"A diving holiday is the perfect thing to do on your own."

What I was looking for was a place to go on my own, a place where I could feel relaxed. I found what I was looking for, along with a challenge, independence, some headspace and some new friends.

At first, Egypt didn't seem the ideal country for a woman traveling on her own. I came with some sense of trepidation. On a previous trip, it had sometimes been a difficult place to negotiate - and that was with a boyfriend. This time, I wanted to go on my own and had been told that Dahab, a town on the Gulf of Aqaba that had once been a high spot on the 1960s and 70s hippy trail, was laid-back and almost hassle-free.

This small Bedouin coastal resort seemed the perfect place for the solo traveler to chill out and dive. It was. Here I came across lots of people holidaying alone, mostly divers. Some had come to escape broken relationships, others to clear their heads and some simply to be down there with the fishes. For all of these things, diving is the way to go.

Hovering around 18m below the surface, playing with clownfish darting in and out of anemones is good for the soul. While diving, you think of little else but the ocean, the coral and fish around you and, most of all, your safety.

I had enrolled in an advanced diving course. I knew from my open-water course (the first rung on the dive ladder) that this involved a lot of time and a bit of study. But the point about learning to become an advanced diver is that you can go down deeper and feel more confident in your diving.

And a course keeps you busy, gives your holiday some structure, gets you meeting other people and helps you to appreciate the time you do have on your own.

I had no idea when I called the Bedouin Moon hotel to book my trip that there would be so many other people in the same boat (well, minibus, actually) as me. Some had come to learn to dive, others to be better divers, some simply to snorkel and hang out, and many had come alone.

Dahab is one of the Red Sea's oldest diving resorts and hosts some spectacular, as well as challenging, dive sites. Named after the Arabic word for gold, Dahab borders the Gulf of Aqaba, and is an hour's drive through spectacular desert from the airport at the more commercialized resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

There really is a different vibe in Dahab, particularly compared with the glitteriness of Sharm and the other Red Sea resort of Hurghada. There are banks of cushions and kelim rugs scattered everywhere and people lounge around a lot, playing backgammon or smoking hookah pipes.

The cafes almost hover over the water of the small bay - many are near the dive site called the Lighthouse and you can sit and sup while you watch people emerge from a night dive, their smiling faces tickled by phosphorescence or perhaps a Spanish dancer. The music is almost Ibiza chillout and we heard Bob Marley just once (only after my new friend Dorian and I jinxed it by saying how great it was that people had got over playing Marley here).

The local licensing laws make the town conducive to socializing.

After a few nights, the faces become familiar and you don't really lack for conversation. You don't find yourself worrying whether the reality of eating alone every night will eventually reduce you to tears.

By the end of my week, I had eaten with an Egyptian, a Bedouin, some Dutch, five girls from east London who had left husbands and babies behind, some Australian backpackers and Joselyn the welder and Wilma the nurse, two ageing hippies with a passion for life.

Most of these I had met at the Bedouin Moon hotel, a friendly, white-washed, traditional-style place dramatically fixed at the base of a mountain. It is ideal for the solo traveler because the single supplements are small - if indeed they charge you at all. Gilly, a gregarious South African who runs the place, organizes Bedouin dinners to bring the hotel guests together with some of the locals.

The rooms are simple, each with an interior dome designed to keep the place cool, and some have air conditioning at an extra cost. Mine had a balcony with a view of the mountains of Saudi Arabia; others faced directly on to the mountain behind the hotel, which burns red at sunset and is floodlit at night.

Attached to the hotel is the Reef 2000 dive club, a British-owned operation run to the highest standards of safety - you get fined every time you do something wrong, like leaving an oxygen tank standing upright ready to break someone's toe.

The instructors and dive masters are a friendly bunch who party with the guests. The manager, Ahmad, instills in almost everyone a love for Dahab, a place he says is "magical" and to which many guests return.

Reef offers courses and day trips that include a camel trek to the dive site of Gabr el Bint and boat trips out to less populated dive sites. They also run Bedouin nights in the mountains, with candles placed along ledges and crevices, a bright fire and whizzing flares as one of the divemasters juggles with fire and you lie back and watch the stars flicker in the Sinai night sky. One word of caution. Dahab is developing, although it may never reach the madness of Sharm. As you make your way out to the more distant dive sites such as the Canyon, or down to the southern oasis, you see rows and rows of half-built low-rise concrete buildings, the signs of expansion on a large scale.

As far as beaches are concerned, the majority are rocky and pretty barren but most have carpet-strewn cafes to make up for it. There is golden sand at a place called Golden Beach but a lot of the strip is occupied by the top hotels. Take a taxi to a restaurant called Baby Fish and lie on the loungers there.

The dive sites themselves make up for the lack of sand. Three of the best are the Canyon, the Bells and the Blue Hole. The Canyon, a deep crack in the reef, is roofed over by living coral but sunlight penetrates, making it a light dive with good visibility. You descend - head-first is better fun - to 30m and swim into a coral dome known as the fishbowl, which is filled with thousands of glass fish. You then ascend and swim back over the Canyon to catch your bubbles forcing their way through the seabed in straight columns reaching to the surface.

The Bells offers another headfirst entry through a narrow chimney and is full of overhangs and fissures, with many swim-throughs and cavelets. This dive is mostly combined with a swim along the reef wall, up over a saddle and into the famous Blue Hole.

A diving holiday is the perfect thing to do on your own, since by design you must always dive with a companion, or "buddy". With luck the buddy may turn into a friend. If not - hey, they can't talk to you underwater.