India & Maldives Trip
Our trip started with a cruise through airport security, pre-Heathrow bomb plot, and a long wait for a 1am flight to Kuala Lumpur. We had a brief stop in Taipei, long enough for Ryan to get his first taste of Asian food and to have some coffee. Due to flight scheduling, we had a 30 hour "stopover" in Kuala Lumpur where the airline put us up at fairly nice Holday Inn a bit outside of downtown.
After a hot shower and a nap, we wandered into town to the KL aquarium, Aquaria, which was more impressive than I'd expected. They had a rather extensive collection of interesting fresh water critters that I hadn't seen before, as well as the standard see-through tunnel where you can watch sharks and rays and all manner of ocean fish swim around. After that, we spent an hour stuck in traffic trying to get from there to Chinatown for the night market. According to our taxi driver, the unusual traffic was due to a combination of the "mega sale" going on at the big malls and some concert event. The night market wasn't all that impressive, consisting mostly of vendors selling the usual tourist crap, but we did have some good cheap food at a little food court tucked behind the shops.
The next morning we had a rather scrumptious breakfast at the hotel, including a roti canai filled with scrambled eggs and onions. We followed this up by some wandering through the KLCC mall which turned out to consist of all high-end expensive shops. The highlight of the day ended up being food again - fresh jackfruit "on a stick" and something called yong tau foo which is a soup made from various veggies, tofu products and seafood that you choose from a buffet, sort of like mongolian bbq. We returned to the airport with very content bellies.
Our arrival in the Maldives was not as scenic as it could've been because we flew in at night. After collecting our bags, we made our way to the boat taxi that took us over to Male. It was an adventure just handling our luggage as there was no ramp to the boat - just a guy holding out his hand to help you step on board or to grab your suitcase. On Male we checked into the Vilingili View Inn and got ourselves a late night snack/dinner of rotis and dal. Our meal was accompanied by a local open air concert that sounded like a guy doing really bad rock'n'roll karaoke but with a live band. Fortunately the "music" stopped by the time we were ready for bed!
We discovered the next morning that by coincidence, the manager of the boat we were on was staying next door to us. With her help, we taxied back to the airport then met up with the rest of our dive boat group. The boat was fabulous - spacious and well furnished. Our room was one level up from the main deck with real windows that opened, a nice big bed, a loveseat, a desk, a/c, a fan, and a bathroom with shower. Life on the boat consisted of a fairly consitent routine - wake up at 6:30 and go for a dive at 7:30. Return for breakfast, then nap or read while the boat motored to a new location. Go for another dive, come back for lunch, read/nap, go for the third dive, get cleaned up, have dinner and hang out until bed. We were very well fed the entire time!
The other divers in our group consisted of an Austrian and his son, two girls and two more guys from Austria, one lady from Switzerland, one guy from Germany, two couples from Italy, and one American who'd been working in Bangalore. Everyone was very friendly and laid-back, and ages varied from (I'd guess) 20ish to 50ish. Some of the dive masters spoke German in addition to English, but no one spoke Italian, and the Italians didn't speak much else, so the attempts at communication provided us with a lot of entertainment.
It would take way too much space to go through every dive in detail, and not all were that interesting, but I can sum up by saying that the diving was challenging but worth it. Almost every dive involved a low to medium strength current such that we had to descend very quickly - no lingering on the surface after jumping out of the dive boat. Within 2-3 minutes we would be down to 70+ feet. Almost every dive went fairly deep, too.
I had only two scary moments the entire time - one dive where we were swimming against the current and my group disappeared into a little canyon where I didn't have the strength to follow them. After what seemed like an eternity of wondering what the hell to do, I saw the dive master come back and used my last bit of adrenaline to kick over to his hand. He practically had to pull me into the canyon which was sheltered so I could take a bit of a break. The second scare was during my first ever night dive, when I lost Ryan for a bit. I was hanging around the rest of my dive group, but for a short while I couldn't find him anywhere. Not being able to yell for someone underwater can sometimes be a real pain in the ass.
