Try to find The Maldives on a map. Go on, I dare you. I doesn’t matter which map you choose, or how adept you are with your geography, you’re not likely to find something that looks bigger than a smudge or a few grains of sand.
Even if you’re on a plane directly overhead, the place barely emerges above the surface of the Indian Ocean. Instead, what you’ll find are a series of circular aquamarine halos, like enormous turtles, with the top of a shell or a head breaking the unending expanse of velvet water.
There are 1192 islands that make up the country, none of which rise higher than 8 feet. It is the country with the lowest high spot in the world, and the flattest nation on the planet, so you’ll be forgiven if you’ve overlooked it your entire life.
I think there are good places to have a birthday and bad places to have your birthday. I would say sitting behind a desk on a Wednesday in November, meeting unenthused friends at the bar for a token free beer is one of the bad places. The Maldives on the other hand…
I knew it would be an all-star day the moment the dive master said the words “shark dive” at our briefing. It almost felt like this one was hand picked for me, especially since I prefer my hobbies to have an element of “you might die doing this” and breathing underwater at 90 feet in a strong current with 8 foot sharks nearby meets that criteria. But as I would discover, they didn’t just swim by occasionally – they patrolled at eye level, cruising back and forth a few feet away, as if looking for a stray arm from an unsuspecting diver.
Bookending the day, we watched the sunset from one of the many uninhabited Maldivian islands. Unlike the dozens of quintessential desert island castaway sandbars we’d seen, this one was “developed” in that it had a few trees and a covered picnic bench constructed for dive boat barbeques. The crew was kind enough to bake a cake shaped like a whale shark, and light the words “Happy B-Day” in flame on the sand with the “B” staying lit just long enough for a photo op. They could have saved the fuel however, because nature had a better idea in mind when she sent up a full moon a few minutes later.
Amanda and I slept on the top deck of our live-aboard that night, and I woke up more than once thinking the bright of the moon was daylight. And as if to top it all off, a lone dolphin circled our boat, saying, “Whirr-clickk-click-reech” which (in case you don’t speak dolphin) roughly translates to, “Good luck topping this one, pal.”
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