[Speaker 1]
Okay, so I’m from Sweden. Yeah. And if you want background before freediving, you mean?

I, well, I was a social worker. This is what I did, mainly working with teenagers for a while, also in homes for, you know, more smaller babies, newborns that the state needed to decide if the parents could take care of or not. So you’re like evaluating the situation, things like that.

[Speaker 2]

So you were working as a social worker and did you already have a background in sports, in swimming, in the water? How did you discover the water?

[Speaker 1]

Yeah, so I’ve never been a sports person, really. Having said that, I was swimming, competitive swimming when I was a kid, yeah? So I was in the swim school or, I mean, until I was like 12, at least, yeah?

Where I was quite good, they considered for my age. And my parents told me much later that they wanted in that club, they wanted to make me the one that they put their effort in to try to promote up to be really good. So they were asking my parents and but then I had to come three times a week before school to also train, not only the other two times.

And then they said no, because I’m actually dyslexic or dyslectic. [Speaker 2]
Dyslexic, yeah. That’s how you say it. You see, I can’t even say it. You’re excused from saying it correctly.

[Speaker 1]
It’s supposed to have to do only with writing, not talking. Anyway, so it was hard for me in

school a little bit, yeah? So they figured like, no, that will be too much for me.

So they said no. They didn’t tell me this until many, many, many years later, when I was grown up already. And then my mom said we probably made the wrong decision, because now you know more about everything, because for sure I’m also having ADHD, which at that time was not a diagnosis.

But it would have been better if I did more exercise, probably, than sitting home studying only, yeah? Anyway, so I was quite good, but I quit eventually, when I became a teenager. And that’s the only sport thing I’ve done.

Other than that, I hated sports. [Speaker 2]

And then at some point you came to, I mean, you started freediving. You came here and you started freediving more than 20 years ago now.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah.
[Speaker 2]
So did you come to Egypt for a holiday, scuba diving? [Speaker 1]

Exactly. And not for scuba diving though, but I came here with a friend to go on a swim with a dolphin trip. Mainly we went to Eilat.

That was an organised trip by Swedish, two Swedish women, which are a little bit like into the new age thing, but they had this like 10 day swim with the dolphin. And there was this wild dolphin in Nweiba, the next village next to Daham, which had become friends with some, a Bedouin guy there, like a fisherman, yeah? And she just decided to live in the water, just outside his hut, pretty much.

So they organised this trip. We went to Eilat, we went there. And that’s how I ended up here first.

And that’s how I ended up wanting to hold my breath longer. I totally fell in love with swimming with this dolphin.

[Speaker 2]
Because you just wanted to be in the water with the animals.

[Speaker 1]

I just wanted to be under the water more with a dolphin, because that’s where the dolphin was. We were mainly on the surface. And yeah, that was a huge experience.

That was in 98, I think, when we were there. Yes, 98. And then I came back in 2000.

[Speaker 2]

So you wanted to initially hold your breath longer to stay underwater with the dolphins, but did you know any free divers or have a sense about free diving as a kind of a thing or a culture back in those days?

[Speaker 1]

Absolutely no idea. I was in the belief that you can hold your breath as long as you can hold your breath. I didn’t even cross my mind that you can train to hold your breath longer, right?

So no, I had no idea. I didn’t know it was a competitive sport. I didn’t know you could learn it.

And then there was a programme on TV. Okay, so Jacques Mayol had a son that is Swedish. I don’t remember his name, but so he was doing a little bit of free diving things in Sweden like 100 years ago.

And there was a programme on television. And the only thing that that gave me was like, oh really, you can actually train to hold your breath longer. And I wanted to do that, but I didn’t take any kind of steps towards finding out where I could do it.

But then I kind of knew that it’s possible. And then I left it with that. And then I came back here again with my family for the third or fourth time to Daham and I met the free diver.

[Speaker 2] Who is that? [Speaker 1]

This was a Swedish guy called Magnus. And we were here over the winter for five weeks because we fell in love with Daham. Like I fell in love with Daham completely regardless of free diving.

There was no free diving. And we just kept coming back here like two, three times a year just for vacation. Yeah.

And then this time we stayed for five weeks. And this Swedish guy walks into the hotel and dive centre where we were staying, talking in the counter about him being a free diver and that he can do some free diving courses. And if the counter, you know, if they sell it to somebody, they

can be a commission.

You know, I was trying to do that. And my husband overheard him and also realised he was Swedish. And he knew that I wanted to hold my breath longer.

So so he’s like, hey, come, you need to talk to this guy. And that’s when I did a course with him then, like a two day homemade course, which all courses at that time was homemade.

[Speaker 2]

Yeah, I bet. And all free divers must have been really weird back then.

[Speaker 1]

Are they not now?

[Speaker 2]

I mean, they still are. That’s what I’m saying. No, they must have been like, most of us are outliers today.

They must have been like really out there back in the day. [Speaker 1]

Yeah. So so he came here because they have heard something about there is a place with the blue hole. Right.

So he was one of the first free divers that that came to see what that was. And he came with Tom Sittas. And Tom Sittas was a complete beginner.

[Speaker 2]

So German Tom Sittas. He eventually did the world record in static at some point. Right.

[Speaker 1]

So he he he was a complete beginner. He had been free diving for six months at that time. Yeah.

So I did my beginner course with Magnus. And then the next week Tom came because they came to be here together. Right.

So then I was actually training static. Tom Sittas and me were training static together in Coral Coast Pool.

[Speaker 2]

Really? So that was there then? In the winter?
Yeah. Yeah.
[Speaker 1]
Coral Coast has been there for a long time. Yeah. And the pool.
So we were in the Coral Coast Pool doing static. Ah, no, sorry. Blue Beach Pool. [Speaker 2]

Blue Beach. Okay. Yeah.

So these are also for people who are watching and listening, like two minute walk away up the up the street here on the waterfront.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. And of course, not heated in the winter. This was in December.

Right. So super cold with gloves and everything. And I find it funny because both Tom and me did static world records later.

And we actually trained together in there as beginners right there.
[Speaker 2]
Right in that Blue Beach Pool. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about DAHB 25 years ago.

Like, you know, we’d like to give people a sense of how it’s changed, which is a lot, obviously, in 25 years, but obviously as well, like what has stayed the same about DAHB and why you continue to live here. And I think you probably still like it, you know, still enough. Yeah.

But if we think about it. Okay. So now probably at this time, people listening, if you’re watching on the YouTube channel, you’re going to have some footage of DAHB.

I’m going to be doing some walking around and getting some really nice pictures from DAHB and the surroundings. So you’ll see that it’s quite a, you know, there’s pretty much everything here now. You have a lot of restaurant options.

You have a lot of diving schools, 10 free diving, you know, schools that have physical locations. You know, there’s suburbs with housing areas and it’s congested and busy to a certain extent in some places. It wasn’t always like that, right?

[Speaker 1]
No, it wasn’t. I mean, it was a very much like a very laid back, slightly hippie, more hippie

village, you know. Of course, I’ve been here all the time throughout the changes.

And when you’re there, you don’t realise the changes, you don’t notice it as much. Yeah. But a couple of things that I definitely can say, for example, you went always to sit in the beach restaurants, you know, they didn’t have chairs and tables.

They had, you know, these palm tree trunks as the back seat and the cushions, pillows. You were very much sitting on the floor seat like we do in Blue Hole, right?

[Speaker 2]

Yeah.

[Speaker 1]

It was that kind all the way on the beach. At some point, the government decided, no, you’re not allowed to anymore. You have to have tables and chairs.

And that’s why everybody now had these low sofas and tables because nobody wanted to have the high chairs.

[Speaker 2]

So as close to the ground as possible.

[Speaker 1]

Yeah. So that’s why all the restaurants here still doesn’t have real tables and chairs. They have these low ones.