There were several exhilarting moments to make up for those two bad bits, though. I got to see an octopus for the first time - I wouldn't even have recognized it if it weren't for all the people pointing and staring! It looked like an amorphous grayish blob sticking out of the rocks, but the way it writhed around was fascinating. During the night dive there was a moment where I had turned off my light and was hanging back off a ledge. Ryan was a bit in front of me trying to photograph something tiny and the rest of the group was even further up. As I hung there, the shadow of a turtle that we'd seen under the ledge suddenly rose in front of me and floated silently right over me. I think that's the closest I've ever come to a turtle! Another close encounter was with some very friendly/curious Napoleon wrasses at a spot where they used to get fed. Now it's a marine preserve and nobody feeds them, but they still like to hang out with the divers - and they're huge! One was almost as big as Ryan. They have beautiful markings all over their face and body that look like tribal tatoos, so they're also known as maori wrasse.
Our final dive of the trip was also the most memorable. There wasn't much current, the sun finally came out, and a half dozen giant manta rays put on quite a show. We went to a spot that's known as a cleaning station for mantas - they come in out of the depths to this spot and get cleaned off by various tiny fish that live in the coral. We managed to drop right into the spot, hooked into the rocks, and hung out for an entire hour at about 60 feet. After a few minutes the mantas got used to our presence and would swim as close to a foot away. It was especially awesome when they'd swim right overhead - I felt like I was watching a spaceship cruise over me. Most of the time they would be slow and graceful, but every so often they seemed to get annoyed by some little fish and would twitch quickly away. If I'd had enough air, I could've spent hours watching them.
Those were the highlights, but we also saw lots of moray eels, stingrays, surgeonfish that would nip at our bubbles, huge schools of blue triggerfish, a variety of sweetlips, a school of batfish inside a wreck, and new types of parrotfish, angelfish, butterflyfish, and various small sharks. Let me not forget the abudance of lionfish - we were so excited to see one in the Bahamas, and in the Maldives we probably saw at least one on every dive. I also got to play with some underwater photography for a couple dives which was a lot of fun. Overall it was a great experience, and I would recommend diving or snorkelling in the Maldives to anyone who happens to be in the area.
Next it was on to Chennai (formerly known as Madras) to my cousin Rajiv's wedding. This was a cousin on my Mom's side so we got to meet up with lots of extended family members. I saw a couple of cousins that I haven't seen in probably 10 years which was cool. Ryan was totally overwhelmed by all the new names and faces. The festivities started Sunday evening and continued on Monday morning. We had a break during the day Monday, followed by a reception that night that proved to be rather uninteresting. It was mainly a parade of friends and coworkers going through a receiving line with the bride & groom. We just sat around and killed time until we could eat. The food at the wedding was quite good, though we still had to avoid the raw stuff. The final cermonies were on Tuesday morning - mostly a series of fertility rituals for the bride that must've been carried over from a thousand years ago.
On Tuesday afternoon we finally made it back to the apartment that my uncle had rented out for all of us. The bride and groom packed up and left for their honeymoon to the Maldives - lucky coincidence there! Then it was just us, my Mom, my uncle and aunt, and my grandma. The apartment was rather basic, but right across from the beach. It would've had an awesome view except that the owner put up a gigantic billboard (advertising a DSL service no less) right between the house and the beach. Not only was it an eye sore, but it blocked all the nice breezes coming off the water!
We spent the rest of the week doing various errands, shopping and visiting family members who lived in town. We went over to my cousin Mukund's place to poach internet and do laundry. The poor guy was sick with some kind of flu so we tried not to go over for more than a couple short visits. Ryan and my Dad took a day trip to Bangalore on Friday for some work-related stuff, and my Mom and I went clothes shopping. I managed to get a few salwar-kameez outfits of my own this time so I won't have to scrounge for appropriate India wear next time.
