The Trip Begins

After months of planning and obsessive reviewing and researching of websites, travel logs and reviews, we finally are on our way to the Maldives!

I will spare you all the typically groaning about flying out of India except these two nibblets.  First, Indians have a really hard time with row numbers.  Seriously, every flight within, into or out of India, 70% of the passengers needs directed to their row.  Finding a row is not rocket science – you look at the bold number on your ticket stub and match is to the brightly lit or boldly placed number above the row.  This task, though, always seems a bit too much for the Indians.

The second thing is a plea to Indian wives.  When your husband is leaving the house to catch a flight and he smells like a pair of old running shoes and rotten eggs, please, please tell him, march him back into the house and insist he bathes!  Every non-Indian, Airline passenger in the subcontinent will thank you.  There is simply something to be said for personal hygiene and a lot more to be said about the lack of it.  Being cooped up in a plane with 250 Indians stinking to high-hell is just not unfair, it’s torture. 

Anyway, Olga brought the repurposed White Flower Oil to rub under our noses thus replacing Indian BO with the soothing smell of menthol, eucalyptus and other medicinal fragrances and we settled back to watch Season 6 of Weeds!  It was not bliss, but it was as close as we were going to get.  It is amazing the simple high we now get from just leaving India.   

We arrived in Male, the capital of the Republic of the Maldives at around 12:30am after a brief transfer in Sri Lanka.  The airport is a simple terminal and apparently if you are not smuggling in pork or porn, you fly through customs pretty fast.  We were staying in Male for one night as the seaplanes on which we need to travel only flys in the daytime.  Our Male hotel, Traders, met us as we exited customs and whisked us to the hotel, not in the usual black Mercedes, but in a boat.

Since the Maldives are just a series of small, non-connected islands, each island has a function.  The airport, which seems to be a few islands land-filled together, sits about a 10-minute boat ride from the main island on which the city of Male resides.  It is a very cool arrangement.

Tired and hungry, we boarded the boat for our jaunt across the open ocean in the middle of the night.  We pulled up to a sea wall and were happily greeted by a woman from the hotel, confirming our identities and then easing us into a car for the 1-minute ride to the airport. 

The air was fresh, the people seemed efficient and we had left the BO ridden passengers somewhere in Sri Lanka.  All was right with the world!