But originally it was much more like Blue Hole, the whole front side. Yeah. And you could go there and the food was bad.

You know, there was nothing to eat at all. We brought scuba groups here and you always said like, you’re going to be, anybody who come will be sick.

[Speaker 2]

You’re going to get sick.

[Speaker 1]

Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think that’s true anymore, though.

But then it was for sure. And you said it took forever to get any food. And in the end, the food was like very average.

[Speaker 2]

And in those days, it was mostly still Bedouin who were providing these services to people, just as many Egyptians.

[Speaker 1]

Yeah. Well, I can’t swear on that, but there was a mix for sure. It was not like everything was Bedouin only.

[Speaker 2]

Because if you listen to the Bedouin, they tell you like the Egyptians pretty much showed up like four years ago.

[Speaker 1]

No, but look, maybe they mean because they did show up four years ago or what is it now? They showed up around 2016. After that, all the Egyptian tourists, the more wealthy Egyptian tourists, they showed up.

So it’s more than four years ago. But they were not here before. [Speaker 2]
Before that, it was mainly European tourists.
[Speaker 1]

Yeah. And long staying backpackers. There were for sure no charter tourists, which is barely still.

[Speaker 2] Yeah. [Speaker 1]

They tried sometimes and then something happened and then everything goes down. But yeah, you have a lot of Israelis from time to time. When I first came, which was like in 98, like I said, and then in 2000, almost the biggest population of tourists were Israeli.

It was really big for Israelis and they were always welcome here. Yeah. Now I doubt it. [Speaker 2]

Now there’s none. You know, before this all kicked off last year, if you had gone to Nuweiba, which is the next town up, that was still almost exclusively Israeli tourists.

[Speaker 1]

It was, but for many, many years they were not Israelis. Yeah. Because it’s been going through different periods where the Israeli government is also more or less telling them that it’s super dangerous to go to Egypt and you shouldn’t come.

Yeah. So there was some incidents here. And then for years, there was no Israelis.

Right. So like two years ago, they started or so they started coming back and they were very welcome back. You know, it’s like, oh, cool.

Finally, there’s some peace. And then this happened. [Speaker 2]
Didn’t last very long.
[Speaker 1]

The restaurant has much better food and there’s more restaurants and there is more restaurants that have a certain cuisine. Yeah. Because in the beginning was just everybody the same.

Yeah. Which the street restaurants still are like a menu with everything. You know, as a person living here, we tend to go to the restaurants that are specialised.

Like if I want sushi, I go to the sushi bar or I go to the Asian food or I go to the Italian, you know, we don’t particularly necessarily go to the ones that just have everything, you know. So that’s nice. It’s a huge, much bigger variety now.

One of the big changes that was when bread arrived to the hub. [Speaker 2]
Bread?
[Speaker 1]

Bread. My God, we miss bread.
[Speaker 2]
Didn’t you have the Egyptian Aish before? [Speaker 1]
Yes, we did.
[Speaker 2]

But you mean like bread branches. Yeah.

[Speaker 1]

So all the foreign community were like dying for some proper bread.

[Speaker 2]

But isn’t that still only the German bakery that really makes bread?

[Speaker 1]

Yes. But we didn’t have it.

[Speaker 2]

So German bakery is like there’s like three of them in Dahab and they it’s like it sounds like it’s like a German style bread bakery.

[Speaker 1]

It’s owned by a German.

[Speaker 2]

Owned by Germans. And you get like half decent coffee there and cakes and things like that.

[Speaker 1]

Bread is really good.

[Speaker 2]

Proper raw bread. It’s like if you get something delivered or picked up in Dahab, it’s always like, yeah, German bakery, pick up a German bakery, drop off a German bakery.

[Speaker 1]

Yeah, so it’s well known. Everybody knows. Anyway, so there was a German bakery opening, which was another person opening it.

Actually, it was called Alf Leila Bakery or sorry, Leila Bakery, which is still the place up at the top of the road. So that’s where the original bakery was, which was Leila’s Bakery. And when that was opening in the end, they started selling the bread out from the back door before the actual cafe opened because people were so amazed and desperate like that they could buy bread.

We used to go to Charm to Meccani, which makes bread there that had the dark bread. So people in Dahab, when they went to Charm, went there to buy some dark bread. After we got

the bakery, I know that people from Charm bought bread here to bring back to Charm because we had better bread here.

That was a huge milestone in Dahab’s life. And like you said, now it’s another owner and he has many shops, including two in Cairo.

[Speaker 2]

So you like the way that Dahab has developed in the sense that there are more restaurant options and things like that. Also, Alenka, I was speaking to her recently here and she didn’t come back for many years and then she came back after a few years and she was like, actually, you know what? It’s quite nice to come and train here now because it’s easy to have the house and then go to a restaurant that’s got decent food and then go and train.

It’s a little bit more convenient because if I remember correctly, we watched this amazing video film, mini documentary about a competition that you put on here back in the day in Dahab and it was incredibly fascinating for me. Unfortunately, we didn’t get permission to use it. Otherwise, we’d be having it playing in the background right now.

But at that time, the Blue Hole was like a good 40 minutes plus drive away, right? Because you didn’t have the road.

[Speaker 1]
True, true.
[Speaker 2]
Now it’s like a 20 minute drive. [Speaker 1]

Yeah, it was probably the double and you were driving the whole way on the beach in the sand. So now there is an asphalt road all the way to Canyon. But you started driving on the beach, so to say, already at the corner where you turn when there’s the Bedouin Moon Hotel now.

From there, you’re in the sand. And the road is going in like this. I don’t know how to say that. You can understand it on the podcast.
[Speaker 2]
Yeah, you’re just driving through sand basically.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, but they had to do twists, you know, because the tyres create this…

[Speaker 2]

Like a groove.

[Speaker 1]

These are the… So the car started doing… So at some point, they were really high up to the sides and then to this side.

[Speaker 2]
There’s still one little patch where they like to like… [Speaker 1]
Exactly. The whole way was like that.
[Speaker 2]
The whole way was like that, yeah.
[Speaker 1]

It was amazing. It was fun. And when you came to Blue Hole, obviously, you went through this really little nook, you know, like a little opening they had done in a stone rock where the Jeep just fitted through there.

And it was always exciting. And all the tourists were always scared, especially when you went back from Blue Hole, because you went through that hole and you didn’t see the road. It was like you’re going straight, going to go straight down into the water.

[Speaker 2]

I wanted to ask about that little opening, because obviously, in the past, it would have been just rock all the way down to the sea. So at some point, they must have blown that up.

[Speaker 1]
Which was before me. So that was…
[Speaker 2]
But they made it bigger in your time here?
[Speaker 1]
No, no, it was like… As it is now, it was. The Jeeps went through there. And the road, I don’t know if you can go and film that.

[Speaker 2]
There will be some on screen now, yeah. [Speaker 1]

Because it’s really cool, yeah. So the road where we go now, which is like on the side of that, that was still there, but it was much higher, yeah. So usually, the shitty Jeeps in Dahab, they couldn’t really make it up that.

So we went all through that hole still, while the land cruisers that came from Sharm, the nicer, newer cars, they could go up that hill because they were too big to go through the hole anyway. Yeah. So it was these two ways going through.

Yeah. [Speaker 2]

Yeah. And it’s still nice how you get to Canyon and then you go onto the sand again. And that’s one of the joys of Dahab, is the morning sort of training trip to the Blue Hole.

And, you know, you see camels out there, you see Bedouin women fishing in the shallows, you see the desert dogs come down from the mountains to go into the sea to cool down. And it’s still super beautiful out there.

[Speaker 1]

We were not happy that they were building the… Nobody here was really happy that they were building the… The road.

