Maldives 2024
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The biosphere as we know it is ending and I’m spending two weeks in
the Maldives with my wife for her 50th birthday. I feel conflicted.
The trip to get here was long. Zurich Doha by plane, Doha Male by
plane, Male Kurudu by water-plane, Kurudu Komandoo by speedboat. I
felt like sleeping for 20h when we finally got here. And all the
anxiety before leaving was terrible, too.
With that, I think we have all out must-see locations before the end.
We went to the Great Barrier Reef in 2017, to the Galapagos in 2020
and now to the Maldives.
#Pictures #Maldives #Maldives
2024-04-06. The last leg of the journey – our water-plane was delayed
because of the bad weather.
Looking out from the porch the ocean is blue, the sky is blue and the
reef begins a few meters in.
We go snorkeling every day. Our last two trips showed me that we need
an underwater camera. Oh to have videos of Reef Number Nine in
Australia or the penguins and sea lions in the Galapagos! I bought a
GoPro Hero 10 before we left.
This cowtail stingray (?) we keep seeing is about 2m long and likes to
hide in the sand.
There’s sea grass sprouting right now and sea turtles grazing.
Black tipped reef sharks… harmless! At a later point we did see it
attack something hidden in the rocks and it was scary to see!
Most corals look dreary! It’s certainly not as colourful and busy as
in Australia or the Galapagos. This purple giant is cool, though.
There are still plenty of colourful fish.
Whenever we’re away on a trip, we play games. The most popular
tropical island game is Race for the Galaxy.
Yesterday we also played Petition by @klaatu@mastodon.xyz.
2024-04-10. More pictures.
We saw our first hermit crabs in Costa Rica where we spent our honey
moon. We love these little ones. Maybe because they’re slow and easily
scared and therefore obviously harmless.
The parrot fish have super sharp teeth and gnaw on the corals. And
when you’re snorkeling, you can hear them. Kchrrr! Kchhhrrk!
I also love those lone corals harbouring a small school of tiny
fearful fish that retreat and hide in the coral as somebody
approaches.
When you swim past the nearby reef the bottom drops out and the deep
blue begins. I am always afraid some huge fish will show up.
There is a strange tourism industry, here. The islands are either
uninhabited, inhabited by locals, or reserved for tourism. Tourists
can stay on the “local islands” since 2007. Natives are only allowed
to work on the tourist islands.
The capital city is one of the densest urban areas on the planet.
Just look at the image of Malé on Wikipedia.
I would lament this urban sprawl, the land reclamation, the garbage
problem, the democracy deficit, the dependence on tourism – but I know
what my friend Peter would say, pointing at the Factfulness book.
Check out these stats from the German Wikipedia page on the Maldives:
In 2020, the Maldives had 541000 inhabitants. In 1950, they had about
74000 inhabitants. At the time, a woman had about 7.5 children on
average in 1980 but these days they are so much better off that the
growth rate has dropped to 1.8% in 2020 and a woman has about 1.8
children on average. Life expectancy rose from 34.5 years in 1950 to
81 for women and 77.8 for men in 2020. An amazing improvement from the
point of view of the locals.
From my green perspective, though… let’s not forget the garbage island
Thilafushi. The picked an island and use it as a garbage dump because
they don't know what to do with all the garbage. Sure, every island
needs a garbage incinerator now, but in the nineties, there was just
garbage and it had to go somewhere. And some of the stuff starts
leaking. It accumulates in the the fish. People eat the fish. It's
easy to feel grim about this. I need to remind myself that life
expectancy was less than 35 years just a generation or two ago (I was
born in the seventies). Poverty is much, much worse than pollution and
we tend to forget it.
If you’re wondering why I’m basically skimming, reading and finally
summarizing Wikipedia articles on my blog, I guess the answer is that
this is how I try to deal with it all. To not close my eyes. Not to
look away.
2024-04-12. Bad luck for Claudia. Yesterday, late at night, she stuck
her small toe in a gap between two planks, took another step, nearly
fell and twisted her foot. There’s a huge dark bruise on its back and
a significant dark bruise below. No more fins, for a while. 😭
We had signed up for a snorkel safari when suddenly the buzz was that
the young humpback whale they had seen two days ago was still around
and so the ship picked up some extra passengers and Claudia came along
to do some whale watching.
The whale watching did not disappoint.
This adolescent humpback whale was about 8m long. It’s unusual to
find a whales here, now, so close to the reef, so young, without its
family. There was speculation that it might be waiting for its family
to pick it up again, or that perhaps it was sick.
2024-04-13. Today it is raining. Good for Claudia since she is
supposed to rest her foot.
2024-04-21. After snorkling with the whale, not much seemed to be
worth posting about.
Before going on this trip, I bought an older GoPro HERO 10. Now I have
a few gigabytes of reef snorkeling footage. I don't know what to do
with it. Post it? Unlikely! It takes too much space and nobody would
look at it. Donate it to YouTube? Unlikely! Upload it to some Peertube
instance and thereby offload the cost? Unlikely.
Regarding the economy of the Maldives and the shock when I learned
about the garbage island and my dismay when I saw the skyline of Malé
island – when we flew back, I got a closer look at Malé from the air
as we landed and while it wasn't an island nature paradise, it was
just a city with nice, tall buildings and roads and palm trees and
construction sites and glass fronts and cars and motorcycles. In other
words, it seemed like a perfectly normal city and it wasn't shabby and
it didn't have slums and so I keep coming back to the main issue:
Beating poverty is of ultimate importance in order to improve people's
lives and giving them options so that they can work on the problems
they care about. When we flew over Thilafushi, the garbage island
didn't look "apocalyptic" but just like some industrial zone elsewhere
in the world, except it's an island in the middle of the ocean.
2024-04-24. Ugh. Seems like Claudia broke her foot, after all. 😰
2024-04-26. It’s amazing how humans can walk around with a broken
mid-foot bone. My wife is a space orc and we’re on the way to see a
specialist since this happened on April 11 and the bone has shifted
and is probably mending in the wrong position. 🤮
Relief! Both the conservative treatment boss doctor and the surgeon
boss doctor looked at it and decided that there is nothing left to do.
A carbon sole into the shoe to help immobilize the foot and that’s it.
The foot is already mending, it’s already much better. No long walks
and no stairs, they say. She's good to go.
There's an x-ray in two weeks just to make sure that it all mends.
The human body is amazing.
For reference:
* "More seriously, humans do have a number of advantages even among
Terrestrial life. Our endurance, shock resistance, and ability to
recover from injury is absurdly high compared to almost any other
animal. … In essence, we’d be Space Orcs."
* "It’s even a little weird that just existing in the same place as
them for long enough seems to make them care about you. But if
you’re hurt, if you’re trapped, if you need someone to fetch help?
You really want a human."