When it opened in 1986, the Camel Dive Club joined just a handful of pioneering Red Sea dive centers along Sharm El Sheikh's Na'ama Bay, a crescent of white sand on Egypt's Sinai Peninsula that forms the epicenter of one of the world's can't-miss diving destinations. And since that time, the Camel Club has evolved into a veritable attraction unto itself.

The four-star Camel Hotel—situated in the heart of Sharm's main tourist district, just a short walk from the beach and the

When it opened in 1986, the Camel Dive Club joined just a handful of pioneering Red Sea dive centers along Sharm El Sheikh's Na'ama Bay, a crescent of white sand on Egypt's Sinai Peninsula that forms the epicenter of one of the world's can't-miss diving destinations. And since that time, the Camel Club has evolved into a veritable attraction unto itself.

The four-star Camel Hotel—situated in the heart of Sharm's main tourist district, just a short walk from the beach and the dive boats—features 38 rooms built around the circumference of the courtyard and swimming pool. Each room has an en-suite bath, satellite TV, tea and coffee station, refrigerator, and room safe. Four restaurants/cafés serve Italian and Indian fare, along with burgers, sandwiches, and homemade Italian ice cream.

The dive resort's central gathering point, the Camel Bar, is undoubtedly the most famous and popular nightspot in all of Sharm El Sheikh. The place is packed every night of the week with dive tourists from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East who belly up to the bar with ex-pat dive guides, local Egyptian boat captains, and street merchants and listen to live music on the main floor or people watch from the rooftop, which overlooks Na'ama Bay's main drag.

During the day, diving reigns supreme. Camel Club's dive training center is both a five-star PADI IDC center and a TDI technical diving center, which means the multilingual instructors can teach everything from introductory lessons to advanced decompression and mixed-gas diving. Dive classes can be done right from the beach in Na'ama Bay, and the Camel Club runs boat trips every day of the week, which include a hearty lunch cooked fresh from the onboard galley. Local dives happen at any of the more than 30 reef and wall dives found just off Sharm's shoreline. Sites like Temple and Ras Um Sid boast Technicolor soft-coral reefs packed with the region's signature schools of anthias and flamboyant lionfish.

Camel also offers daily boat trips to explore the world-class reefs in the Straits of Tiran, where a spine of coral seamounts rises vertically from the purple-blue depths to create sheer walls of current-swept, coral-covered limestone formations that attract tropical reef fish and pelagic sharks alike. And no dive trip to Sharm would be complete without making the trek to the southern tip of the Sinai, where the historic wreck S.S. Thistlegorm still sits on the seafloor, filled to the brim with her lost cargo of Bedford trucks, motorcycles, munitions, and other supplies meant for Allied troops in North Africa during WWII.

Just up the coast from the Thistlegorm, the Ras Mohammed National Park is another can't-miss dive spot on Camel's roster. The anemone-draped walls of Shark Reef, which plunge vertically into thousands of feet of gin-clear water, are some of the richest and best preserved in the Gulf of Aqaba. Fast currents here allow divers to make heart-thumping drift dives, sometimes accompanied by behemoth manta rays and whale sharks.