Dive and Cruise team just came back from the beautiful Maldives...
Surrounded by crystal clear wather and pure white empty beaches, freindly crew and good diving makes the Maldives heaven on Earth. Maldives has alwasys been the perfect place and idyllic holiday destination for both divers and non-divers.
Outside of the capital island - Malé, this made-for-tourism country is just resorts, yachts, and more resorts and yachts. Most of nationality in the world can get a 30 days visa on arrival free of charge. Due to religion reason, Malvies does NOT allow the import of alcohol, porc meat. But all the resorts and liveaboards are allowed to provide alcohol drinks to their guests.
One thing super good about Maldives was the 3G connection. After we arrived Malé, we bought a Maldivian sim card at one of the office in the airport, and it worked during the wohle liveaboard trip, only in-between atoll, the coverage may be temporarily lost.
We were transferred to our liveaboard - Honors Legacy through the dhoni (In Maldives, the liveaboards are virtually always accompanied by a dhoni, a smaller boat on which your diving equipment is stored and from which you will do your dives).
The diving itself was very enjoyable but average. As we all know that Maldives had experienced major coral bleaching and subsequent die-off in the late 1990s. But in October 2013 when we went there it seems have recovered quite OK.
However, the coral health was widely varied, most dive sites still had significant dead coral with only a small number containing healthy colourful coral. The fish life were pretty good though, we saw lots of large manta rays showed up at the cleaning station, and most of the mantas were really friendly and gave us some spectacular display. We also saw lots of nudibranchs during the trip as well. And if you jump in the blue early in the morning, there were always a few sharks around but they tended to be a bit small, there were nurse sharks, grey reef sharks, balck & white tip sharks. And we saw two Whale sharks during the snorkeling around South Ari, everyone was happy about it.
And we also had a nice BBQ dinner night at one of the local island with no others around. The boat crew even drawn up a whale shark by using the sand.
Overall, the good points about diving in Maldives are: drift dives, channel dives, big game fish life (manta rays, egale rays, reef sharks, nurse sharks, whale sharks etc.), high standrad liveaboards (In the past, we have been to liveaboard trips with Honors Legacy, Stingray, Egaleray and ScubaSpa Ying, and all of the boats we have been provided really excellent services and facilities), good for groups mixed with divers and non-divers as there are many other activities that can be offered.
The bad points about diving in Maldives could be: The coral was not as good as some other destinations, the capital city - Malé doesn't have many activities to offer so for divers who need to make a stopover in Male there is nothing to do at night.
If you want to know more about diving in Maldives, just Contact us.
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You can also have a look at our partner's YouTube video from Honors Legacy by Honors Legacy here :
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