30m! Got it today, though i rushed too much on the way up with some poor technique which left me pretty knackered by it - apparantly I was shaking a bit at the top and probably not that far from a 'shallow water blackout'. This is the most common danger in freediving - as you near the top the expanding air inside you combined with everything else going on inside you at the end of an intense dive can make you black out in the last few meters. This happened yesterday to Andy - he did an 82m dive and blacked out about 1m from the surface - he was more annoyed than anything as it doesn't count if you blackout! The blackouts are usually very short though - just a few seconds of 'touch, tap, blow' and they're usually back in the land of the living.

Gonna try it again tomorrow and make sure i keep my technique good to get a smoother, less intense dive - hopefully do it a couple of times. We also went out this afternoon freediving with some DPVs (little things to pull you along underwater like they have in Thunderball). Pretty cool as you can stay down for quite a while because you use very little energy and can relax easily, you can also do loads of random summersaults and stuff. Definitely want to try to carry on some freediving when i get back.

Whilst i came back to Dahab planning to do lots of different stuff I've so far only managed to chill out and go freediving (oh, and morning sessions of yoga). The chilling was fairly easy to do (most days here involve at least a fair amount of lying around in the sun chatting/reading) and freediving has taken up the rest of my days. I did the intro course with Fred (from the expedition) and have now done 2 extra days, and after what should be a day of climbing tomorrow i'll be back at Blue Hole doing it again. Blue Hole is the local freediving (and tec diving) mecca for deep dives- a circle of shallow reef running around a big (blue) hole dropping down to 90ish meters. For the best, there's even a 25m swimthrough arch at about 55m down (an aim for the future??).

The course was really useful - all about how to breathe properly, hold your breath and techniques for the different types of dives. The main types are 'free imersion' - where you can use a line (buoy at the top, weights at the bottom) to pull yourself down and back up - and 'constant weight' where you just use your fins (or monofin if you're good) to get down and up. The experience is awesome: at about 10m (depending on how you weight yourself) you just begin to drop - sit back and relax! The harder bit is then pulling/swimming back up as until 10m if you stop then you'll just start to fall back down again. The sensations of a long breath hold are strange too - when you've held for quite a while you get contractions in your stomach as your body trys to adjust to using less oxygen, learning to carry on with these is wierd and pretty hard. Yesterday was a good diving session - I managed a 3 min 28sec breath hold in the morning and did a 25m free imersion dive in the afternoon... today should have been going to 30m but my ears were playing up (until now they'd been better than i'd expected). Hopefully after a rest tomorrow i'll be good for it at another session on Saturday.

The people I'm doing it with are incredible too - we've mainly been diving as a four: me, Fred and his faltmates Anneli and Andy. Yesterday Andy did a personal best of 78m and today Anneli did her pb of 65m (and her best for 'unassisted' - swim down, swim up, no fins - 42m). The depths are utterly asstounding when you think about how high a 78m (250ft ish) building is. It's really cool for someone new to the sport like me to have the opportunity to go out with some of the top freedivers around (Anneli is/was Swedish female champion, I think Andy is rated second in Germany at the moment).

It seems that freediving and climbing go together too: almost all the freedivers I've met climb as well! I think the main reason I prefer it to scuba is that it feels more like a sport - something you can push yourself in and train for - whereas scuba diving seems to me almost like going sightseeing underwater. It's brilliant when you're down there and it's absolutely silent, just looking up at the others on the surface and the reef droping off next to you...

I'll blog one last time before I'm back next Wednesday... hopefully with a 30 or even 35m dive in the bag.. insh' allah.

Just got back to Dahab from my travels in the rest of Egypt, and really psyched for some freediving, windsurfing and bouldering.

After another day by the Med in Alexandria, spent wandering the local markets and visiting some catacombs which seemed straight out of a horror film set, I set off for the small oasis town of Siwa. It's a bit of a hassle to get to, as there are no night buses, so you have to endure a 10 hour journey all day - but definitely worth it. It's pretty small so there aren't many travellers around, but those that did make the trip there were cool to hang out with. With not a lot to see, we just chilled out most of the time and wandered to the local sights as well as spending a day going off into the desert for some dune driving and sandboarding. Definitely the type of place I prefer to the major towns and cities I've been in for most of my time here, we also arrived just in time to see the local football derby - a fiercly fought contest which the home side won 2-0. (I see Arsenal made it to the Champions League Final, conveniently timed for the day I get back.)

