Male Atoll - The End

Local boats.

Our boat crew with Aman.

Goodbye to our home for the last week.

Shuttled back to the mainland.

Thursday, February 22^nd.

We were up at 7:30 had breakfast and then packed up. We sat up on the bow as we sailed for about an hour back to the airport island. When we arrived Aman took us to the Maldavian Bank so that we could withdraw funds to pay for our bar tab, the tip for Aman and to pay back Elena who had paid for both John and my tips to the boat crew. Problem was the ATM at the bank said both my debit and VISA card were not honoured, and neither were John’s. So, John gave Tom some British Pounds in exchange for $US so that we could pay back Elena as she needed the $US to pay for scuba diving she is doing tomorrow. But we had no money to pay Aman his tip or repay the bar bills that he had paid for us. He finally found a solution: his company Voyage Travel had a booth at the airport and they tried to swipe my two cards with no success and then managed to swipe John’s and finally we were able to settle with him. We said goodbye to Aman and headed off into the airport. We had four hours to kill and John had spotted a ‘Wellness Clinic’ and fancied a back and neck massage, so we went in. We booked two massages and would only take Mastercard as payment. He tried his but couldn’t remember the pin and got locked out. So I used my Mastercard which luckily worked. They gave us a coffee and then a massage side by side in massage chairs. After that we hung around in the clinic for a bit as it was nicely air conditioned.

Later we went in and checked in and headed to the lounge, as again Denise has booked us business class flights to Colombo and then on to Chennai, India. We had an okay lunch in the lounge and worked on our computers until flight time at 3:00. The flight to Colombo was very comfortable, but only an hour long. When we arrived there, we went to the Serendip business lounge where we were last week. As soon as we walked in the lady told us our flight was delayed until 11:40 – six hours! On the flight I had said to John that it was too bad that we only had about a half hour in the next lounge, and we’d better hurry in order to take advantage of the food and drink. Now we had lots of time.

We also had internet and I managed to contact Denise to tell her about the delay and she told me that she had booked us the business flights because at the time they were the same price or cheaper than economy. I told her we were very happy to have business class now and a place to comfortably hang out. She gave us a number to call Intrepid and inform them as we had a pick up booked. They assured us they would be there when we arrived.

So, we e-mailed, typed, ate, drank and enjoyed our time. When we boarded the flight we found we were on an older plane with less comfortable seating, and we definitely didn’t want a meal.

We arrived in Chennai, India about 1:30 am. We lined up for a half hour in the wrong line before we were told to go the the eVisa line. We had assumed that that was for people who were applying on arrival and since we already had one… but we were only partly wrong. It was for both people who had it and people who were applying on the spot (which took much longer and held up the queue). We were there for well over an hour and didn’t exit the luggage area until at least 3:00. But, our Intrepid driver was there! He drove us along the series of highways at breakneck speed as if we were being pursued by immigration police for my lying that I had never been to India before (I was told by the Indian embassy in Australia to tell that lie when I was applying for the eVisa, because I could not tell them my previous visa number as it was in my old passport back in Canada). We raced around and through any traffic with horn blowing and when we got onto city streets we used lanes indiscriminately narrowly missing everything. However, we arrived safely at the Pride Hotel and checked and headed straight to bed at about 4:00, after leaving a 9:00am wake up call so we wouldn’t miss breakfast.