I was pretty impressed with the part of Chennai that we stayed in this time. I even saw a guy sweeping the street! We had a Starbucks style coffee shop within a couple blocks, as well as a boba tea place. A little further down the road was Murugan's Idli shop where they used filtered water for all their cooking so we could enjoy their great chutneys and vadais (the eponymous idlis were not as impressive). We had a few nice dinners out during the week - one was at Dakshin, a very classy restaurant at the Chola Sheraton that served a variety of South Indian food. Based on a few recommendations, we went to Amaravati, a more modest place that specialized in Andhra Pradesh food. It's reputed to be the spiciest food in India, but nothing we ordered was all that hot - though it was all very tasty. We also tried some Bengali cuisine at Bay Leaf with my cousin Pushkala and her family where I had the best, most fresh jalebi ever.
Sunday night we made our way to the suburb of Chrompet to stay at my Dad's cousin Sundar's house. Early the next morning we were off to Kerala with my parents and my grandmother on my Dad's side. We flew into the city of Madurai where we picked up our little SUV with driver that took through the plains and up the hills into Thekkady. It was cool and green up in the mountains - a nice relief after the sultry heat of Chennai. We each had our own one-room bungalows at the hotel Treetop which was quite posh for $70/night. The first afternoon we didn't do much other than eat lunch and wander around the many spice shops that lined the town. The area is known for growing various spices including cardamom, cinnamon, pepper, nutmeg, mace and vanilla.
The next morning we had another early start for a jeep safari into the Periyar Tiger Reserve. We didn't end up seeing any tigers (or elephants, which are more common), but we did see the giant Malabar squirrel, several Nilgiri langurs and lion-tailed macaques. We also heard a whole lot of birds but most were too elusive to spot. The safari was really just an open air jeep ride through the hills, but we got some good views of dense rainforest canopies. After the safari they had us don "leech socks" for a jungle trek, but we hadn't been informed of any trekking as part of the tour so we were woefully underprepared. I was in flip-flops and couldn't fathom walking 3-6 km in those things, so we opted to do our boat ride on the lake early. It was good thing, too, as after lunch it started pouring rain!
The boat ride itself was quiet and relaxing since we were on a row boat. Our guide was telling us about all the amazing elephant encounters people have on the lake during the dry season, but this being the wet season, all we saw were lots of banks of trampled dirt. We saw some more Niligiri langurs including one little one playing in the trees, and we saw lots of cormorants and snake birds - they're actually some kind of duck but they look like snakes when they swim underwater. We also got one close view of a kingfisher which is a tiny little bird for such a big name.
We hightailed it back to Thekkady after lunch and a short tour of the local cardamom factory. It rained most of the way back, then got briefly sunny just long enough to get on the big boat with my Dad and grandma. This boat went around the Lake Periyar which is famous for having various wildlife come to drink there during the dry season. Unfortunately it started raining again during the boat ride, so we didn't see much and were generally just wet and cold. I can imagine that the lake must be really pretty when it's sunny and the banks are well populated with animals, though.
The next day we drove from Thekkday, through the mountains called the Western Ghats, and down almost to the West coast of India to the Kerala backwaters. We passed by hillsides that were covered in tea plants - the reminded me of the way vineyards blanket the hills in Napa or the ride paddies terraced the mountains on Bali. The "backwaters" of Kerala were sort of like the canals of venice, but much wider and full of floating water hyacinths and lillies. We boarded our kettuvallam, a sort of houseboat made from bamboo and coir, on the banks of Lake Vembanad. We had a slow cruise around the lake to our overnight anchorage near a bird sanctuary - there wasn't a whole lot to do other than lounge so it was very relaxing. We had a delicious dinner on the boat, then hung out and watched the stars and listened to the night birds until it was time for bed.
The next morning we quickly motored back to our dock at Allappey, then drove over to Cochin for our flight back to Chennai. The last couple of days we didn't do much except for a couple more family visits and some more shopping. We had to pack more creatively on the trip home because of the added security post-Heathrow plot. Luckily we weren't bringing back much in the way of liquids, so it was mostly just all our shampoos, lotions, etc., that had to get checked in. The flights home proved to be one nuisance after another as each airport security station subjected us to a different set of rules. I don't think any of it made travel one iota safer, but it seems that they have to go through the motions for a while. We finally made it back to LA about 3.5 weeks after the start of the trip with lots of pictures, some new clothes, and many great memories.