Because we felt, I don’t want an asphalt road all the way to Blue Hole because, why, they’re going to start bringing these big tourist buses or something. You know, we’re happy that you have to go on a, you know, on a Jeep or a pickup.

[Speaker 2]

But it’s still nice how it’s kind of separated that way, that half of the trip is still through the sand. But, you know, it looked like on the way to Canyon, so Canyon is about maybe like three, four kilometres up the road from Dahab. On the way, it looked like they were starting to build a lot of resorts and hotels and things like that.

Now there are maybe just like two or three that got established. [Speaker 1]
But that’s been looking like that the whole time.

[Speaker 2]
So they started building them and then they got abandoned. And what happened there? [Speaker 1]

Well, I think this happens also in many other countries in the world. Either you start building until you finish the money and then you just wait until you have money and you continue. Most of the time I think it probably gets sold and then somebody else continues.

And then maybe they run out of money and then they, you know, some of these has been there for since I came and still didn’t finish. Some has been finished throughout the years. Suddenly somebody bought it and actually finished.

So there was originally when I came, if you go from, I mean, there was all the way from Dahab, I love Dahab, Bedouin moon there, until Blue Hole. There was only Diana, no, Daniela.

[Speaker 2]
Daniela, yeah. [Speaker 1]
That was the only one. [Speaker 2]

You were driving in front of it. You get the boat from Daniela now. [Speaker 1]
Yeah, you were driving, the road was in front of it, not behind it. [Speaker 2]

There was no behind road. Hey, folks, excuse me for interrupting this episode for just a minute to remind you that you can find me here in Dahab, Egypt, where I’m teaching freediving courses of all levels and providing professional coaching and guidance to aspiring deep freedivers from all over the world. Dahab is one of the best places in the world to experience the culture of freediving.

And you are most welcome here. Most entry level freediving courses are two or three day experiences. But with me, we take a minimum five days training.

So you have the best opportunity to fully immerse yourself in the world of apnea, to allow your body and mind to properly adjust to the underwater environment and to allow us to cover all aspects of freediving theory and practise thoroughly without rushing anything. On top of that, I

have my own dedicated space right beside the ocean in Dahab with classroom spaces, equipment storage, hot showers. And there’s even a fully equipped apartment available to rent for those students who wish to be as close to the action as possible.

Visit freediveandthrive.com for detailed information about the unique courses I teach and to get in touch with me personally. Or have a look at freediveandthrive on Instagram and send me a DM there. All right, let’s dive back in with Lotta.

For me, one of the biggest challenges living in Dahab, and I love Dahab, I think, and I’m not gonna spend my time complaining about, you know, aspects of living in a developing country and an under-cared-for town. But the trash is very, very challenging.

[Speaker 1]
Still here.
[Speaker 2]
Is it worse now or was it always bad? [Speaker 1]

It was always bad. I don’t know if it’s worse. No, look, to be honest, I think they have the absolute best cleaning company now that they ever had.

This was always an issue, yeah? I don’t think the government wants to spend any money. It’s corrupt and whatnot.

So, of course, they always wanted to pay as little as possible. So it used to be absolutely, absolutely useless. You know, really bad.

And then they changed many times over the year. And then they get the new company and it’s still bad. And it usually be the worst in Asala where everybody lived.

And they tend to only clean where the tourist areas were and don’t care about where the people lived much. But this company they have now, I mean, I think it has to do more with how much the government decided to pay for it to ask the company to do. It’s not the company in itself, yeah?

But they’re doing an amazing job now. So for the last one or two years, I think Dahab is the cleanest ever. And you can see that the government is paying more money because, you know, you have the street cleaners that walk around and clean with the smoke, you know.

We didn’t have that for 20 years at all, right? And then the garbage trucks that pick up the empty, the big bins, you know, are coming very regularly. Also in the area where the people live in Asala.

[Speaker 2]

Yeah, at least in the area where the people are frequenting most. And so probably better than most places in Egypt.

[Speaker 1]

This I cannot say. I’ve been in some cities in Egypt where it’s so clean and I’m thinking like, why they can manage to clean here when not in Dahab, yeah?

[Speaker 2]

Here, the problem that I see mainly is that people put the trash into bags and then leave them on the side of the street. And then in the night, dogs and cats go through them, open the bags up and it’s very windy here. And these bottles and everything end up all over the streets.

Every morning you come out, you see that the bags are opened up all over the streets. And because everything in Dahab is right next to the water, half of it ends up in the water as well. And unless you have some kind of facility for putting the bags into a protected place.

And there are no trash cans here, really. They’re just the big ones that get the, you know, every, you know, there’s a few of them around the city.

[Speaker 1]

It used to be more of those. And people were putting the garbage on the side of them if they were full. So the problem was that they were not emptying them enough.

But I guess the government fixed it by removing them. So I used to have one quite close to my house. I have none of those close to my house anymore.

I bring the garbage here. I bring my garbage here because I have them outside of Freedom of Dahab, yeah? So it’s up to the people, obviously, to go and find one and put the garbage there rather than just throw it on the street.

So what happened in some places where they used to stand, one of these big garbage containers, people, they took the container away and people just kept putting the trash in the same place. And of course, then more animals can tear it apart. But I don’t know where you stay.

But where I stay, I don’t have any way this problem because we still have the garbage guys coming daily down the street and picking up stuff. I even saw the other day this big truck that has these round brushes that brush the street from sand and stuff. So they even were doing that the other day.

[Speaker 2]

No, unfortunately, where I’m staying, it’s one of these sandy alleys down beside the beach. And to be honest, it’s some people who live there, they put their bag outside the door. And actually, the bin is like one minute walk away.

And because they put it there, they just end up opening up the bags. But let’s not dwell too much on the fact that… I mean, because…

[Speaker 1]

Let’s talk about the nice part.

[Speaker 2]

You know, it’s good to hear you talk about, you know, like, there’s some improvement in that situation.

[Speaker 1]

Oh yeah, it’s actually way better than it used to be.

[Speaker 2]

You need that, you need that.

[Speaker 1]

But the education of the people of throwing stuff or using plastic and thing here or like they have…

[Speaker 2]

It’s nothing, it’s nothing. I remember, I’m 41. I remember when I was a kid, maybe like six, seven years old.

I remember very clearly, I grew up in a village in a rural area. We used to go to the local store. We used to buy candy.

We used to eat the candy and immediately just dump it on the ground. I hate to say it, but our family, like everybody’s family, they would take the trash bags. And if they had too much, they would drive a little bit into the countryside and throw it over a bridge into a fucking stream.

This is exactly what you see here that looks absolutely mind-blowing. But I remember very clearly how the government initiated some like a campaign. They had like some online like advertisements, not advertisements, but like public information kind of thing.

[Speaker 1]
And did a lot of that in Sweden.

[Speaker 2]

And they put new trash cans all over the country, Scotland, England, Wales, all over every country. They had these black and gold trash cans on new ones. And then not long after that, they brought in the wheelie bins and the fines also.

They made it quite clear, like if you drop trash, you’re going to pay like 200 pounds or whatever it is. I don’t know what it was at the time. But it’s amazing how quickly things changed.

And it’s also a little bit like the smoking thing. You know, like I remember in 1999 being in Amsterdam and walking around smoking a cigarette. And I was serving tables and I had my cigarette in the ashtray of the tray that I was carrying to the tables.

You know, I was smoking while I was serving drinks. And then it changed pretty much overnight when they brought the ban on smoking inside. And so it’s not like people here are ignorant or stupid or whatever.

It’s just that we are. [Speaker 1]

No, it has to come from above and below, so to say, you know. But if the government doesn’t… I mean, it’s education in the end.

[Speaker 2]

It’s not stupidity. It’s just education and understanding. And it’s like I say, 20 or 30 years behind.

