Welcome to Paradise

I was at the airport with Robina.  We were queuing for our flight and talking about going back to work, returning to Melbourne in winter, how great Sri Lanka has been and thoroughly depressing ourselves when suddenly we were like ‘Hang on, why are we getting upset?  We’re not going home yet!’  We were actually on our way to the Maldives a place often referred to as Heaven on Earth.

In Male (ma-lee), the Maldivian capital, we met Robina’s friend Tegan at the airport and early the next morning the three of us boarded a seaplane to take us to our resort island.

Oh by the way, it’s Maldives like for ‘forgives’, not Maldives like ‘skydives’.

The flight was amazing.  Crystal clear waters in vibrant blues and greens washing over shallow reefs and dotted with small tropical islands.  From the plane I could actually see dolphins swimming and jumping out of the water! 

Arriving at our island we were greeted by welcome drums and a man saying ‘Welcome to Paradise’.  We were taken to our room where we discovered we had been upgraded from the garden villas to a beach villa.  The water was literally 10 feet from our doorstep and upon closer inspection I discovered that swimming up and down in the warm, shallow waters were baby reef sharks and stingrays.  We called our little reef shark Bruce Jr after the shark in Finding Nemo.  Our little Brucy was so cute, about 20cm long with a black tip on his little fin and he’d swim up and down past us all day. 

So we spent four days swimming and snorkelling, I went diving, we tried kayaking and spent a lot of time and effort on the all you can eat buffets for every meal.  We had the same couple of waiters every day and they were just lovely.  Each day we would have lunch and hang out chatting, having a tequila sunrise or two and the waiters would laugh at us as we left telling us that we’d been there so long it was already dinner time.

So at the end of our four days I left Robina and Tegan on the island (they were flying out that evening) and returned to the airport for my flight back to Colombo.  However, the one hour flight back took a little longer than expected.  After sitting on the tarmac for an hour and half while the pilot told us there were technical difficulties they were checking the pilot finally decided to do that old IT trick and turn it off and on again.  So we sat in the dark for 15 minutes before we were finally told to get back off the plane.

This was just the start of a 12 hour wait before I finally got a flight home.  Yep, that's no typo - 12 hours!  And that was hours and hours of not being told anything by the airline and just being made to sit in the tiniest airport in the world that doesn't even have any wifi.  Poor Sandy and Samadhi turned up at the airport in Colombo to pick me up and I wasn't there!  And you should have seen the look on Robina's face when they turned up for their 10pm flight and I was still there!  They had also been delayed, however it was their seaplane that got delayed and the poor things got stuck on the island for an extra 3 hours!