After a hot shower and a nap, we wandered into town to the KL aquarium, Aquaria, which was more impressive than I'd expected. They had a rather extensive collection of interesting fresh water critters that I hadn't seen before, as well as the standard see-through tunnel where you can watch sharks and rays and all manner of ocean fish swim around. After that, we spent an hour stuck in traffic trying to get from there to Chinatown for the night market. According to our taxi driver, the unusual traffic was due to a combination of the "mega sale" going on at the big malls and some concert event. The night market wasn't all that impressive, consisting mostly of vendors selling the usual tourist crap, but we did have some good cheap food at a little food court tucked behind the shops.
The next morning we had a rather scrumptious breakfast at the hotel, including a roti canai filled with scrambled eggs and onions. We followed this up by some wandering through the KLCC mall which turned out to consist of all high-end expensive shops. The highlight of the day ended up being food again - fresh jackfruit "on a stick" and something called yong tau foo which is a soup made from various veggies, tofu products and seafood that you choose from a buffet, sort of like mongolian bbq. We returned to the airport with very content bellies.
Our arrival in the Maldives was not as scenic as it could've been because we flew in at night. After collecting our bags, we made our way to the boat taxi that took us over to Male. It was an adventure just handling our luggage as there was no ramp to the boat - just a guy holding out his hand to help you step on board or to grab your suitcase. On Male we checked into the Vilingili View Inn and got ourselves a late night snack/dinner of rotis and dal. Our meal was accompanied by a local open air concert that sounded like a guy doing really bad rock'n'roll karaoke but with a live band. Fortunately the "music" stopped by the time we were ready for bed!
We discovered the next morning that by coincidence, the manager of the boat we were on was staying next door to us. With her help, we taxied back to the airport then met up with the rest of our dive boat group. The boat was fabulous - spacious and well furnished. Our room was one level up from the main deck with real windows that opened, a nice big bed, a loveseat, a desk, a/c, a fan, and a bathroom with shower. Life on the boat consisted of a fairly consitent routine - wake up at 6:30 and go for a dive at 7:30. Return for breakfast, then nap or read while the boat motored to a new location. Go for another dive, come back for lunch, read/nap, go for the third dive, get cleaned up, have dinner and hang out until bed. We were very well fed the entire time!
The other divers in our group consisted of an Austrian and his son, two girls and two more guys from Austria, one lady from Switzerland, one guy from Germany, two couples from Italy, and one American who'd been working in Bangalore. Everyone was very friendly and laid-back, and ages varied from (I'd guess) 20ish to 50ish. Some of the dive masters spoke German in addition to English, but no one spoke Italian, and the Italians didn't speak much else, so the attempts at communication provided us with a lot of entertainment.
It would take way too much space to go through every dive in detail, and not all were that interesting, but I can sum up by saying that the diving was challenging but worth it. Almost every dive involved a low to medium strength current such that we had to descend very quickly - no lingering on the surface after jumping out of the dive boat. Within 2-3 minutes we would be down to 70+ feet. Almost every dive went fairly deep, too.
I had only two scary moments the entire time - one dive where we were swimming against the current and my group disappeared into a little canyon where I didn't have the strength to follow them. After what seemed like an eternity of wondering what the hell to do, I saw the dive master come back and used my last bit of adrenaline to kick over to his hand. He practically had to pull me into the canyon which was sheltered so I could take a bit of a break. The second scare was during my first ever night dive, when I lost Ryan for a bit. I was hanging around the rest of my dive group, but for a short while I couldn't find him anywhere. Not being able to yell for someone underwater can sometimes be a real pain in the ass.
