August, 2004
Had a charter trip to one of the local islands yesterday (meaning not a resort, just a town on the island). I thought i'd tell you all about it as generally the trips i do are pretty boring, so something different is newsworthy. The island we went to is called Kulhudufushi and it's in the Haa Dhaal atoll, 143 nautical miles north of Male (about 1hr and 10min flight), (Dad that's primarily for your benefit so i hope you've got your map out so you can look it up!). The population of the island is just over 7000 so it's a good sized island, though i dont have any dimensions for you. There is a harbour construction project going on up there, dredging and building a sea wall, so some of the head honchos associated with the company doing the work flew up there to check it out and see how their money is being spent. When we arrived there was a small crowd of adults and kids watching the plane come it. We also discovered that three Air Taxi employees were there, 2 of them, Mauroof and Mafaaz are from the island. They greeted us warmly, helped us tie up the airplane, and served us fresh coconut drinks and draped us in lays as you can see in one of the pictures below. From there they took us on their scooters for lunch at Mauroof's girlfriend's place. Meal was curried noodles with fish. It was really good and for desert they served us fresh custard with fruit (mom you would have loved it). Unfortunately i dont have any pictures of us eating. So after hanging out there for awhile they told us we had to go to Mafaaz's place for coffee and snacks. So we zipped over there, chatted for a bit, then they decided they'd give us a tour of the island before we had coffee. Was great, a very nice island, lots of trees, a couple schools, government buildings, hospital, general stores, etc. My batteries were pretty low so i couldn't get pictures of everything, but have some general ones of streets ocean surf etc. I took a couple quick videos so maybe another time i'll send them along, or when i get back i'll show you. So after the tour we went back for coffee and snacks, then on to Mauroof's family place. There we had more snacks and fresh quava juice. So after relaxing and chatting with them our time was up and we had to go back to the airplane to get ready to depart. It was a great day. I'd rather spend time doing that then hanging out at the resorts any day. Having those guys up there to take us into their homes and show us around was incredible. They treated us like kings (helped that they knew we were coming) and were great company while we waited for our time to depart. So after about 3.5hrs we took off again with a small crowd watching our departure and returned to Male. Made for a great end to my work week! And to go some place new and do a different sort of trip was great. Such a nice change for playing taxi driver for tourists!! And it's the first local island i've been to so it was nice to be able to see some of the local residents on the islands other than in the city of Male.
Rob displaying some photographic genius.
A view of Rob's window (and perhaps an avid fan?).
And here's the man himself under a foreign sky.
A dhoni - the taxi out to the airport.
Rob and an Otter.
