Rough seas

Galle (Sri Lanka) to Alifushi (Maldives) 

Overnight there had been a ferocious storm, water had even washed under the external door into our room. Fortunately though it had cleared by daybreak, and we collected by Sam one last time for the two hour drive to Colombo. 

We arrived at Colombo airport with plenty of time (as usual), checked in, then headed to the Lotus Lounge. It wasn't long before we were notified that our flight had been delayed by three hours, we think this may have been related to the storm.  As boring as the delay was, at least we had comfortable lounge access. Our flight finally left for the one hour trip to Male at 4.15pm, we were meant to be checked in and swimming by now!

We finally arrived at Male three hours late at 5.15pm and were met by a rep from our resort who tagged our bags, then gave us the bad news that we had to wait for others to arrive from other flights before we could take the boat to the resort, with an expected wait time of up to 90 minutes. The airport is right on the edge of an island, you just walk out of the airport and cross the road to get onto a boat. While we were waiting we could very dark clouds in the distance, and shortly afterwards day turned to night and there was a massive storm with torrential rain.

Just before 7pm we were told we could take the 15 minute speed boat ride to our resort. The seas were quite  rough and the boat had trouble docking so we had to walk to another spot.  We made it onto the boat with our luggage as the waves constantly slammed the sides. In the dark safety jackets were put over our heads with no explanation on how to fasten them, no safety check, in fact no words at all, just a paper sick bag pushed into our hands while we gripped the rails. 

We took off in the dark with massive waves and the boat crashing continually up and down, one poor lady was almost hysterical, it was a frightening trip that that lasted for 30 minutes, at one point they stopped the boat and told us to move to the back, we can see it would have been quite terrifying for someone who couldn't swim or wasn't used to speed boats. K had some ceramics in her cases so she was also worried about how they'd fared on the trip.

We finally pulled up to a jetty and were greeted by smiling helpful staff who informed us that this wasn't our island, as we couldn't dock there because of the weather. We were bundled into a jeep and we thought we were heading for another boat, but after about 10 minutes crossing a few bridges we reached our resort.

Arriving at night can be quite disorienting, we really had no idea where we were, but after a short orientation from the staff we were taken to our nice water villa. Once our luggage arrived we headed to the resort restaurant for the first (of many) nice buffet meals.