It’s actually not a huge amount of time. But maybe we are reaching a kind of a critical period where the pure amount of plastic and industrial waste is a problem. You know, that brings me to the question of the health of the reef system here and the underwater life.

I was in Taiwan for five years. I had my school on this island, Xiaoliuqiu. And I just watched the reef disappear in front of my eyes in the space of like three or four years from, you know, a combination of different things, but mainly people being the main problem.

And then I came to the Red Sea and I jumped in the water here. And I’m like, holy shit, like this is unbelievable. It’s so beautiful.

Some places where the reef is so spectacular. And I’ve only seen really places close to the town. I haven’t even seen like the really untouched places up the coast.

I haven’t been to Ras Mohamed yet.
[Speaker 1]
Oh my God. Next time we do the trip, you want to come?

[Speaker 2]

I haven’t been to the canyon. I know I haven’t. Okay.

[Speaker 1]

But look, we organised a trip to Ras Mohamed.

[Speaker 2]

Can I invite you for the next one? Yeah, I’ll go next time. You have to see Ras Mohamed, come on.

So in your mind, having been here for 25 years, what kind of change have you seen under the water?

[Speaker 1]

Now you put me on the spot. It has been going back and forth a little bit. And it is in different areas, I think, you know, because and I don’t know, I mean, of course, people are everywhere.

Unfortunately, also the Bedouins are fishing on the reef in some areas more than others, which they’re not allowed to. I understand if they do it. This was their place originally.

This was a Bedouin village and they were fishermen. [Speaker 2]
And they are allowed to, right?
[Speaker 1]

They are allowed to fish. They’re supposed to fish from boats, a kilometre or so out to sea. They’re not allowed to fish on the reef.

[Speaker 2]

On the reef, right.

[Speaker 1]

But it’s fine. You know, they do it in some places. What happens is mainly that the bigger fish are gone.

Yeah. So the whole Dahab area doesn’t have a lot of big fish. Like if you go down to Ras Mohamed, there’s much more big fish for two reasons.

They don’t fish there generally is more protected. But also there is currents is the peak of the

tip of Sinai with some more currents and big fish kind of like that. So that’s one reason we go there.

But so there’s never been like a huge amount of big fish here. Yeah. But I think over the years, like sometimes one dive site is like everybody’s complaining about it.

Oh, it’s so bad. It’s dying. The corals are bad, you know.

But then a couple of years later, that’s kind of better again. And then there’s another one people are complaining about. So I think it has some kind of cycle also that doesn’t.

Yeah. [Speaker 2]

I mean, I’ve seen a reef like bleach and like 70 percent of the whole reef has turned white in front of my eyes. And then the next year, maybe 30 percent came back.

[Speaker 1]

Yeah.

[Speaker 2]

You know, and the rest is covered in seaweed. And I don’t know the exact details. Maybe I can link to some stuff here on the podcast.

But as far as I understand, the Red Sea coral has much better durability than other coral around the world, because in its evolutionary past, there were periods of time when the Red Sea was closed off and the water became much saltier and warmer. So the coral has evolved to deal with increases in temperature. But at least where I was part of it, the biggest part of the problem was that it’s first of all, it’s a tropical area.

So they have a rainy season. And when people build on the land, they tear up the ground, they remove the vegetation, and then it rains and then the rain washes all this shit into the sea that would never get there before. So it changes the chemical composition of the water.

And you get more people because there are more tourists. You get more people shitting and more shit goes in the water. Excuse my language.

And but the nice thing about this Red Sea, I mean, this is you’ll see in the background here, this is as desert as desert gets. And there’s no rainy season. It rains maybe three or four times a year.

[Speaker 1] Oh, that’s a lot.

[Speaker 2]

Yeah, and it causes complete chaos when it happens. So yeah, so still an amazing place for the underwater world. Like if you want to see amazing stretches of coral, I think also around the Blue Hole is incredible.

You know, I love taking people to the bells and having them swim down the outside of the wreath. And you’ll see some footage of that here. Is it true what they say that it was Jack Cousteau who created the saddle of the Blue Hole because he wanted to bring it?

[Speaker 1]

You never heard that story?

[Speaker 2]

So I heard that he brought his boat up and he couldn’t get into the Blue Hole. So they decided to blow it up with dynamite. You never heard that one?

[Speaker 1]

Never heard that story. OK, the temporary quote was like you find it in the articles and stuff.

[Speaker 2]

No, someone told me that maybe like I don’t want to name names because they don’t name names.

[Speaker 1]
I thought you read it somewhere.
[Speaker 2]
A top freediver who lives in Dahab told me this story. [Speaker 1]
Never heard that story.
[Speaker 2]

Very trustworthy source. Tell us about the development of freediving. I mean, Dahab is intimately linked with the development of freediving, modern freediving and competitive freediving in the world.

Tell us a little bit how, you know, from when you saw this random dude, Magnus, in the hotel, how quickly did freediving become popular and how did the scene develop here in Dahab?

[Speaker 1]

OK, so when did I meet him? Around 2000, I guess. No, wait, 2002, 2003, somewhere there, yeah.

And like I said, there was no freedivers here. Like he was the only one I met and then was Tom and then we trained. And if you walk down the road with a monofilm, people didn’t understand what it was.

When we went to Blue Hole to dive in the beginning, we went and we put the rope and the buoy outside bells. We didn’t even put it in Blue Hole because it was supposed to. Don’t ask me why, actually.

It doesn’t make any sense. But of course, it wasn’t attached to anything, you know, because then I did the courses with him. Well, the course, whatever.

And then I went home and I started training. And of course, I loved the static from the beginning. And as soon as I came home, I did the static records and stuff.

And then the next summer I was here with two other Swedish freedivers and we were diving in Blue Hole. But we went always to bells. I really, I can’t like grasp it now what was the purpose of that.

But we had the buoy there and it was like floating. [Speaker 2]

So you inexplicably left this incredible natural swimming pool a little bit to the south and went outside of bells. Where the current is and everything like that.

[Speaker 1]

We didn’t know how deep it was. I really don’t know. I mean, I was the beginner and they had been, I had been here before, but they were more advanced freedivers than me.

So I just followed their suit, you know, we did. There was no other freedivers here. That was it.

That’s how we did it, you know.

[Speaker 2]

And who were the first people that started to show up whose names you might recognise today that kind of started to, I mean, apart from yourself, obviously.

[Speaker 1]
So yeah, one of the one coming in the beginning and one of the one hitting the bottom of the

Blue Hole first was, for instance, Matt Melina. And he came, there’s some people that come, you know, they just, they have, there’s nothing that stops them, right? Most people, we do have some kind of barrier that we need to break through.

It’s like the equalising suddenly stops us or we’re squeezing or it’s just our brain who’s scared of going deep, you know, like these three things, like it’s very rare to find a freediver that doesn’t hit one of these three at some point, right? But I met a couple that just come. So Matt had been here doing some beginner course or something with us.

Then he came back and I don’t know how many weeks he stayed, but maybe he stayed for a month and he came as a 30, 36 metre diver and he left with having picked up a stone from the bottom of the Blue Hole.

[Speaker 2]
Do we know who the first freediver was to touch the bottom? [Speaker 1]

No, I’m not sure. He was one of the, he was definitely what I know, the first picking up the stone because my husband was always telling everybody, please bring me a stone from the bottom of the Blue Hole. That was his constant joke to everybody that went training with me.

[Speaker 2]

That’s what you got to do. You got to pick up a stone, stick it in your hood or something like that.

[Speaker 1]

He kept it in his hand.

[Speaker 2]

I always thought sand and I’m like, well, how the fuck do I bring sand back up?

[Speaker 1]

Exactly. So there is other people who try to bring a stone to Peter, but then they go down and they just like grab like that. And then there is sand and it just spills out of their hand.

But he managed to grab a rock, you know. [Speaker 2]

Can you imagine you went all the way down there and you just reached out to take something and you got a snorkel?

