Maldivian ladies

Couple more photos for you. We had our leaving party with the guys from work on Friday, and they made us traditional Maldivian outfits to wear – had no idea how they would turn out since I’m not accustomed to wearing shiny green satin on a regular basis, but actually they were great and made us feel a bit like princesses! The girls we work with are so kind, and we had so much fun. And the outfits went down a storm around Male’ – the old guy who sits outside our apartment’s jaw hit the floor when we stepped out and then he couldn’t stop giggling, and we were nearly the cause of several motorbike accidents – we’re going to feel a bit pedestrian when we get back to London and no-one pays us the slightest bit of attention…

Eeee lovely weather for ducks

The torrential downpours of tropical rain bouncing off the roads, pouring off the roofs and collecting ankle-deep in the gutters have precipitated a trend amongst Maldivian men to crack out the plastic bags – small ones generally in a lovely shade of blue or pink – as tightly tied rain hats. I’m bemused as to how this helps since at the most it’s keeping their hair and maybe the tips of their ears dry. The ones without plastic headgear who’ve got somewhere to be ride around a flooded Male’ on scooters, tyres tread-free, holding up a massive golf umbrella in one hand and – “look no hands” – a cigarette in the other.

The rain also seem to have exponentially increased the number of lone shoes littering the street. Abandoned shoes – now is this purely a low/middle income country phenomenon – I’ve never seen one half of a pair of shoes abandoned in the gutter in the UK?

I begin to realise how deeply engrained my British-ness is when I have the urge to chirp “lovely weather we’re having” happily at people we pass sheltering under the eaves of the nearest shop to hide from the driving rain.

Underwater photography

Yesterday I did my underwater photograhy specialist dive, so here’s some photos of general underwater stuff taken by me and Andy (who is way ahead of Gemma and I and has already done underwater photography, deep dives, drift dives, navigation dives and a night dive and has as a result now completed his Advanced Open Water). Gemma and Andy did their Fish ID specialist dive at the same time so will be able to tell you what stuff we’ve taken photos of actually is! I just pointed and clicked… it’s harder than you’d think – the decreasing light available as you go down even just another metre, backscatter of the flash off the plankton and a moderate current meaning you can’t hold the camera still make for some… “interesting” shots – is that a fish or a rock?

Fish Food

So the Open Water is completed, and what a mission that was! Lots of fun but after the catalogue of errors that accompanied the rest of our diving experiences (ear infections, food poisoning, malfunctioning equipment and unseasonable lightning storms) it was only fitting that the last 2 open water dives last Friday were in the same vein.

Lessons learned:

Check all equipment carefully, and if there’s an option to operate anything manually, do that as a priority because there’s a high probability if you give a piece of equipment to Gemma or me that it will be broken in some small but vitally important way. This goes for regulator mouthpieces, dive computers, compasses, BCD inflator valves, and generally anything dive-related and important for general health and safety.

In fact, do not buddy Gemma or myself if you value peace and calm.

Do not ride out your required hour-long surface interval in between dives on the dive boat if you are at all prone to sea sickness. Unless of course you want to witness Gemma in full scuba gear (but minus a fin) retching over the side with a poor Maldivian guy holding onto her tank so she didn’t topple in, and me subsequently throwing up underwater in my regulator.

Nice.

We’re qualified divers now you know.

Newsflash

The new Mr and Mrs Cruise are apparently heading to the Maldives on their honeymoon after their star-studded Hollywood wedding in
Italy. We’ll keep an eye out for them hanging out down the local Agora supermarket in Male’ then…

…and a partridge in a pear tree

OK it’s not quite 12 days to Christmas, but seeing as it’s getting closer and there’s not going to be any Christmas cheer here cos of obvious Islam issues and the fact that it’s hot and very un-wintry, we’ve begun to sing Christmas songs at the top of our voices off the balcony and to compile a list of our own to chronicle the many sights, sounds and experiences of our time in the Maldives… hum along with us… on the 1^st day of Christmas, my true love gave to me….