Back in Cairo a few days later, I found it seemed a little less hectic than before but still found myself longing for the donkey carts of Siwa to replace the endless cars! The Pyramids - what can I say: big, old, impressive. Just a pitty they've banned climbing them! The inside of them was actually slightly disapointing for the only remaining one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world- I was expecting far more vast chambers and tunnels than there were, but the view of the three of them with the Sphinx - also smaller than expected - in front made up for it. The area known as Islamic Cairo has to be my favourite - loads of backstreet markets for us to wonder aimlessly(I was still with some Canadian girls from Siwa at this point).

Dahab seems pretty quiet now, although not totally dead, and there's little here to show the recent bombings - a small monument to the dead and a lot of signs hung from shops and houses speaking against terrorism. Hopefully the tourism wont drop off too much as the locals here rely on it hugely for their businesses.

See you all in 2 weeks time!

Thanks to everyone who emailed to check if I was ok after the recent bombings in dahab (pretty useful too, as I didn't even know about them until I saw your emails!). It's pretty scary when you recognise the bridge in the photo of the bombed area on the BBC website as a spot a couple of hunded meters from the hostel I stayed at, and somewhere I walked along several times a day every single day I was in Dahab. I think I will still go back there later though, partly as the locals will need all the travellers they can get to keep the town afloat (and, yes, partly bacause I can't bear to think of all the potential new bouldering problems near there being left unclimbed!). It will be strange to see how the place feels compared to before as well. I'm guessing that it will be pretty quiet - a pitty as it seemed like a cool place for partying when it was busy (helped along by a fair amount of hash cake courtesy of Fred's flatmate!).

As for my travels... I've just arrived in Alexandria after a few more days travelling in Southern Egypt. I've been doing the usual- Valley of the Kings, all the main temples, Aswan dam etc. but for all of the ancient wonders, my favourite thing there has to be enjoying a cold beer or two with some other travellers whilst watching the incredible sunsets over the nile with some fellucas (the local sail boats) drifting slowly by. Wandering through the backstreet markets comes a close second, and it's surprising to see how many Egyptian tourists there are (usually getting ripped off just as badly as any westerner). Chatting to them, it seems that whilst large parts of Egypt are very poor, there are a large amount of rich Cairenese (not sure on the spelling for that one) who head to the tourist spots for their holidays. The sales talk of some of the owners of the touristy stalls can be pretty funny too - when they find out that you're English, some will reel off a series of 'luvly jubly' 'awright mate' and ocassionally a surprise gem like 'how now brown cow'.

have fun back home. will try to stay safe on my travels.

After a couple of days chilling and bouldering around Dahab (lots of developed problems and plenty more to go, as well as some possible new lines to be bolted -God forbid- at the area's sport crag) I decided to head off to travel for a while. A 9 hour bus ride later and I was in Cairo, a city which is just about as far removed as possible from the chilled out atmosphere of Dahab. It's incredibly hot, crowded, polluted, noisy etc and unfortunately I seem to be deciding that large capital cities like it and Bangkok are best stayed in as little as possible: see the sights, buy a few cheap clothes and leave. The Egyptian museum was a nice place to wander around, but I decided to head straight down the Nile and leave the pyramids etc. to later in the trip. In Luxor at the moment, I spent today looking around the Temples of Karnak - though they're still very interesting at the moment, I've got a feeling that in a few days time I'll be fairly tired of temples/tombs etc and up for diving and bouldering back in Sinai/ Should get a different way of viewing the monuments in Alexandria though, as you can do dives to see a lot of the ancient ruins.
Hope everything is well with everyone in Bristol/unis.
Sorry about the lack of photos, but my camera doesn't like loading onto computers without its software, so you'll have to wait til I get back (thinking I probably wont extend my flight atm.)

Sorry about the lack of any decent posts so far, but I'm now back in Dahab with the climbing part of the trip over, so I should finally have time to put something longer up.

