The Maledives – eini, obi, ummi, auffi, aussi

The Maledives are the epitome of dream islands, with white beaches, green palms, and turquoise water. The ring reefs are a fantastic destination for scuba diving. And the resorts are known for great food, barefoot and car free holidays. So many good reasons to spend our last days of our great journey there.

We arrived in the evening, so had to spend one night in Hulumale, in a reasonable priced and convenient hotel close to the airport. They were also so kind to call our first resort after our arrival to ask when the transfer to the Baa Atoll would take place the next morning. It was planned for late morning, so quite convenient, but they could have informed us on their own initiative. Nobody is perfect and we were at the airport well on time to catch the small plane for the short trip to main airport of the Baa Atoll, from where it was another 30 minutes by speedboat to the Reethi Beach Resort. It is not the most fancy or new resort, but it is located on a beautiful island where you feel like walking through a botanic garden.

Anyhow, we had chosen to spend a few days at Baa Atoll for one main reason: Hanifaru Bay. This place is famous for the agglomeration of Manta Rays during the month May/June till November. In that season a huge number of plankton is pressed into a kind of underwater funnel and at the peak times some 100-200 manta rays are gathering in the bay to feed in huge groups on the mass of plankton. For this they are swimming in formation like the peloton at the Tour de France, profiting from the slip stream of the ones swimming before them, just not avoiding the wind, but getting the food flushed into their open mouths.

The diving center of the resort (run by the Ocean Fanatics) has organised a WhatsApp group, and once they get confirmation of the Maldives’ rangers protecting the bay, that a significant number of mantas are around, they organise a boat trip to the bay. Once you get the message, you have to rush to get to the boat and off you go. The speed boat has to slow down when it gets close to the bay, and then the whole group gets into the water to snorkel for a maximum of 45 minutes before the boat has to leave again.

We learned that there are more mantas the closer the full moon is (which was 4 days ahead), but we decided to do the tour at the first opportunity, to have a second chance if needed. We were lucky the first day, as we had two groups of estimated 30-40 mantas each cruising the bay just close to the surface. In our 45-minute slot we had the immense pleasure to encounter the groups very closely at least 4-5 times.

We have hardly ever experienced something more impressive in our whole life than to have 30-40 mantas floating below and around you with plane mouths in a row, swimming at times directly towards you just to move below you with an elegant move of their body in the last moment, some even touching you briefly. The rule is not to touch them, but they can touch you. You should also not swim actively in their way, but if they get close to you it is their choice. Just AWESOME !!

Scuba diving is no longer allowed in Hanifaru, but we did two dives close by at their cleaning stations, and we were lucky enough to encounter a few more there.

We also did a quite boring dive at the house reef during the day and a more exiting night dive. We were accompanied most of the night dive by a large sting ray, who seems to accompany divers every evening, not aggressive, but extremely obtrusive, so that we could hardly get close to any corals or rocks without the ray swimming in between. In addition, another ray, but also a nurse shark and a white tip shark as well as several jacks were hunting around us profiting from our lights. At one point of time our guide asked to switch off all lights and we could see the water around us glittering and sparkling in blue and green, and continued some minutes without any light. It would have been even more awesome if our friend, the sting ray, would have not bustled around us all the time.

After a few nights at Reethi Beach, we continued our journey to spend the remaining days in the South Ari Atoll at Vilamandhoo, and island and resort well known among scuba divers for many years. The trip there took longer than we had hoped for as the two resorts had not communicated well amongst each other, which was a bit annoying given the price you pay for the transfers. Anyway, in the early afternoon our sea plane landed in the waters just before Vilamendhoo and we very cordially welcomed. The island is not as beautiful as Reethi, but the resort as such was well maintained, the service outstanding, and the food marvelous.

South Ari Atoll is famous for its whale shark national park, so we booked the boat and diving trip there the first day. And, unbelievable, we were lucky again and detected (actually Claus did) a whale shark shortly before the second dive was about to start. As we were already geared up, we all jumped quickly into the water and were able to see the whale shark for a minute or so before it disappeared in the depths again. It was a quite young one, but still impressive with its 4-5 meters length (difficult to judge underwater).

Another day we joined the manta ray trip, as it was also manta season there at that time (not all of the estimated 1500 individuals go to Hanifaru). Again, we were lucky to see a few mantas at both dives, at the second dive it was just the two of us so we had one Manta just for us swimming several times around the cleaning station and close above us – just awesome. And in-between the two dives we had the pleasure to snorkel again with a group of six mantas who were feeding close to our boat. We could not ask for more ;-))

We also wanted to dive at the famous channels and “Thilas” (underwater coral hills). Here we were not as lucky as with the manta rays. We had to end some of our dives early because the current was so strong that we had trouble to find good spots to watch the many sharks – white tip, black tip, and grey reef sharks as well as tuna, jacks and other pelagics – who love to hunt in the currents.

But we also had some marvelous dives at various Thilas seeing plenty of sharks, turtles, napoleons, tuna, jacks and others, drift dives and a wreck. The funniest incident was with our main guide Ramiz. He was actually from Bangladesh, but a dive instructor in the Maldives for many years. He was the senior instructor of the dive center and took the briefings before each and every dive very serious.

However, when we had to change plans again because of the strong current at the Thila planned, we went to an easy dive site instead. And suddenly Ramiz told us that he could keep the briefing short and snappy: “Eini – obi – ummi – auffi – aussi” he said. It took us a few moments to digest that he had suddenly briefed us in Bavarian (or Austrian) dialect, and we could not stop laughing. He had learned that briefing from some fellow Tyrolean divers and we will always remember it well. (In English you could say: “In – Down – Around – Up – Out”, but in a slang or dialect version).

We also did two night dives on our own, giving us the chance to dive very slowly and enjoying all you can see when the night starts. All in all, Maldives was great for the big stuff, but not so abundant as regards nudis and critters, which we had found more in Indonesia and Philippines.

Besides diving we spent a lot of time reading at the beach under palms, swimming and snorkelling, and eating far too much delicious food, gaining back a kilo or two that we would have preferred to gain (and had avoided to do so in the last six months !!), but what can you do if you have a delicious buffet in front of you – at least we had not booked all-inclusive and kept the number of cocktails at a reasonable level.

And then it was time to say good-bye to the Maldives and to start the last leg of our trip around the world back to Brussels. We had still a nice morning at the pool before a sea plane brought us back to Male – the pilots again with flip-flops and barefoot as at the way there. We were the first to check-in for Doha (the first time we were the first), and had no problem to get our flight to Frankfurt were we arrived on time the next morning, as did our luggage.

Can you imagine that we took so many flights, bus and boat trips and had not had any significant delay during the whole trip – and our three suitcases always arrived on time with the same plane? We could not, but were more than happy that it happened like that.

In Frankfurt, our dear son Leon already waited for us which was a great pleasure to see him first when back. He drove us safely back to Brussels, but not without stopping in Aachen for an extensive shopping at the local Edeka supermarket and filling every free space in the car with bread, sausages, cheese and a lot of other food and consumer products that we had missed for the last six months. Leon had been so kind to already buy a beer crate of Augustiner Helles and Andechser Weißbier in Munich. Just awesome.

So we arrived with a hundred thousand fond memories, our son and plenty of food back in Brussels. Our house was in good order (thanks to Alexandre, Katarina and Max) and we quickly felt at home again.

It was a once in the life experience, but we were lucky enough that we had not had any perilous encounters or dramatic situations. We were very satisfied with our choice of countries and the itinerary had worked well.