There were several exhilarting moments to make up for those two bad bits, though. I got to see an octopus for the first time - I wouldn't even have recognized it if it weren't for all the people pointing and staring! It looked like an amorphous grayish blob sticking out of the rocks, but the way it writhed around was fascinating. During the night dive there was a moment where I had turned off my light and was hanging back off a ledge. Ryan was a bit in front of me trying to photograph something tiny and the rest of the group was even further up. As I hung there, the shadow of a turtle that we'd seen under the ledge suddenly rose in front of me and floated silently right over me. I think that's the closest I've ever come to a turtle! Another close encounter was with some very friendly/curious Napoleon wrasses at a spot where they used to get fed. Now it's a marine preserve and nobody feeds them, but they still like to hang out with the divers - and they're huge! One was almost as big as Ryan. They have beautiful markings all over their face and body that look like tribal tatoos, so they're also known as maori wrasse.
Our final dive of the trip was also the most memorable. There wasn't much current, the sun finally came out, and a half dozen giant manta rays put on quite a show. We went to a spot that's known as a cleaning station for mantas - they come in out of the depths to this spot and get cleaned off by various tiny fish that live in the coral. We managed to drop right into the spot, hooked into the rocks, and hung out for an entire hour at about 60 feet. After a few minutes the mantas got used to our presence and would swim as close to a foot away. It was especially awesome when they'd swim right overhead - I felt like I was watching a spaceship cruise over me. Most of the time they would be slow and graceful, but every so often they seemed to get annoyed by some little fish and would twitch quickly away. If I'd had enough air, I could've spent hours watching them.
Those were the highlights, but we also saw lots of moray eels, stingrays, surgeonfish that would nip at our bubbles, huge schools of blue triggerfish, a variety of sweetlips, a school of batfish inside a wreck, and new types of parrotfish, angelfish, butterflyfish, and various small sharks. Let me not forget the abudance of lionfish - we were so excited to see one in the Bahamas, and in the Maldives we probably saw at least one on every dive. I also got to play with some underwater photography for a couple dives which was a lot of fun. Overall it was a great experience, and I would recommend diving or snorkelling in the Maldives to anyone who happens to be in the area.
Next it was on to Chennai (formerly known as Madras) to my cousin Rajiv's wedding. This was a cousin on my Mom's side so we got to meet up with lots of extended family members. I saw a couple of cousins that I haven't seen in probably 10 years which was cool. Ryan was totally overwhelmed by all the new names and faces. The festivities started Sunday evening and continued on Monday morning. We had a break during the day Monday, followed by a reception that night that proved to be rather uninteresting. It was mainly a parade of friends and coworkers going through a receiving line with the bride & groom. We just sat around and killed time until we could eat. The food at the wedding was quite good, though we still had to avoid the raw stuff. The final cermonies were on Tuesday morning - mostly a series of fertility rituals for the bride that must've been carried over from a thousand years ago.
On Tuesday afternoon we finally made it back to the apartment that my uncle had rented out for all of us. The bride and groom packed up and left for their honeymoon to the Maldives - lucky coincidence there! Then it was just us, my Mom, my uncle and aunt, and my grandma. The apartment was rather basic, but right across from the beach. It would've had an awesome view except that the owner put up a gigantic billboard (advertising a DSL service no less) right between the house and the beach. Not only was it an eye sore, but it blocked all the nice breezes coming off the water!
We spent the rest of the week doing various errands, shopping and visiting family members who lived in town. We went over to my cousin Mukund's place to poach internet and do laundry. The poor guy was sick with some kind of flu so we tried not to go over for more than a couple short visits. Ryan and my Dad took a day trip to Bangalore on Friday for some work-related stuff, and my Mom and I went clothes shopping. I managed to get a few salwar-kameez outfits of my own this time so I won't have to scrounge for appropriate India wear next time.