The expedition was basically a series of excursions into the mountains from our base in St Katherine's in Sinai's interior. The scenery there is awesome- huge barren granite mountains everywhere, and the weather up there is surprisingly cold for the desert (as it's at about 1500m). Unfortunately I seemed to have taken the English weather with me, as on our first day there we got rained off a new route by the monastery. The resulting flash floods also knocked out the road, phone and internet links to the area for the next 10days or so! Most of the big climbs around the monastery has been done, mainly by visiting Israelis, but we still got a bunch of amazing new bouldering done in our time between trips.

Our first excursion took us to an area a few hours trek away with camels carrying our gear through valleys filled with opium gardens. Luckily Dave has been there enough that the farmers know him, so that nught we had supper with the local drugs lord! Again there was loads of awesome new and extablished bouldering to be done, and the 3rd ascent of a 500m route. The climbing here is very different to what I'm used to at home- all smeary slabs and hand/fist jam cracks, offwidths, strange palming moves... quite hard to get used to. The amount of rock aroumd here is astounding too- endless boulders and mountain crags, and countless new areas waiting to be discovered.

Our next trip took us up to a base camp by a cave where our guide (now a good friend of Dave's after all his trips) grew up until he was 12! Yet again the bouldering was awesome, and the amount of longer routes was stunning- a new 6 pitch E2, a few second ascents, a sunset top out on the classic of the crag (which has still only been climbed 5 or 6 times)... not too bad! We also had a day out to search for some gold which a Bedouin fable said was on a large ledge on a mountain nearby. A quick inspection on abseil shattered the dream, but there were plenty of great looking lines so we decided we would return later. The team for the first bit had actually been fairly small: me, Dave (who organised it), Fred and Andrew. Fred is working out in Dahab teaching freediving, and wierdly enough went to Balliol a few years ago and did French and Italien literature; Andrew is an expat working for BG in Cairo who is good mates with a Bristol climber who's mates with Ally Smith- very small world. For the next section we got a few more climbers from the UK, a Canadian and an Austrian as well as a couple more expats. Luckily this gave us enough 4x4s to head out to some sandstone which no-one had climbed on before. We were a bit unsure how this would go as all the climbing in Sinai so far has been on the granite areas, so we had no idea what the quality of the rock would be like. Luckily it seemed fairly good, and lead to my favourite routes of the trip: 2 brilliant 12m solos that me and Andrew did (an onsight E2 5b from me and a combined effort to get and E3/4 6b ground up after a lot of falls onto a bouldering mat). Overall the team got about 20 new routes done before Fred found out how bad small wire placements can be in dubious rock: 3 ripped right through, taking chunks with them, and he decked out onto boulders from about 15ft. Luckily an x-ray showed it was nothing more than a badly bruised coxix (sp.) but it gave us a major fright for a bit whilst we stretchered him down to the cars. (I managed to put myslf out for the first afternoon there with some sore bruises after pulling a bunch of rock onto me whilst bouldering, but they were the only injuries of the trip - except for fingertips and hands which lost a lot of skin and blood.)

After a few days back around ST Katherine's we headed back out to the mountain with the tales of gold for a few days before rounding off the trip at Umma Hashaur (the venue with the cave as a base). The climbing on the 'Gold Mountain' was excellent, and our new routing was only halted by having to go out on a search for an 11 year old Israeli kid who had got lost treking with his familly. We failed to find him that night, but he emerged the next morning just as we were thinking of calling in helecopters for an extended search. It turns out that he had spent the night sheltering down a dried up well!

All in all it's been an awesome 3 weeks of climbing and adventures, the only problem being that I don't want to stop climbing! I'm not quite sure whether i'll extend my flight back or not, largely as everyone says that by June the heat will be insane in Egypt and Jordan so travelling round wouldn't be a huge amount of fun.. I'll keep you updated on my plans though.

This is just another short post to say I'm still OK and having an awesome time climbing. I had just spent an hour writing a big one but the computer crashed as i tried to submit it and i'm low on time, so you'll have to wait another week or so until i'm in dahab again and i'll write up one for the last 3 weeks expedition.

Quickly: climbed lots of new boulder problems, lots of second ascents, a few new routes (including an awesome E3/4 6b solo), ate with a local dugs baron, slept under the stars every night , awesoem scenery, bruised my ribs from pulling a bunch of rock onto me, really great people on the trip... will tell all in a week.