[Speaker 1]

That would be excellent. There’s a couple of them down there for sure.

[Speaker 2]

A couple, yeah.

[Speaker 1]

Let’s not talk about other things that are down there.

[Speaker 2]

Five metres shallower these days with all the snorkels.

[Speaker 1]

You know how the bottom of the Blue Hole is, right? It’s like that angle. Yeah, there’s not a bottom.

[Speaker 2]

Yeah, we know that.

[Speaker 1]

So because it just goes straight through the arch, right? So when you’re going down in the end, like you’re actually going down parallel to the bottom technically. So it’s so steep.

So usually the things that fall down, they slope, keep sloping down and they end up deeper. Than where they first fell, yeah.

[Speaker 2]

Yeah, I know. I still haven’t really… I mean, I’ve seen the arch only without the mask on, you know.

So I’ve seen it once with the mask from maybe like 45. But I really need to go down one day to like 60 or something and have a proper look at it. Yeah, yeah.

[Speaker 1]
But you saw it on my video. [Speaker 2]
Yeah, yeah. I mean, also…

[Speaker 1]

And it’s quite cool. And you’re next to the bottom literally, yeah.

[Speaker 2]

So that was really fun to watch. You started to… Tell us about how this like competition thing came about in the Blue Hole.

[Speaker 1]

Okay, so the thing is…

[Speaker 2]

This must have been… Sorry to interrupt you. This must have been some of the first like freediving competitions in general.

[Speaker 1]

Yes, at the time when I started, there was very few freediving competitions around the world. Like now there are all over the place, everywhere, all the time. At that time, you had the World Championship, which was like every other year.

And the IDA then, there was no CIMES or something. Well, there was a CIMES, but they didn’t do freediving competitions. So IDA had the competition every other year.

And it was only the team competition. Individual World Championship didn’t exist, right? And then some countries sometimes had some national competition, right?

But that was it. So in Sweden, we had one national competition. And then there was the World Championship every other year, somewhere in the world.

And that was very much it. It was much more record attempts at the time, yeah? Because arranging a competition…

I mean, arranging a record attempt, a national record attempt, each national IDA had their own rules. There was the common rules of the surface protocol and all this other stuff. But, you know, who can be the judge?

And when you had to announce it, and all these things was always the national decided, yeah? So people were not arranging competitions to do records. You arranged record attempts to do records, right?

And also now, and also then, there was no competitions in variable weight or no limit, right? There’s never been. So when I moved here, there was a couple of Swedish guys who really wanted to do, or one Swedish guy mainly, who wanted to do the Swedish record in no limit.

Which I don’t know what it was, but apparently 90 metres was enough to do the no limit record. So he got this idea that we should arrange it here. And I said, sure, we arrange it here, you know?

So they built a sled. He built a sled in Sweden and brought it. And still the same sled that is hanging down in the dive centre.

And me and my husband had the job to figure out how to create something in the blue hole that could have the sled and have the sled pulled up out of the water like sleds normally are. We don’t have a boat. We cannot put the boat there with an arm, like the normal kind of scenario.

So that’s when we built the pyramid. And so the pyramid is a massive metal structure. [Speaker 2]
Yeah, I think we can get a picture of it.
[Speaker 1]

Yeah, we need to have. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. [Speaker 2]
It’s kind of like a metal frame.
[Speaker 1]

Yeah.
[Speaker 2]
That was constructed to have the line hanging down. [Speaker 1]

In the middle to be able to pull the sled out of the water so you can hang on it, right? It was developed for the next year after that to have a proper counter ballast. Because when I started freediving, there was no such a thing as a counter ballast, right?

We were diving without counter ballast. And the only safety was the scuba divers.

[Speaker 2]

Now we have a surface line that goes from one side of the blue hole to the other. So the buoys are always fixed in the same place. But you were telling me before that you used to just fix to one side and kind of drift into the centre and kind of just know where to drop the line.

[Speaker 1]

Well, yeah, and this was not the problem because there was only me and my school and my people, you know. There was nobody else. So I knew, we knew.

I mean, we’re still attaching the rope. The cross line now is still attached in the same place in the front, yeah? Which is technically right above where the arch is.

So we just had the normal surface line just like we have in Lighthouse. And we had our buoy there. And we knew, you know, you can see if it was drifting.

Normally it wasn’t. Normally it was pulled straight. If the technical divers came or that go deep with all the bubbles, how they expand from depth up, that pushed us to the sides, yeah?

So if we see this technical diver going down, we knew we need to be careful because our buoy will be pushed to the side, yeah? And in different side, you know. So you as the instructor were also in charge of making sure that the buoy was kind of where it should be so nobody hit their head somewhere, yeah?

But it wasn’t a big problem until more and more people started having and they didn’t know. They just came, attached to us, had no idea and then just drifted. And we were like there screaming at people like, cannot like move your buoy, move your buoy.

And then we said, okay, we put the cross line. So we put the cross line, which was like our surface line, yeah? What happened then is that everybody stopped bringing their own surface line.

So when we wanted to get out and we took out the cross line because it’s our line, like that was for us our surface line, right? And then people go like, hey. It was funny in the beginning.

But there was other things happening too because in the beginning, the scuba divers and the tech divers or whatever, they didn’t know what was going on, right? Now everybody here knows exactly. But at that time we were there, we had a buoy, two, three buoys.

Sometimes we were a group and any scuba diver that passed by, they had to swim to the rope, touch it and look up and say, what is this doing here, you know? Especially the deep ones where you didn’t see, you know, they didn’t see the surface and we didn’t see the bottom. So it happens sometimes that free divers go down and they like hit their head on a scuba tank or a scuba diver, right?

So that was an issue. And there was some crazy fights between a scuba diver and a free diver in the end.

[Speaker 2]
Two worlds collide, yeah.

[Speaker 1]

Definitely, yeah, definitely. It took some year, you know, in the beginning for all the schools here and everybody knowing that those are the free diving lines and we should stay away from them and that they actually inform all the students and the other divers around that don’t touch the lines and stay away, yeah? But that happened a couple of times, some incidents with that.

Nothing serious, obviously, luckily, you know?

[Speaker 2]

Yeah, luckily, yeah, yeah. So that’s still something that we have to watch out for today is when we do drop the bottom weights at the beginning of the session that we look out for bubbles, first of all, but also that we drop with a little bit of care and patience, because you can have some deep tech breathers on scuba guys, on rebreathers down there and stuff Where you don’t see the bubbles at all, yeah. And it’s funny when you see like some, now most of the scuba divers here, they know not to mess with the free diving lines, but sometimes those big boats come in from Sharm or wherever, and they drop off a group in the blue hole and you see all these people come and sometimes they’ll come and hold onto the line.

[Speaker 1]

Oh, they do that, yeah, because they don’t know, because they haven’t been briefed by the local divers, yeah.

[Speaker 2]

So it’s not like they’re doing something wrong, they’re just curious, but it does, you know, we do have to be, but overall, it is kind of like probably one of the safest places to do deep free diving in the world.

[Speaker 1]

Yes, definitely, yeah. I mean, the main thing that we were more concerned with before, even now, but still, is the distance to a hospital and a proper place if something happens, right? Like you said, it took 40 minutes in the desert to get to Blue Hole, right?

Plus, we didn’t have a good hospital here. The governmental hospital is not really anything good and that was the only hospital we had at the time, yeah. So it was always a little bit iffy with the medical at that time.

Eventually, they opened the chamber in Dahab. So Dr. Adel Taher, who was in SHARM, I had the chamber there, the only one who had the chamber there.

[Speaker 2]

Who still has the main place in SHARM, yeah.

[Speaker 1]

and he knows more about free diving than most other diving doctors. He opened the chamber here, the first chamber in Dahab. Also, the scuba diver had to go to SHARM to go to a chamber before, yeah.

