The biosphere as we know it is ending and I’m spending two weeks in the Maldives with my wife for her 50th birthday. I feel conflicted.
The trip to get here was long. Zurich Doha by plane, Doha Male by plane, Male Kurudu by water-plane, Kurudu Komandoo by speedboat. I felt like sleeping for 20h when we finally got here. And all the anxiety before leaving was terrible, too.
With that, I think we have all out must-see locations before the end. We went to the Great Barrier Reef in 2017, to the Galapagos in 2020 and now to the Maldives.
#Pictures #Maldives
Looking out from the porch the ocean is blue, the sky is blue and the reef begins a few meters in.
We go snorkeling every day. Our last two trips showed me that we need an underwater camera. Oh to have videos of Reef Number Nine in Australia or the penguins and sea lions in the Galapagos! I bought a GoPro Hero 10 before we left.
This cowtail stingray (?) we keep seeing is about 2m long and likes to hide in the sand.
There’s sea grass sprouting right now and sea turtles grazing.
Black tipped reef sharks… harmless! At a later point we did see it attack something hidden in the rocks and it was scary to see!
Most corals look dreary! It’s certainly not as colourful and busy as in Australia or the Galapagos. This purple giant is cool, though.
There are still plenty of colourful fish.
Whenever we’re away on a trip, we play games. The most popular tropical island game is Race for the Galaxy.
Yesterday we also played Petition by @klaatu@mastodon.xyz.
We saw our first hermit crabs in Costa Rica where we spent our honey moon. We love these little ones. Maybe because they’re slow and easily scared and therefore obviously harmless.
The parrot fish have super sharp teeth and gnaw on the corals. And when you’re snorkeling, you can hear them. Kchrrr! Kchhhrrk!
I also love those lone corals harbouring a small school of tiny fearful fish that retreat and hide in the coral as somebody approaches.
When you swim past the nearby reef the bottom drops out and the deep blue begins. I am always afraid some huge fish will show up.
14 second video
There is a strange tourism industry, here. The islands are either uninhabited, inhabited by locals, or reserved for tourism. Tourists can stay on the “local islands” since 2007. Natives are only allowed to work on the tourist islands.
The capital city is one of the densest urban areas on the planet. Just look at the image of Malé on Wikipedia.
one of the densest urban areas
I would lament this urban sprawl, the land reclamation, the garbage problem, the democracy deficit, the dependence on tourism – but I know what my friend Peter would say, pointing at the Factfulness book. Check out these stats from the German Wikipedia page on the Maldives: In 2020, the Maldives had 541000 inhabitants. In 1950, they had about 74000 inhabitants. At the time, a woman had about 7.5 children on average in 1980 but these days they are so much better off that the growth rate has dropped to 1.8% in 2020 and a woman has about 1.8 children on average. Life expectancy rose from 34.5 years in 1950 to 81 for women and 77.8 for men in 2020. An amazing improvement from the point of view of the locals.
German Wikipedia page on the Maldives
From my green perspective, though… let’s not forget the garbage island Thilafushi. The picked an island and use it as a garbage dump because they don't know what to do with all the garbage. Sure, every island needs a garbage incinerator now, but in the nineties, there was just garbage and it had to go somewhere. And some of the stuff starts leaking. It accumulates in the the fish. People eat the fish. It's easy to feel grim about this. I need to remind myself that life expectancy was less than 35 years just a generation or two ago (I was born in the seventies). Poverty is much, much worse than pollution and we tend to forget it.
If you’re wondering why I’m basically skimming, reading and finally summarizing Wikipedia articles on my blog, I guess the answer is that this is how I try to deal with it all. To not close my eyes. Not to look away.
We had signed up for a snorkel safari when suddenly the buzz was that the young humpback whale they had seen two days ago was still around and so the ship picked up some extra passengers and Claudia came along to do some whale watching.
The whale watching did not disappoint.
5 second video
This adolescent humpback whale was about 8m long. It’s unusual to find a whales here, now, so close to the reef, so young, without its family. There was speculation that it might be waiting for its family to pick it up again, or that perhaps it was sick.
6 second video
Before going on this trip, I bought an older GoPro HERO 10. Now I have a few gigabytes of reef snorkeling footage. I don't know what to do with it. Post it? Unlikely! It takes too much space and nobody would look at it. Donate it to YouTube? Unlikely! Upload it to some Peertube instance and thereby offload the cost? Unlikely.
Regarding the economy of the Maldives and the shock when I learned about the garbage island and my dismay when I saw the skyline of Malé island – when we flew back, I got a closer look at Malé from the air as we landed and while it wasn't an island nature paradise, it was just a city with nice, tall buildings and roads and palm trees and construction sites and glass fronts and cars and motorcycles. In other words, it seemed like a perfectly normal city and it wasn't shabby and it didn't have slums and so I keep coming back to the main issue: Beating poverty is of ultimate importance in order to improve people's lives and giving them options so that they can work on the problems they care about. When we flew over Thilafushi, the garbage island didn't look "apocalyptic" but just like some industrial zone elsewhere in the world, except it's an island in the middle of the ocean.
Relief! Both the conservative treatment boss doctor and the surgeon boss doctor looked at it and decided that there is nothing left to do. A carbon sole into the shoe to help immobilize the foot and that’s it. The foot is already mending, it’s already much better. No long walks and no stairs, they say. She's good to go.
There's an x-ray in two weeks just to make sure that it all mends.
The human body is amazing.
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