I was pretty impressed with the part of Chennai that we stayed in this time. I even saw a guy sweeping the street! We had a Starbucks style coffee shop within a couple blocks, as well as a boba tea place. A little further down the road was Murugan's Idli shop where they used filtered water for all their cooking so we could enjoy their great chutneys and vadais (the eponymous idlis were not as impressive). We had a few nice dinners out during the week - one was at Dakshin, a very classy restaurant at the Chola Sheraton that served a variety of South Indian food. Based on a few recommendations, we went to Amaravati, a more modest place that specialized in Andhra Pradesh food. It's reputed to be the spiciest food in India, but nothing we ordered was all that hot - though it was all very tasty. We also tried some Bengali cuisine at Bay Leaf with my cousin Pushkala and her family where I had the best, most fresh jalebi ever.
Sunday night we made our way to the suburb of Chrompet to stay at my Dad's cousin Sundar's house. Early the next morning we were off to Kerala with my parents and my grandmother on my Dad's side. We flew into the city of Madurai where we picked up our little SUV with driver that took through the plains and up the hills into Thekkady. It was cool and green up in the mountains - a nice relief after the sultry heat of Chennai. We each had our own one-room bungalows at the hotel Treetop which was quite posh for $70/night. The first afternoon we didn't do much other than eat lunch and wander around the many spice shops that lined the town. The area is known for growing various spices including cardamom, cinnamon, pepper, nutmeg, mace and vanilla.
The next morning we had another early start for a jeep safari into the Periyar Tiger Reserve. We didn't end up seeing any tigers (or elephants, which are more common), but we did see the giant Malabar squirrel, several Nilgiri langurs and lion-tailed macaques. We also heard a whole lot of birds but most were too elusive to spot. The safari was really just an open air jeep ride through the hills, but we got some good views of dense rainforest canopies. After the safari they had us don "leech socks" for a jungle trek, but we hadn't been informed of any trekking as part of the tour so we were woefully underprepared. I was in flip-flops and couldn't fathom walking 3-6 km in those things, so we opted to do our boat ride on the lake early. It was good thing, too, as after lunch it started pouring rain!
The boat ride itself was quiet and relaxing since we were on a row boat. Our guide was telling us about all the amazing elephant encounters people have on the lake during the dry season, but this being the wet season, all we saw were lots of banks of trampled dirt. We saw some more Niligiri langurs including one little one playing in the trees, and we saw lots of cormorants and snake birds - they're actually some kind of duck but they look like snakes when they swim underwater. We also got one close view of a kingfisher which is a tiny little bird for such a big name.
We hightailed it back to Thekkady after lunch and a short tour of the local cardamom factory. It rained most of the way back, then got briefly sunny just long enough to get on the big boat with my Dad and grandma. This boat went around the Lake Periyar which is famous for having various wildlife come to drink there during the dry season. Unfortunately it started raining again during the boat ride, so we didn't see much and were generally just wet and cold. I can imagine that the lake must be really pretty when it's sunny and the banks are well populated with animals, though.
The next day we drove from Thekkday, through the mountains called the Western Ghats, and down almost to the West coast of India to the Kerala backwaters. We passed by hillsides that were covered in tea plants - the reminded me of the way vineyards blanket the hills in Napa or the ride paddies terraced the mountains on Bali. The "backwaters" of Kerala were sort of like the canals of venice, but much wider and full of floating water hyacinths and lillies. We boarded our kettuvallam, a sort of houseboat made from bamboo and coir, on the banks of Lake Vembanad. We had a slow cruise around the lake to our overnight anchorage near a bird sanctuary - there wasn't a whole lot to do other than lounge so it was very relaxing. We had a delicious dinner on the boat, then hung out and watched the stars and listened to the night birds until it was time for bed.
The next morning we quickly motored back to our dock at Allappey, then drove over to Cochin for our flight back to Chennai. The last couple of days we didn't do much except for a couple more family visits and some more shopping. We had to pack more creatively on the trip home because of the added security post-Heathrow plot. Luckily we weren't bringing back much in the way of liquids, so it was mostly just all our shampoos, lotions, etc., that had to get checked in. The flights home proved to be one nuisance after another as each airport security station subjected us to a different set of rules. I don't think any of it made travel one iota safer, but it seems that they have to go through the motions for a while. We finally made it back to LA about 3.5 weeks after the start of the trip with lots of pictures, some new clothes, and many great memories.