Sharm-El-Sheikh began life as a Bedouin fishing camp on the edge of the desert. Rough tourist shanties first appeared in Naama Bay around 20 years ago, when small numbers of recreational divers first started to make the long trek through the desert from Cairo. Since then, it has grown like mould, and is now an 80 percent non-diving generic holiday resort, patronised mainly by Italians, Germans and Russians. It has its own airport, MacDonalds, Hard Rock Cafe, and (like so many package holiday destinations) around 10 times as many empty building shells as there will ever be tourists to fill them, scattered into the desert and stretching for miles in a thin strip of concrete, dust and whitewash along the Sinai coast.

It aint even remotely like real Egypt, but the sea which laps the crowded beach still contains some of the very finest coral reef diving in the world. If (like me) you are a UK-trained diver used to being barely able to make out your own fins, dropping into tropical water for the first time can be mindblowing...

I did five days shore-based diving with Divers International who were friendly and professional. A primarily German speaking dive operation, most days I was the only native English speaker on the boat, but all briefings were in English - yep, it's a great privilege. My rental kit (Reg/Oct/SPG and BCD) was pretty shabby, and my reg free flowed on the surface several times while waiting to descend, wasting that precious gas. In December, the water wasn't all that warm either, and I ended the week in a 5mil two piece and hood.

The dive guides optimistically pepper every site briefing diagram with mantas or sharks, but it was the wrong time of year for big pelagics, and they weren't coming out to play this week. Instead, there were a fair number of turtles, Barracuda, Moray Eels and enormous Napoleon Wrasse, as well as the endless variety and colour of parrotfish, coral cod, butterfly/angel/surgeonfish etc etc.

One afternoon at the Tower, the entire boat was kitted up, in line and ready to stride in, when frantic arabic shouts came from the bridge and the dive was abruptly cancelled. President Mubarak was in Sharm this week for a diving holiday, and had chosen that site for his afternoon dive (presidential privilege to see dive sites without hordes of tourists!), so we had to hop it and find an alternative.

My standout dive of the week:

Jackfish Alley in Ras Mohammed National Marine Park.
Max depth 20.4m, 52 min, viz >30m. Billed as a drift dive (true, insofar as the pickup was in a different place to the dropoff) but if anything the current was slightly against us.

Strode off the back of the boat into the blue, then swam over to the vertical reef wall, dropping far out of sight below. Hidden in a fold of the wall at about 5 metres was the entrance to a short swim through, with a white sandy bottom leading down past a fork to an exit at about 10 metres. Inside, a lionfish hovered in the sunbeams, feathery fins gently sculling, watching the procession of bubble blowers lumbering past with something like ennui.

After exiting back into the endless blue, we follow the wall round and down past magnificent Gorgonian fans to around 20 metres. Here, the wall levels out to form a sandy arena, pierced by towering coral pinnacles swarming with those tiny antheas, basslets and bigeye. Which never seem to feature on fish tables, despite the fact that you see more of 'em than any other fish?

I declined to do a second (and much more constricted) swim through, and was rewarded by a couple of huge barracuda which patrolled back and forth several times as I hovered outside.

When the rest of the group rejoined me, we crossed the arena, an enormous Napoleon Wrasse joined us and tagged along for the rest of the dive. I thought it was just being friendly, but apparently it was hunting hard boiled eggs. Unlucky for Napoleon, fish feeding is now illegal.

The end of the dive was spent swimming along a sandy road at about 15m, dotted with blue spotted rays, a hard coral garden sloping up on one side and a lush soft coral wall - perfect for a leisurely safety stop - on the other.