And Dr. Haeckel, which every free diver in Dahab know, he worked with Dr. Adel in his chamber. So he was the one running the chamber here. So when that happened, that helped a lot.

And originally, the chamber was at the harbour. And Haeckel had tried to say to Dr. Adel, like, no, we don’t want it in the harbour. Like, that’s as far as you can go from Blue Hole.

But of course, he used to be in SHARM. And they have a search and rescue team with the boats. And most people are going on boats.

So his chamber is close to the harbour. And he just didn’t realise how much we’re actually not coming with boats. There’s no search and rescue team.

And we will go in the back of a pickup from Blue Hole. And we want the chamber to be as close as possible there. So eventually, it was moved to the beginning of the Blue Hole.

[Speaker 2]

And I’ve seen the building. And it’s often crossed my mind, like, whatever happened to this chamber?

[Speaker 1]

Because it’s not in- It’s really unfortunate, I would say, because it was great to have it. And all the scuba divers liked it. And it was funny, because all the first, like, for so many years here, there was no chamber.

And then when he decided to do it, at the same time, another hospital did. So suddenly, from having no chamber, we had two chambers, right? Most people always went to Dr. Adel’s chamber, because he’s well known for everybody here before that. And we trust him and, of course, Dr. Haeckel. So that was the one everybody went to. But what I understand, a couple of years ago, it was just costing too much.

And he couldn’t handle it. It was just not working financially anymore, yeah? So he sold it.

To one of the other private hospitals here, as I understand. Where it ended up in the end, and what happened, I don’t know, because what I know now, I don’t even know if there is a chamber, if there is two, or if there’s one, or if what happened, yeah?

[Speaker 2]

So that is the issue here, is that you can get to a hospital pretty quickly. But now, with free divers getting so deep and doing so much training and, you know, it’s standard for people to doing multiple dives in the week, 70, 80, 90 metres. There are those cases where decompression illness becomes an issue for free divers, and it would be much more convenient to have one 20 minutes drive away than an hour and a half drive away.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, definitely, yeah.
[Speaker 2]
But still, better than a lot of places in the world as well, right, because we do have… [Speaker 1]

Definitely, and also because I think they can actually know something about free diving and understand what happens in the body, you know, Heikel, he’s been here for, you know, it’s so many free… Everybody goes to him. And also Dr. Taher knows and did some studies on this, on free diving, yeah?

He treated, for example, Carlos Costa when he had his bad accident in Charm.

[Speaker 2]

Back in the day, you organised this competition, you built the kind of the pyramidal structure to organise the no-limit stuff, and then we started two years ago having depth competitions in Dahab again after a break of a few years. But before that, there were regular competitions in the Bluehole, right?

[Speaker 1]

Yes, we were doing competitions for many, many years. We were the only ones doing. So we started with doing the triple depth, which was like a thing then.

We did it 10 years in a row, yeah? And like I said, it was not a lot of competitions. And when we started doing competition, this idea that a competition in free diving means that you get to choose the discipline and dive as many times as you want, and then you choose your result kind of, that didn’t exist, you know?

Like a competition was still a competition. Like you go, you do a dive, and you compare with the other, that one dive that you could do, you know? Any other sport is like that, I think.

So that’s how it was. So we had the triple depth, which was all the three depth disciplines. Bifins didn’t exist as a separate entity, right?

And there was one day for free immersion, there was one day for no fins, and there was one

day for constant weight. And there was no choices, there was no rest days. The whole point is like, can you do, who is best on doing all three disciplines in three days, the same way, everybody?

[Speaker 2]

Who can rise to the challenge that we have set for these few days?

[Speaker 1]

Yes.

[Speaker 2]

Everyone is in the same circumstances.

[Speaker 1]

Yes. So, I mean, we liked it, and it was really popular, but it wasn’t a lot of competitions around the world at the time anyway, but it was very popular. We had every year returning.

Sometimes we had really good sponsors that we had quite nice prices, never really money, but computer suits like fins, like proper, some more expensive things, not every year, but several times we had quite good Raleigh cameras, like instead of the, you know, they had the same stuff as a GoPro at the time, or in 2014, when Mares and SSI bonded, so to say, we got a lot of things from there. We had a lot of things from Australia at some point. So we had quite nice prices, actually.

So it was kind of worth it to make the effort to do these three things in that order, in this row, and actually compete. Of course, it was men and females separate, yeah? So it was fun.

We had a lot of fun with that.

[Speaker 2]

And you must have seen a lot of world records, actually.

[Speaker 1]

Oh, massive, massive, yeah. I think both Herbert and Natalia did a lot of records in our competitions. We also did, for many years in a row, we always did the Russia National.

We arranged it for Natalia and Alexei, because obviously they train in Russia, and their open water spot is Dahab, yeah? So they always came here. So in May, almost every year, we were doing the Russian National.

Later, they did it in Sharm. But we did it for many years. I know one time, I’m really bad with

years now, but one time she specifically said, it has to be on this date.

Her birthday is in May, beginning of May, somewhere. Really bad now, but I don’t remember the date. But she wanted the competition to be on her birthday, because that was her 50th birthday.

And she intended to do a world record. And she wanted to show the woman power, like we can do it as women, we can do it when we’re older. So, and she did, of course she did.

She always did a world record. She entered the water. There was no fin record at the time, yeah.

So we used to do it for them a lot, yeah. [Speaker 2]

Do you still follow the freediving competitions and the world championships and things like that?

[Speaker 1]

No, not really. I mean, since I stopped competing, which is many years ago, I don’t know. And then it was a smaller community and you knew the people.

It was fun, you knew the people. There was Martin Stepanek and Herbert Nitsch and all these people that you were training with and competing with, we all know each other. It didn’t matter if you were good or…

I think it’s similar now, but it didn’t matter so much if you were a 20-metre diver or a 100-metre diver. It was a community, you were sitting, discussing freediving with Herbert, even if you were a 20-metre diver. I don’t know, it changed a little bit, I think.

But it’s so many more people now. [Speaker 2]
Yeah, it’s huge now.
[Speaker 1]

And all the younger people that are in there, they’re really good now. They didn’t even know about how it was before. Nobody knows who I am anymore.

I was right up there and I was training with all these old, famous people.
[Speaker 2]
It’s all around the world, internationally, freediving has exploded hugely. And now maybe I’m

guessing that probably the biggest country in terms of like you, I mean, apart from China, the biggest country would be Taiwan in terms of just the number of young people who take up freediving. And then in terms of like places to go and train, the Philippines and Panglao is kind of exceptional now.

But that’s kind of what’s nice about, at least in my understanding, from what I’ve people that I’ve spoken to, is that you can still come to Dahab, you can still take that pickup truck to the Blue Hole. And you still chill with Ali. And you can have Alexi could be there.

And Stefan is there, who’s been there for years and years and years. And any number of the world’s elite freedivers, Alenka could be there. You know, anyone could be there and you’d sit down.

[Speaker 1]

And they have been here. Yeah, exactly.

[Speaker 2]

Easily have a coffee with them. And it’s just a normal everyday kind of life for freediving community. And I think it’s probably exceptional and special in the freediving world still, right?

[Speaker 1]

Probably. I mean, I don’t know. I mean, I’ve been in Panglao for sure, but you still, it’s not like, because Blue Hole is such a tight, small spot that it’s impossible not to meet the people when you’re there, right?

[Speaker 2]
It’s basically one room if you think about it. Sorry? It’s basically one room if you think about it. [Speaker 1]
Yeah, so it’s, I mean, yeah. And of course you need to be with Ali. I mean, Ali was there.

I mean, we did all our competitions there. I actually was sitting originally in a restaurant next to Ali. I mean, it was always where we were sitting because there was not so many other freedivers around, yeah?

