Maldives - Oct 06

[John_McG]

A few pics from our trip to the Maldives earlier this year. Only my 2nd ever trip with a camera - Canon A510 with only built-in flash. Touched up in Photoshop CS2.
Looking at upgrading to a 10Mp Canon G7 soon

Gallery thing HERE


John

[ScubaSue]

Ooh, rays, I love rays

[Tazzie]

Thanks for sharing them John Some lovely pics there. I'll be taking mine to the Maldives for the second time too in a couple of weeks time, hope I can get some rays like you have

[John_McG]

We saw rays on just about every dive. The Eagle Rays were almost a permanent feature on 2 of the dives we did and there was a lone one on the house 'reef' (actually not any reef there, just sand and some junk!)

[Big O]

Great pics and photoshop skills John!

[Tazzie]

Originally Posted by John_McG

We saw rays on just about every dive. The Eagle Rays were almost a permanent feature on 2 of the dives we did and there was a lone one on the house 'reef' (actually not any reef there, just sand and some junk!)

Fantastic I can't wait! Which atol were you on?

[John_McG]

Hi Tazzie, we were in the North Male Atoll. Place called Summer Island Resort. Must admit that I probably wouldn't go back there again, but the diving wasn't bad.

Google Earth co-ords are: 4°31'59.45"N 73°22'21.11"E


John

[Tazzie]

Hmmm sounds ominous! I'm heading out on a live aboard to try and get in the best of the diving as I really struggled getting decent enough info on each atol... Is everything as expensive as they say?

[John_McG]

We did an all inclusive thing, but the bits that weren't included (DIVING!!!) were quite expensive. We paid almost £900 for 12 days diving on top of the initial holiday cost. We had all of our own kit except cylinders and weights with us and the boat dives were 1 tank affairs with only 10 and 11 ltr cylinders filled to about 200bar each. At the very least I had expected 2 tank boat trips.

A couple of friends went to the South Male Atoll at the same time as us and paid less for their diving and got 2 tank trips ever morning and afternoon.

General shop prices were a bit more expensive than in the UK - at least on the outlying islands, don't know about Male itself as we didn't visit. However, you need to bear in mind the difficulties these smaller outlying places experience just trying to keep stock of basic essentials due to their location, so higher prices are to be expected.

[Tazzie]

Lovely, thanks for the heads up