On Christmas Eve 2009 Andy and I went to the Maldives. The main purpose was of course diving but also just to get away for a few weeks.
The first night we spent in Male, the main island/city. It was not a very exciting place. We decided to go have a beer and celebrate the holidays. When we were ordering the beers we realized that this is a non-alcoholic country… We did try the one “beer” they had, but I am not sure it was such a good idea. It was awful.
The next day we were picked up at the airport by the dive crew. The diving was done from a dhoni, a smaller boat which carried the diving equipment and compressors. It was big and comfy with a huge sun deck. The main boat, Sachika, was quite new and beautiful. The cabins were very roomy, comfortable dining room and bar and on the large sun deck there was a jacuzzi. And they had proper beer…
The diving was not fantastic but quite ok. There were lots of morays, puffer, sting rays, some white tips and the usual stuff.
The anemones had really nice colours.
The turtles were not very shy. On one dive we found a fairly rare zebra moray who happened to be next to an eating turtle. The turtle did not care that it all of a sudden was in the middle of a group of divers. It was simply munching away very relaxed.
But the one dive that made it all worth it was when this guy decided to swim by at our safety stop. It was a small whale shark, maybe 4 m long. Cute!
After the dive cruise we stayed on a tiny island, Dhiggiri, for a few days. It was basically the hotel with a beach around it. You could walk around the whole island in 5-10 min. Some people were to stay here for 2 weeks, we were quite happy with less than a week. It was a beautiful spot, really a paradise island. Very relaxing and calm.
There was a reef around the island and the snorkeling was good. The corals were not great, they were not great anywhere due to el Nino and the tsunami. But there were lots of fish to look at. They had a dive shop on the island so we went diving a couple of times. We did channel dives which had more or less current. We saw some shark, drifted along the reefs and played around on the sandy bottom. They were nice and relaxing dives, we had fun.
On our way back we had to stay one night in Qatar. We spent the afternoon walking from the “old” part of town where our hotel was to the finance district with the tall modern buildings. It was quite a long walk along the water front. This walk was probably longer than what we had moved all together the past two weeks.
Qatar was an interesting place. It was extremely clean and organized. Apparently they have the worlds largest export of gas and they are only 3 million inhabitants. They seem to be doing pretty well…