But then we were doing the competition and this restaurant they were sitting was eventually the one looking the shittiest, you know? And we always put like a lot of flags and did a lot of decoration of the place for the competitions. And in the end, it’s like I told the guy, look, we’re having, and it was a bigger competition with a lot of people coming.

And I said, look, can you like fix up your restaurant a little bit? Like it’s sad that I will have the competition and I’m in the restaurant that looks the worst, you know? But he wasn’t interested

in doing that.

So I just swapped at the time and we did it in Aquamarina. Then I was never welcome to the other restaurant again. I don’t care because that’s how I, and then you Ali kind of before, but you know how it is there.

You kind of, well, now you don’t because everybody go to Ali. But if you went to one place and then suddenly you went to another place, they were pissed off with you. Like, it’s like you belong to a place, you know?

And it was really hard to try to choose different, to make everybody happy in the end. So it’s like, no, let’s just not do it. So I stayed with Ali because they were pissed off with me that I didn’t do the competition.

I said, well, then I don’t go there anymore. And Ali never had that attitude, yeah? And then he started doing, he did the courses with us and I always pushed him to like join the competitions.

And sometimes he was the starter before. So he learned so much about the freediving. And in the end, he’s a part of it very much.

[Speaker 2]

He is an exceptional person, honest, kind individual in Dahab. But also he’s kind of like one of the most, I would say he’s one of the most important people in the freediving community because he binds everyone together in that place. When you go there, it’s like a safe space.

You know that you’re getting looked after. Like you get a special kind of treatment from Ali. He’s working like minute by minute to give you this treatment, but also to take care of your food, to take care of your boy, to help you find something that’s lost, to give you equipment if you’ve forgotten to bring something.

[Speaker 1]

And for safety and rescue, he’s always been involved. It’s a little bit harder now when it’s further away from the entry point. But even then, like there’s the defibrillator, you have the oxygen, he will be on the spot.

If something happens, he knows. I don’t know how he knows, but he knows. He has a binocular.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, he’s literally watching the boys with binoculars.
[Speaker 1]
He is knowing what is happening in the water. And if there’s an accident, he will be standing by

the shore side or somebody from his place with oxygen and stuff, even if it’s farther away. But originally, he was the one who has the easiest, shortest entry.

And he was always involved in anything like that. You know, he would be the one that immediately you’re towing somebody back and he’s there with the oxygen. The car is prepared to go somewhere.

You don’t have to say anything. He knows and they just do it. So it’s a super important part of the freediving.

[Speaker 2]
Special thanks to Ali and Mohammed.
[Speaker 1]
I wanted to say, don’t forget Mohammed.
[Speaker 2]
Because he’s in the background a lot, but it wasn’t for him. [Speaker 1]

And he’s the main chef. So we all decide Ali being the person he is or Mohammed being the person and involved in the freediving and knowing they’re also actually doing great food and people love their food.

[Speaker 2]

It’s the best food in Dahab.

[Speaker 1]

And in general, it’s Mohammed who is the chef, the main chef, the cook.

[Speaker 2]

Yeah, I love those guys. And of course, Ali’s actually been a guest on the podcast. You’ll see in the bottom of the screen the number if you’re watching on YouTube.

Otherwise, just search for Ali Okab on the search in the website. So we’re on the rooftop of freedive.hab, which by the way, is like working out so well right now.

[Speaker 1]
It is. You have a little bit, but I’m still happily in the shade.

[Speaker 2]

It’s so cool. And we are surrounded. We’re in the thick of it here in Dahab, but it’s quiet.

It’s an amazing location. I did not step foot into freedive.hab for a year and a half until we first connected. And then I couldn’t believe when I came in because you have probably the best facility here for freediving as a freediving school and for freediving education in the town.

So tell us how you ended up here in this amazing location and what are you doing here?

[Speaker 1]

I’m running a freediving school. Well, this location, we moved to in the beginning of 2019. So obviously, I’ve been having freedive.hab since 2003. So we’re definitely the oldest school in Dahab.

[Speaker 2]

Remember you told me that you used to be in where Namaste was before and I couldn’t figure out which is that way, because now I see that they’ve also covered the outside. So you were in the back, in one of those rooms back there.

[Speaker 1]
No, no, no. Yes, okay. We were there for 10 years.

Before that, we were somewhere else. We started off being integrated in Scuba Centre, so in three different places. And then we decided…

[Speaker 2]

So you just moved from centre to centre?

[Speaker 1]

Yeah, we were in my husband’s centre and then that centre moved. So then we moved with the centre to another place. And then there was an issue with the other owner of the hotel there.

So it’s like, well, we don’t need you. We moved to another place. We, me and Linda, obviously.

And we moved to Reef 2000, Bedouin Moon. And we were there for a while because I was really… I needed a pool.

Like for me, I was a static person. I did a lot of static. I love static.

And for me, it has to be done in a pool. Until I started doing it in the sea. Now I think that’s much better.

But that was weird in the sea for me in the beginning. So it’s like, you have to have a pool. So we were in Bedouin Moon and then we decided like, okay, we actually don’t really need a Scuba Centre because in the end of the day, you’re always the one getting the classroom the last.

Or you didn’t really have much help from the centre. So we had good deals. You just pay the commission.

You paid per customer you had. So it’s nice. If you didn’t have customer, you didn’t have any expense.

So it was a big step when he decided to actually rent a place which had a fixed monthly expense. So we did. We rented two apartments in Asala, close to the beach, where we also had rooms for rent.

And that was the first centre as in our own centre. But we were there for maybe one, one and a half year. But it was not the best landlord.

We have a problem with the landlord. And we got really tired of dealing with taking care of the customers, the rooms. Like, oh, the water is not running or the gas is finished and cleaning.

Because Linda and I was doing everything ourselves still at the time. [Speaker 2]
Linda Paganelli, who was your partner.
[Speaker 1]

Yeah, well, still is my partner.
[Speaker 2]
Still is your partner. Also a guest on the podcast previously. I forget the number.
[Speaker 1]
But yeah, so we were like, that was the two of us. We did everything. We did all the courses.

We didn’t have any employees or anything. So we didn’t want to clean sheets and stuff anymore. And we figured it’s better to be somewhere where the people in the hub know where we are.

We were still kind of the only freediving centre. And that’s when we moved to where Namaste is now, which is right in front of the mosque.

[Speaker 2]
100 metres down the road here.

[Speaker 1]
So we started with two shops. There are four shops there. We started with two shops.

Is it four or three? Maybe we started with one and then we rented the second one. So we had two out of three shops.

And Namaste was in the third shop and we were in the two first shops. We did the whole roof outside, you know, to cover the sitting area. And then we rented, eventually, we did rent the two apartments upstairs and we started having rooms again to rent for people.

But now we had the cleaning person and we had the office person and then we had other instructors working. So it started becoming a bigger centre that we didn’t do all ourselves anymore.

[Speaker 2]

And then you came to here.

[Speaker 1]

So we were there for 10 years.

[Speaker 2]

Well, that’s such a long time. It’s like you were there and then you came to this amazing location, 100 metres down the road.

[Speaker 1]

Yes. So what we were looking for actually was we really wanted a swimming pool. Yeah, we really wanted to have our own swimming pool.

So we were looking and we had some different options where we were trying to find, you can find a place to build a swimming pool, but we wanted to find a place to bring the swimming pool and still not have to take a taxi to go to lighthouse. So we had to be in this area. And as you know, there’s not a lot of land left here to build a swimming pool and still be walking distance to the open water, right?

We found a place, we almost made a deal. It fell through for different reasons. And then suddenly this was free.

And this building is something I’ve been looking at for the last 15 years because it’s so cool. [Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]

You know, it used to be a Russian dive centre and it was closed. It was just with gates and a lock on it. And it says Crocodile Dive Centre.

