back from the deep

Yes it’s been several days without wifi so I’ll try to catch you up on how we got from there to here. From the land of Ghandi to Nemo’s front yard. After being mesmerized in Varanasi (I still can’t begin to describe it) we flew back to Delhi, had a brief dinner with Mindy and Roger, said our goodbyes as they got ready to head back to the states and went to bed to get up for a 6am flight to Male, Maldives. Where? The Maldives are a group of very small islands between Sri Lanka and Madagascar. Does that help? All anyone needs to know is that absolutely gorgeous tropical blue color water that you see in the brochures is all they have here. Absolutely fantastic.

We are here to scuba dive and it’s Marci’s very first dive since her certification earlier this year. After arriving in Male, the capital and only airport, we spend the night at a local hotel and arise early to meet up with the motor vessel Sea Queen, our home for the next four nights. Sea Queen has 11 guests aboard including us, plus a crew of two dive masters and five staff. We head out of the channel to our first spot for an easy make sure everyone is okay dive and we get “kitted up” as they say and jump into the water. After a minute of acclimation and adjustment, we make our first decent. Marci is a natural and also, it turns out, a very good luck charm. Within the first six minutes of our first dive I look to my left and there, swimming beside me, is a young whale shark about seven feet long. This is rare, remarkable and damn lucky! Whale sharks are gentle and harmless, they have no teeth and can grow quite large. This youngster is as cute as can be and we are ecstatic! Being a new diver and not a familiar with the local variety, Marci was not so impressed as she just assumed all the fish in the Maldives were this big! (by the way, it took our dive master 400 dives in the Maldives to see his first whale shark)

Unfortunately I did not have my camera with me but we went on to do several dives each day for four days. My underwater photo skills leave much to be desired so I apologize for these pictures but you get the idea. Marci did a fabulous job developing her skills and the group on the boat was full of characters, laughter, sea stories and all around fun. The two critters that one most wants to see here are whale sharks and manta rays. Thanks to our lucky charm, we saw both!

Today we said good bye to the Sea Queen and here we are for our last stop before we return home. A tropical paradise on stilts over the lagoon at the edge of forever. There won’t be much to show or tell over the next few days so I will bid you all a fond adieu with this post. Thank you to all who read, shared and posted with us during this incredible journey we have had. Next week is Thanksgiving and we’ll be back together with our children and will remember all the things that we are thankful for, including you, our friends.