South Male Atoll - Veli Reef

Beautiful tropical colours.

Chilling.

The island of Bodumohoraa.

 A hawksbill turtle.

The village of Bodumohoraa.

Tuesday, February 20th.

 We set sail this morning at 8:00 and headed to our first stop. We were headed into the wind. It took us a couple of hours to get there. We moored, got organized and into the runabout boat and they took us up a reef, so that we could float along with the current and the waves back to the boat. John and I just happily floated along. We saw a large number of beautiful fish again, some nice corals, but the highlight was a hawksbill turtle. We swam with it for a bit and it didn’t seem too perturbed by us. It looked at us through its bird like eye. I also saw a small eel about 30 cm long and pencil thin that seemed to have a head like a seahorse.

When we got back to the boat we set sail again. This time was a long trip to an inhabited island. As we were moving I watched schools of flying fish jumping out of the way of the boat. We had lunch on the boat just before we arrived. Three of the other people on this trip were going diving. Aman took them ashore and then he came back for us and we wandered around the island. It has a small village on it, complete with a school and a kindergarten, a mosque and a main street with numerous souvenir shops, most of which were closed. There was a lot of work being down around town. We weren’t sure if it was new construction or abandoned work after the tsunami. They were also building a large soccer field surrounded by a concrete wall. This seemed exceptionally large and over the top for such a small island, but I asked a worker and he said that people come from other islands. After wandering around for an hour and having a short swim on the beach the little boat came back and got us. 

John and I relaxed on top of the boat for the rest of the afternoon, dozing, reading, sleeping sunning and talking. We are both enjoying the books we are reading, me, I Contain Multitudes and John, The Short History of Nearly Everything. They have generated a few good conversations. Late in the afternoon the captain pointed out a small ray that was swimming by our boat.

After dinner, at 9:00, we all boarded the little boat to go to the island to see a culture drumming, dancing and singing performance. As it turned out there were only eight chairs set up, as we were the only guests. The lighting was poor, with disco like revolving lights, so it was hard to see the performers or photograph them. The performance was similar to others I have seen. The singer sang a line, the backup singers echoed it and the drumming hammered out similar patterns for each of the five long songs. We were encouraged to dance with a couple of local dancers, but only John would do it, so not wanting him to make a fool of himself alone I joined him. We were surprised that none of our young people wanted to get up, including the two girls. The local women who were dancing with us were Muslim and were covered from head to toe, except the face. I even dragged Aman over, but he only did half a song and then disappeared. Anyway, it was a fun evening, after which we headed back to the boat for the night.