And I never was inside, but there’s this palm trees inside and it just looked so cool. And it was just always empty. And at some point somebody opened the restaurant.

I think it started with a Korean, Korean trying to have Korean dive centre and restaurant. Of course it doesn’t work. And you can’t open a new dive centre in the hub.

It’s super difficult and restricted. So they were there for a couple of months or a year maximum. And then there was a Turkish thing.

They barely opened before they closed. So it kept being restaurants for a couple of times, but it never worked out. Yeah.

And then I just got to know that somebody said, oh, you know that that building is for rent now. And Linda is not here a lot anymore because we have our other school in Canary Islands. So she’s mainly there.

She lives there now. But she was here right at that time. So it’s like, cool, look, we need to go and see it.

So we made an appointment the next day to see it together. We went in, we look at it and we say, we take it. We take it.

[Speaker 2]

Yeah. So now you have this amazing location in the centre of the hub where you’re still teaching one of the main schools for teaching free diving courses in the hub. But you do SSI.

Yeah, we do SSI. [Speaker 1] Yeah.
[Speaker 2]

No, I like SSI. We did my first courses with SSI, with Victor, who’s also here for a long time. And I still have fond memories of doing my first two courses because I also became an SSI instructor.

It was my first instructor course. Yeah. Yeah.

I really like the place. It’s an amazing location. Really great option if you come to the hub and you want to do free diving courses.

All right. For the Patreon supporters, a million thank yous if you are supporting the podcast through Patreon. This bit is especially for you guys.

Lot thinks this is the main thing to freak out about somehow. I can’t even remember what the questions are. Find them.

This section of the podcast, Desert Island Questions, is a little addition we put on for the listening pleasure of the Patreon supporters. It’s about eight, nine questions. I ask the guests fun questions, things like, if you could take three books with you to a desert island, what would you be?

If you could only eat one meal for the rest of your life, what would it be? If you could meet one famous person from history, who would that be? Questions like this.

If you want to hear the answers, you can consider supporting the show and supporting me on this free diving journey by going to patreon.com slash freedivecafe. Okay. Thank you.

Answering the Desert Island Questions, wasn’t that hard? [Speaker 1]
Well, I didn’t have very good answers. I said, I don’t know. [Speaker 2]

Just a couple of questions before we finish up. I have the classic question that we always ask, but since we focus a lot on Dahab in this interview, do you still love Dahab? You still like it here?

[Speaker 1]

Yes, I do like it here. I think otherwise I would probably have left. I don’t know why I moved here first, which was partially free diving, but mainly not.

We were planning that already before. I wasn’t sure I was going to start a free diving school when we moved here. Because here, the lifestyle, it was so nice to be away from the commerce, from the, we need to buy, we need to have, we need to, we are this, what do you call it in English?

This wheel, the rat is running in a wheel thing because while you go to work, you work every day to pay the rent to live, to work, to, I don’t know, like, you know, everything is expensive. We need to buy nice things. And when you go on vacation, you need to go and explore all the nice restaurants and buy a lot of souvenirs and stuff.

And here you came, it’s like, the restaurant sucks. So you eat to eat, not to be fancy, just because you need to put food in the belly. There’s absolutely nothing you want to buy.

Nothing. It doesn’t matter what you wear.

[Speaker 2]

Bedouin carpets. You can only have so many Bedouin carpets.

[Speaker 1]

Ah, yeah. And it’s like, it doesn’t matter what you’re wearing. You don’t have to dress up for anything.

You can go to the restaurant for breakfast and you’re still there for dinner. You know, you just keep hanging out. And there’s like, that thing of just letting go of all this commerce was for me like, this is the perfect vacation, right?

This is what made me fall in love with this place. Of course, that’s not how I live here, right? Then you come here, you live, you start working and you’re doing the same as home, but still not because it’s still my hours, my time.

I know when I work or not work and you can decide yourself in a different way. I don’t know. I’ve been here for so long now.

Sometimes I’m thinking if I ever went home and got the real job, normal job, it’s like, could I even do that? Could I be somewhere for eight hours, five days a week on somebody else’s terms of hours? I don’t even know, you know?

[Speaker 2]

No, no, no. I mean, every place is what you make of it and you might end up, for some reason, you could have to go back and you could have to do that kind of thing, but in which case it’s your responsibility to make that reality the best reality that you can make it. I think what appeals to a lot of people about Dahab is that even though those of us who choose to live here still have to make a living and still have to be part of some kind of rat race, in a sense, we kind of do it on our own terms and we can be as involved in it or separated from it as much as we can.

It’s quite simple here. It’s quite a simple life. It’s pretty straightforward. We still have immediate access to the sea and to the desert.
[Speaker 1]

It’s still quite cheap living, even if it got much, much, much more expensive than it used to be, especially rents. But yeah, I mean, I’m from Sweden. It’s not like, I mean, here you don’t need heating.

I mean, you need food and water and shelter, right? [Speaker 2]

To survive.

[Speaker 1]

And that’s easier here than in a cold country.

[Speaker 2]

So affordable. I went to, I was just in Greece, you know, two weeks ago, three weeks ago. And that was my first time in Europe.

I realised for 12 years. Oh, wow. And Greece is a cheap country in Europe.

And fuck man, when I went into the supermarkets, I was like, I don’t know how I would survive here because it’s expensive compared to here. I can get vegetables for, you know, for the week here for two or three euros. You know, it’s insane.

Finally, last question. Why do you freedive, Lotta? [Speaker 1]
Do I?
[Speaker 2]

Why did you freedive? No, I mean, like you still have, you know, it’s a big part of your life.

[Speaker 1]

I’m still very passionate about it for sure. Unfortunately, I don’t do it as much myself anymore.

[Speaker 2]

What is the deeper meaning of freediving for you?

[Speaker 1]

But I know why I fell in love with it originally for sure. Like for me, it was just an absolute peace of mind experience. Yeah, even the static.

I fell in love with static, but even depth, you know, like you, there is something I think is the MDR really that just alters your mind. It calms you down so much that you feel so peaceful. And I think having this running brain all the time that we have that just like, I love FRCs.

That kicks in the MDR even stronger, I think. So I could just go FRCs and you come up with this ridiculous smile. It’s like one more, one more.

It’s like a drug. Yeah, so it’s just so peaceful, like mentally. I don’t know, like it put me in a state

with nothing else ever managed to put me in, you know, in relaxation state, right?

People ask like, how do you meditate? How do you manage to relax for your statics and stuff? That’s what makes me relax.

I don’t need to, you know, I can’t meditate. Like that is the meditation. You know, the free diving or the static is the meditation, the breathe up and everything, you know, that’s the thing.

Like I think it’s beneficial for anybody in life, you know.

[Speaker 2]

So that was Lotte Eriksson. Really about time that I interviewed her and a lot of people will be looking forward to listening to that one. Really a nice overview of DAHB, its history in free diving terms and what it’s like to live here now.

And of course, I live here, there. So it’s definitely a place that I’ve chosen and I love. And it’s a very unique place and it’s a little bit rough around the edges.

But once you come, a lot of people will be so charmed that they just can’t leave. And that’s the way I feel about it. It’s a pretty special place.

Amazing if you want to be training free diving. All right, keep up to date with me on Instagram at freedivingthrive. If you want to get in touch, then email me.

You can message me on Instagram. You can email me donnie at freediveandthrive.com. And just for those of you who made it to the very end of the interview, a little teaser here.

The next episode will be coming out in about 10 days. That is going to be the interview that I just did yesterday with Heike Schwertner, who is the new world record holder in static apnea in Ida, having beaten Natalia Molchanova’s static record that was standing for 11 years. So if you want to hear about how an elite level static apnea does their thing, then stay tuned.

All right, dive safe.