· 1 Maldivian pop video shoot

· 1 office romance

· 1 white plastic chair (due to the lack of desk space at Care Society, there are a couple of white plastic garden-type chairs floating around the office, and whilst sitting on the WPC it seems you have the right to do absolutely nothing, fall asleep for a bit, chat, call all your mates, do a lot of giggling…)

· 1 emergency diving ascent by Gemma (and one large chunk of ancient coral dislodged in the process)

· 1 near sighting of a large shark (someone we were diving with saw it – does that count?)

· 1 incident with cup of coffee and an NHS laptop…

· 1 bout of interior design in the Care Society office

· 2 fast-disappearing Victoria sponge cakes and 4 million uneaten scones (note to self – Maldivians don’t like scones)

· 3 trips to hospital; 2 ear infections, countless tablets and mysterious potions, 1 bout of food poisoning and a fair amount of sea sickness, not to mention the general underlying queasiness of everyday life in a country with too much tuna and no vegetables

· 4 days in skanky cockroach infested (OK so there was one sighting but the rest were definitely lurking ready to pounce) Farivaa Inn until we decided we couldn’t stand it any more and moved into our lovely but very very messy apartment

· 4 tropical beach resorts

· 5 days of fasting, tropical ladybirds and dehydration for Gemma on an island down south during Eid

· 6 (at least) malfunctioning pieces of dive equipment so far… what’s a little air leak between friends? Malfunctioning dive computers? Ditto…

· 7 days – the amount of time Andy can stand the dirt before mopping the entire apartment floor, hooray for him

· 8 sea turtles and counting…

· 9 confined and open water dives

· 10 (at least) attempts at watching Finding Nemo on DVD – copied DVDs which are all you can get out here are all very well but they’re unpredictably compatible with NHS laptops, particularly laptops with a history of coffee abuse…

· 11 weeks to finish our PADI Open Water (shhhh all those of you who did yours in 4.5 days, don’t burst our bubble…)

· 12 red roses for Andy’s Maldivian lady friend

· 15 minutes to walk to work, so we take a taxi instead like proper Maldivians…

· 24 hours of ‘TwentyFour’ on DVD

· 28 degrees – the temperature of the water we’re diving in

· 35 giggling members of Care Society googling, msn-ing, playing solitaire and looking up baby pictures on the internet during work hours – they’re all great and we’re gonna miss them lots!

· A fair few G&Ts once we made friends with the right people… (i.e. the ones with a liquor licence)

· Many tonnes of tuna

· And lots and lots and lots of networking and general hanging out with a variety of weird and wonderful expats – footballers, aid workers, journalists, hoteliers, import/export magnates, yoga-ites, hippies…

So the days are ticking away and with just over a week to go that’s nearly it from the Maldives branch of the NHS – it’s very nearly goodbye to Male’ , Care Society, strategic plans and organisational development from Andy “I’ve got my routine” McMylor, Gemma “capsize much?” Lewis and myself, and hello to Sri Lanka and Thailand and backpacking…

Another day, another dive

Finished off our last PADI confined water dives yesterday afternoon after work (despite the early early start, finishing work at 2.30pm does mean that every day is like 2 days in one) in a mammoth session of underwater tasks. I can now so all sorts of useful things underwater that I hope never to have to do for real.

Setting off on the dive boat it was beautifully sunny but the ominous grey cloud on the horizon got blacker and blacker as we assembled our kit, until as we jumped in, fins on, in a giant stride off the side of the boat the rain started. Above the water it was nasty and cold, salty rain bouncing off the water into our faces, but below, cosy and cocooned. Looking up to the surface of the sea metres above, it was pitted with rain drops like the inside of one of those frosted glass doors, accompanied by the faint roar of the bucketing rain hitting the surface.

