We had one quest for the day: to find a dive shop to take us out tomorrow. As far as we knew, there were two independently run dive shops in Male who target local customers. All the rest of the zillion dive shops are part of private hotels, and the word from fellow cruisers is that the private hotels do not want anyone who is not a hotel guest using their facilities

We took the ferry over to Male at about 0900. The plan was to go back to the Sea House for breakfast because they are a wi-fi hot spot. We could check e-mail while eating. Then we would set out in search of the dive shop and do some sight seeing.

We got off the ferry and headed upstairs. The restaurant was closed until 1330 (1:30 pm). We wandered down a very short and incredibly narrow road walking toward Relax Hotel, noticing that every business on the street was closed. We had heard the food at the hotel was good, and being a hotel, they would likely be open. The menu was huge, with lots of international choices. The food was OK and they didn’t have a wi-fi connection.

Once we were done eating, we set out to do some sightseeing. Male is different from any place we have ever been to before. The closest comparison we can come up with is a very old European town. The roads are paver stone. The main roads, such as the one the ferry terminal is on, can hold two cars. The side streets varied from being one and half cars wide, to one car, to barley wide enough for a scooter. Wider streets have narrow sidewalks along them. Narrow streets have no sidewalk. There are a zillion scooters everywhere. Just about every street is lined from end to end with parked scooters. The few cars on the road seemed to be mostly taxis.

The buildings are literally right on top of one another, with most sharing common walls. There are quite a few Continue reading →

The Maldives are made up of 26 atolls scattered over an area of 90,000 square kilometers, on and just north of the equator. As we had mentioned while in the Tuomotus, atolls were once larger islands that have slowly sunk over thousands of years. The lower points of the island are already underwater, leaving the higher points exposed as multiple small islands situated around a reef. There are 1190 of these smaller islands that make up the larger atolls in the Maldives. The population of the country is roughly 300,000, with about 130,000 living in the capital, Male.

It is believed to be first inhabited before 500BC by Sri Lankan and Southern Indians. Arab traders came through the Maldives en route to the Far East beginning in the 2nd century AD. The Maldives were called “The Money Isles” because they had a tremendous amount of cowrie shells used as international currency at the time. According to legend, in 1153 AD, a sea jinni (evil spirit) called Rannamaari demanded regular sacrifices of young virgin girls in Malé. Abu Al Barakat, a visiting North African Arab, took the place of a sacrificial virgin, and Continue reading →