetty and got our masks and flippers and then it took nearly two hours for them to get us onto a boat. It was absolutely disgraceful how long we had to wait around in the sun.

We finally got on our boat, the Shamandora II and set off. We sailed for about an hour before we reached the reef around Tiran Island, we got into the water and swan towards the reef. I had Ben's underwater camera with me and got some good shots of fish by diving down deeper.

We headed off on the boat again and this time jumped over board and swam to the island itself. This is something I was not expecting as the island is in a protected area and usually you cannot set foot on such places. This is Egypt after all, I thought. There was quite a bit of rubbish on the island, which was disappointing, but none the less it was still very beautiful and we could see the mountains of Saudi Arabia from the shore. We sat in the water, smearing the soft sand into our skin. The sand is supposed to make your skin feel very soft. There was this idiot camera man who had tagged along with us, to make a movie and take pictures to sell. He kept sticking his camera in my face and making stupid gestures all day, it was really annoying. This Russian girl had him take heaps of photos of her on the beach, posing like a model. Geez, I thought I was bad.

We went and laid in some shallow water and Tim and I took pictures of ourselves trying to look sexy and model like, just like our Russian poser friend. Ours were better, and funny.

We left the island, not before we had walked about a hundred meters, over razors sharp rocks and broken glass, which I was not at all impressed with, as the guide had shoes and a wet suit and the rest of us we in swimmers and bare feet.

We swam back to the boat and had lunch, which was really nice. On the way back, we had a snorkel around Na'ama Bay, which was actually the best part of the day. The fish here were amazing! I was determined to get a good photo of a parrot fish and kept diving down and chasing them. Tim started calling me, "Fish Paparazzi". I swam between two huge coral walls and among fish that weren't afraid of me at all. We were here for quite a while before we got back on the boat and headed to Na'ama.

Once we got to Na'ama it took the guys driving the boat about 45 minutes to park it, geez, I wouldn't trust these guys to open a can of beans, let alone with my safety for the day again. Everyone got in their transfer buses back to their hotels, except us. Our driver had gone out with one of the boats and was enjoying himself and was not back yet. We managed to catch a lift with the staff from the boat. And I thought my days of being crammed into a van with fifteen people were over for the moment!