Diving hasn’t been nearly as scary as I thought it would be – my irrational fear of dark water and Something Generally Nasty approaching unseen from behind haven’t played a part at all. However yesterday I had my first real proper ‘get me out of here’ panic when Gemma and Simone our instructor were practising emergency swims to the surface whilst I waited on the bottom. It’s really not nice being at the bottom of the sea with no-one else around. Suddenly it seemed murkier, and having not thought about it at all before I was very aware of the limits of my vision through my mask to the water directly ahead of me, and the unseen 240 degree arc behind me containing who knows what. Really very eerie – not gonna repeat that in a hurry. Social diving all the way…

Occasional flashes that lit up the water told us there might be lightning but it didn’t concern us until we surfaced to find a full blown tropical storm with torrential rain bouncing off the sea making it hard to see the dive boat, loud rolling thunder and the dark sky lit up with lightening. Anyone know what happens if lightning strikes water when you’re in it???

Now it’s just some theory, an exam, and two more open water dives to go… nearly there!

Thieving mosquitoes

For some reason, I have suddenly become very attractive to mosquitoes. They are thieving my blood left right and centre and I am not impressed. And more than that, I am also hoping that I am not going to develop Dengue Fever any time soon, since Mubarak, Care Society’s unfortunate Bengali ‘Office Boy’, has come down with it and is now in hospital, where apparently they’ve got a fair few other cases too…

Not so snappy snaps

Not being up with the digital age I’ve got a couple of rolls of film developed and put onto CD to share with y’all in addition to the ones from Gemma’s digital camera. I’ve been sitting in front of the computer waiting for photos to upload for ages now, but anyhow, there should be a couple more photos up on the flickr site very soon…

Civil unrest and Jacuzzis

Rumours of a potential attempt by the opposition party to overthrow the government undercover of a planned demonstration on Friday (something to do with multi-party politics and upcoming elections or a referendum or something, though the girls in Care Society office are not the most political of beings and all have different ideas as to exactly what the point of the demonstration was) meant that we thought it probably wise to get out of Male’ for the last couple of days whilst all this was going on. Strangely we didn’t fancy hanging around to see if there was a coup or not, especially since Male’s kinda small so if there’s a demonstration of any sort it’s a bit hard to avoid being right in the middle of all the action (on a side point, the same is true if there’s a fight of any kind – don’t know if it’s just our part of town but we seem to get caught up in a fair few street brawls which stop traffic and involve the whole neighbourhood coming out to watch, intervene, advise, punch a policeman…). Rumours were also flying that all internal flights in and out of Male’ from the islands were cancelled by the government to avoid an influx of opposition supporters, boats in and out of Male’ were being searched, several foreign journalists had been deported last week for trying to take photos of stuff in the run up to demonstration kick off, and generally everyone was getting a bit jumpy. Best to get out of it all, and where better to run away to than across the sea to a tropical island? Unwillingly and under duress, obviously. So it was back to Meeru, our top resort so far. In fact, think we should get commission from Meeru since we spent all last week singing its praises amongst the expats and drumming up business, only to witness on arrival that everyone else was promptly upgraded to Jacuzzi Water Villas (yep, for the record, as nice and swanky as they sound) whilst we, the orchestrators of the jaunt, were in the same Standard Room as last week. All very nice but definitely not quite in the same league, resembling more a small holiday chalet than an executive suite with surround sound, espresso machine, private outdoor shower, sea view and a Jacuzzi sunk into the decking. Hrumph. Not sure how that happened… But despite being slightly green-eyed, and despite torrential downpours of rain (and therefore ‘sunbathing’ by the pool under large golf umbrellas) we’ve had a great weekend hanging out with Americans, Aussis, Kiwis, Spaniards, French, Laotians (is that what you call people from Laos…? Sounds a bit Biblical) and a couple of very British Brits (including a guy called Nigel who bore a striking resemblance to Colin Firth), all doing very different things out here in the Maldives and all with amazingly interesting backgrounds and stories to tell. We obviously fitted right in

After all that, turns out the demonstration was cancelled at the last minute by the opposition party due, they say, to the government’s promise to severely tackle any opposition with large amounts of force. Good good. Check out here for news items related to it. Male’ today is very quiet and peaceful, but who knows if there is anything still brooding under the surface…