BLOG: It's an underwater jungle at the Maldive Islands ( with PHOTOS )

After spending a short week in the States, I returned to Zanzibar for a couple days of diving to test out equilibrium problems in my ears before committing to some intense diving in the Maldives, an archipel-ago nation located in the Indian Ocean south of India. Not having any problems, we decided to go on.

Diving in the Maldives has been a dream of mine since a man told me about it when I was visiting St. Lucia a few years ago. He claimed it was the best diving in the world and likened it to an underwater Serengeti. I would have to agree and would encourage any diver to make his or her way there at some point. I have seen better visibility and reefs, but you cannot beat the Maldives for the amount and size of the creatures there.

We flew into Male, the capital, but because the islands are so small they had to locate the airport on its own island about a mile away from the city. The city itself could not be more than two miles wide, but a third of the population lives there (100,000 people) making this small place seem like a mini-Manhattan. Anyway, we were fortunate enough to get on a live-aboard dive boat the same day we arrived and trav-eled to the South Male Atoll before heading west over the sea to the Ari Atoll.

We made a home out of our boat, the Ummeedh 5 (which Ian and I referred to as the Humdinger 5 be-cause we could not remember its name), for the next five days with five Spaniards on vacation doing three dives a day and visiting a new place for nearly every dive. Living on the boat was actually a step up from our normal accommodations even though it was a little cramped. Unlike most of the places we stayed, we had clean sheets, our own bathroom, air-conditioning, warm water showers, and a mirror. I felt that we were living pretty high class at the time.

We began our first dives on the western edge of the Male Atoll the day after we arrived. I was actually a little disappointed with the diving at first because I was expecting a swimming pool with incredible corals and fish everywhere. While the visibility was rarely if ever less than 60 feet, there was a lot of plankton in the water that made it seem less and the corals were not as alive as Zanzibar or Belize. How-ever, as the diving continued, my opinions changed because sea turtles, eagle rays, eels, white tipped reef sharks and Napoleon fish (an enormous wrasse that is somewhat shaped like Napoleon's hat) were seen on nearly every dive, and then we would see 4-foot, 100 pound or more groupers everywhere with nearly 6-foot long yellow fin tuna racing past us in the deep water.

The excitement was not just reserved to being in the water. While cruising on the boat from reef to reef, we watched flying fish glide alongside our boat, regularly passed pods of dolphins that had to num-ber around 30 doing jumps and flips, and we even had a sailfish give us a show jumping wildly just off the back of our boat one day. However, the highlight was swimming alongside two of the biggest creatures in the sea. The first creature we briefly got to swim with was a whale shark. It had to have been 20 feet or more in length and was incredibly wide. We did not get to spend much time with it because it was moving at a pretty fast rate against the current, but seeing its large, vague outline coming into visibility quickly toward me definitely made my heart race even though I know this enormous creature only eats plankton.
The next highlight occurred the same day as the whale shark, which was seeing giant manta rays. We dove at a place appropriately named Manta Point, where these animals are not always seen but are seen on a more regular basis than anywhere else, and we were lucky enough to see four of them fairly close at different times throughout the dive. I believe the smallest one was not less than 8 feet across with the largest one being nearly 12 feet across. They looked really odd to me, but they gracefully seem to fly through the water and are like the giant pterodactyls of the sea.

Over the course of the trip, we eventually spoke enough Spanglish to become friends with the Span-iards onboard our boat. However, their trip was not as worry-free as ours, and before we arrived they had already spent two days stranded in the harbor because the agency they booked with put them on a differ-ent boat than they signed up for and that boat did not work, so they were then moved to the Ummeedh with Ian and me. Luckily, the dive trip ended up OK even though they missed a few dives, and I got to practice a little Spanish-English translation by helping them write their police report complaint in Eng-lish. I hope everything worked out well for them, and now Ian and I have another week to spend in Male before we fly on to New Delhi, India, so we will probably spend a little time in the city before trying one of the island resorts for a day or two.

Till next time, Cheers.

Matthew McGee can be reached at mcgeemn@hotmail.com. Browse www.offexploring.com/mattmcgee or www.myspace.com/mcgeemn . McGee and friend Ian Cotton are hiking around the world.