Category: Maldives

Diving the Maldives is all about seeing large animals – gray reef sharks, manta rays and whale sharks.  Finding the large animals – however – requires getting to the remote dive sites.  Enter the liveaboard: a boat where 12-24 divers cram together and basically live to dive for 7-14 days… that means, sleep, eat, dive, and repeat.

Since this was my first liveaboard, and since we had been significantly under budget for our trip, we decided to treat ourselves to the MV Orion.  The Orion is a newer boat that boasts an on-board hot tub (which – due to the gelatinous looking water – we did not use).  We opted for a shorter liveaboard – 7 nights.  The views were quite nice…

Off we go!

For each pre-dive briefing, the divemaster drew out a map of our dive site.

On the way to one of our dive sites, we followed a rainstorm… check out the funnel cloud!!

We averaged three dives a day and since we were on the hunt for the large guys, we had to endure some boring dives.  However, the great thing about diving on a liveaboard is that you’re bound to get lucky…

Check out the mantas.  We saw about 6 or so coming in to land at a cleaning station.

Mantas are rare to see in the wild, but what’s even rarer? The whale shark – one of the largest, if not THE largest, fish in the sea. We, along with about a dozen other liveaboard and day boats, hunted the waters in an area known to have them. Finally, a whale shark was spotted in shallow waters and the boat captain screamed at all of us to get in the water. It was a mad scramble of grabbing whatever equipment we could find and jumping very ungracefully in to the water.

The whale shark is similar to the manta in that it does not have teeth, it feeds on plankton. The whale shark we saw was a little guy – about 3-4 meters.

We also saw a few gray reef sharks.  Here’s one of the larger ones we saw…

This octopus was fascinating.  He was trying to find a new home and went from crevice to crevice and kept changing colors – almost flickering – like a neon light.  So cool!

Baby gray reef sharks sleeping under the table coral…

Fun fish…

But still our favorite… the turtle.

But, by far, these two were the strangest creatures of them all…

So what did we think about diving in the Maldives?  Hit or miss.  We were able to see some big animals, but it took lots of boring dives to find them.  The visibility was not as clear as we expected and the diving was quite challenging at times (rip roarin’ fast currents, washing machine currents).  But I loved diving on a liveaboard and am looking forward to the next one!

Check out all our photos here:

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And to see more mantas and whale sharks, click here:

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Total Miles Traveled: 49,655

As a child, I had one of those large spinning globes of the world – you know the ones, tilted to one side, with a raised surface you could run your fingers over when you felt the Himalayas or the Appalachians.  Well, the Maldives were always the farthest place I could find from Houston – exactly on the other side of the globe.  It was a game I had played many times growing up, and now, the little chain of islands – dots on the map – were only 4.5 hours by plane from Kuala Lumpur.  Lisa and I decided it was time to realize our fantasies.  This would be the one chance in our lifetimes that we could go.  And so we did.

So, what did we think?  Well, the Maldives are gorgeous.  There’s no doubt about that.  All the photos you see in travel magazines aren’t photoshopped – the scenery really is that beautiful, and some of the resorts probably are as idyllic as portrayed.

But…?

It’s also one of the most expensive countries we will ever visit in our lifetimes.  They have a captive audience – honeymooners, the rich, the newly minted rich e.g. the Chinese (and there were MANY of them), and many others from all over the world.  Let’s put it this way – the per night cost of a hotel room was 4 times more than I had ever paid.  In short, I didn’t think it was worth the hefty price.  I can think of many places that are very beautiful and for a fraction of the cost.  THAT SAID, we enjoyed it very much.

Here are a few photos from our resort, the Sheraton Full Moon.  Quite nice, but there are probably more secluded spots in the Maldives.

We stayed in a water bungalow – basically a cottage surrounded by/over the water .  The view from our deck:

… it had stairs that led down in to the ocean so you could go snorkeling.  Pretty nice.

Have a look at all of our photos from the Maldives:

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Next, we’ll report on the diving…