Maldives


Giravaru Island	On Board a Dhoni	Waiting to Dive	Suface Interval	Eagle Ray
Maldives. The very word conjures up a vision of idylic lazy days on tiny, beautiful palm fringed Islands…….the reality is very close indeed. Our stay there took place in March 2000, on the Island of GIRAVARU in North Malé Atol. The very day we were due to fly out our travel agent telephoned to say our "Airline" had ceased trading and our holiday had to be cancelled, some frantic phone calls restored the holiday although we found ourselves in Sri Lanca for a short stay en route to the Maldives. The Maldives is a chain of tiny Coral Islands of which there are about 1200, stretching 750 miles North to South, 600 miles south west of Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon. Our Island resort of Giravaru is about about 20 minutes boat ride to the west of Malé, and we arrived there in the early hours of the morning in darkness. When we ventured out the following day it became clear that the Island was quite small, in the middle was a tennis court surounded on 3 sides by the acommodation chalets, the reception and restaurant completed the buildings on the Island. We found that you could walk around the Island in about 5 minutes, you could also snorkel round the Island in about 40 minutes. The dive operation there did not allow free house reef diving even though we had booked a 10 day dive package, the charge for a tank to dive the house reef was virtually the same as we had paid for a dive on our package, needles to say, we were not impressed.

Eagle Ray	Napoleon Wrasse	Turtle	Victory Wreck	Victory Wreck

We found the facilities to be lacking on the dive boats (dhonis), there was no facility to keep drinks cool, there was no water carried on the Dhonis or included in the dive costs, no toilet facilities or food on board even when we were out all day. This is not what we have found when diving at other resorts around the world, we were dissapointed by this. The reefs that we dived had all suffered from Coral bleaching a year or two before, this had been caused by the surface water temperature reaching 32ºC or 33ºC, causing the tiny organisms that give the reef its beautiful colour to die, while we were there I did notice the reef showing signs of coming back to life, I can only describe it like "the beginning of spring when the hedgerows in the UK slowly come to life and the buds start to come out". It must have been a fantastic sight to have seen these reefs in full bloom. We found the diving to be nothing to shout about, we actually spent 9 hours on a Dhoni one day while looking for Manta’s, it was late in the day and we all wanted to do our second dive, so we decided to get in even though we could not see them, we did our dive and it turned out to be fairly uneventful, those that did not dive and stayed on the Dhoni were adamant that after we descended the Manta’s appeared and they snorkel’d with them…….we shall never know! Would we go back ?………………we are not planning to as there are still so many places we would like to dive.

Photo Equipment	Nudibranches	Australia	Sipadan Island	Bali	Yap
Chuuk Lagoon	Florida	Maldives	Shark's	Fiji	Tenerife
Gibraltar	Papua New Guinea	Manado	Lembeh 2005	Seaventures	U.K. diving
Yucatan	Frog Fish	Moray Eel's	Egypt Red Sea	Lembeh KBR 2006	Cozumel