One manic, sweaty August, we were attempting to ‘do’ Egypt in a week out of Luxor. We had just completed a double-night-train trip to Cairo and figured we could squeeze in the Red Sea before our flight home. We had hooked up with a young guide who had been amazing, arranging everything at Egyptian prices and even bribing our way into a new dig in the Valley of the Kings on the university dig team’s day off, with treasures in situ!

We were treating ourselves to a decent hotel in Hurghada to compensate for the rough nights on the Cairo train, and traveling in style in a beaten-up private taxi. At 5am, we stumbled bleary-eyed into the cab, and woke up somewhere in the desert, apparently in convoy with a stream of other tourist taxis. “Ees more safer”, said our driver, as I squinted to see the road ahead through the blowing sand.

What seemed like hours later, we emerged into the shocking modernity of Hurghada’s hotel district, and shuffled our sandy selves through the immaculate corridors of the Hilton to the dive shop. Half an hour later, we were boarding a big, noisy boat with experienced, certified divers from all over Europe. I knew I was out of my depth, but we were here now and there was nothing to be done!

Fortunately, the first reef in the gloriously blue water was a shallow one, and I could paddle along just below the surface to enjoy the garish display of corals, anemones and thousands upon thousands of small fish. I narrowly avoided a scary-looking lion fish and hurried back to the boat to steel myself for round two.

I was nervous about the next dive. It was a deeper dive – around 25m – and the centerpiece was a wall of coral descending into a trough. The whole idea of it made the claustrophobic in me jittery. Fortunately, I had some unlikely rescuers!

As the first of us hit the water, a pod of dolphins appeared out of nowhere and began to nose around the group, posing for photographs. They even appeared to be showing us to their shy calves. We chased each other around for what seemed like only a few minutes until people started checking their gauges. Sure enough, we’d been down there around half an hour and it was time to go.

Every diver dumped their tanks and grabbed their snorkels, and we swam around with the bottlenose dolphins for another half hour. Apparently bored now, the dolphins vanished as quickly as they’d arrived, and we climbed exhausted back onto our scruffy boat, the trough long forgotten.

Back on the beach, we barbecued anonymous snapper-like fish and cracked some awful Egyptian beers in celebration of our privileged encounter. We felt so lucky to have been ‘chosen’ by the dolphins, and in just a few short hours to have been introduced to a whole new world.