Maldives Holiday Photos

Since Julie was working in the Maldives, I went out at the end of her 3 month stint to meet her, I started of by staying on the capital island of Male or a couple of days as Julie was still away on a field trip. Male is a place where tourists only tend to visit as a day trip to do some "local" shopping and visit the fish market. It is a bit of a mad place, so many people yet so little space. I had a good chance to explore and with it being the monsoon season I saw the inside of most of the back street shops.

After meeting Julie at the airport we chartered a local dhoni and crew to take us to Bandos. Bandos is one of the tourist islands close to  Male and as we found out had one of the best house reefs going. Unfortunately most of the coral was bleached but the marine life was superb.

We only snorkeled on Bandos  but spent many a happy hour hanging over the edge of the reef looking out into the blue, other things we saw included a whitetip reef shark, a manta ray, 3 baby blacktip reef sharks playing in the shallows but best though were the batfish who always seemed to be keeping an eye on you not bad considering we were only snorkeling.

After Bandos it was back to Male for a couple of days and then another boat off to Kani, which is north of Male by about 45mins in a speedboat. Kani was a contrast to Bandos, Bandos appeared to be a little run down and quiet, Kani was bigger and the snorkeling was not as good so I decided to learn to dive, Julie already could so she dived with us on our open water dives and another group when we were inside the reef edge. Most of the time from then on  was then taken up with lessons and homework !! 

However we now had beautiful weather as the rain had gone and taken the mosquitoes with it. The scuba diving was amazing and we did all the local dive sites we could but the view from the bar took some beating. At night the sharks would come close into the shore to feed, you could sit there sipping cocktails just watching them hunt.......superb. After a week I was a qualified diver and unfortunately it was time to leave. So it was back to the airport for the long flight home to Gatwick.

The Maldives is without doubt one of the most beautiful places in the world, and may well have to be visited again !!!

This page was last updated on the 25 April 2005