Four engines the size of refrigerators have been rocketing our speedboat over the ocean blue for hours. I squint at the casual Maldivians at the bow, wondering how they know where to go. There’s no radar and no landmarks, just a smooth stream of baby blues to cobalts, sky to water, sometimes a distant hint of an island, or a turquoise scar of reef.
Now, the boat banks into a little harbor at breakneck speed and cuts to an abrupt, ear-echoing stop.
“I’ve never seen boat captains drive like that,” Sam whispers, and then sits back, petting Anika’s sleeping white-blonde head.
I nod slowly, and look out at the island. White sand sprouting thick with coconut trees, a red and white cell phone tower rising from the middle.
“Is this it?”
We look to Sanoon, restless.
“Naw, this is Rhihaakuru Island. They’re kinda famous for their ‘ketchup.’”
“Ketchup?”
“Well, it’s made from fish guts, so it’s red.”
I shudder.
Clear water sloshes at the hull. Voices call out in Dhivehi, cardboard boxes exchange hands, and then we’re off again, jetting over water so delicious I want to lick it, float it, melt into it.
A few minutes later we careen into another harbor, and Sanoon nods to us, smiling. After three days traveling halfway around the world, this is Mulah! The mile-wide atoll where our friend grew up with fifteen siblings and god knows how many cousins. I crane my neck out the window and notice the area in front of the little harbor building is thick with people. My pulse ticks up a beat.
The boat’s buoys bump the breakwall, and the crew gets busy tying off with nylon rope as thick as a python. Sanoon steps off the boat into a crowd of hijabi-clad women, and the voices raise in pitch. We follow, and I can’t help braking into a huge smile to mirror every face I see.
“Maama!” Sanoon embraces a woman in a full black kaftan, her eyes glowing.
Plumeria lei are draped over our heads.
Anika looks up at me, wide eyed.
“Hello?” I venture, embracing a warm hand curling around my fingers.
There is much hugging and smiling, and somewhere close drums are booming, rhythmic, tribal. My heart quickens again. This is nothing like pulling up to ketchup island.
The homecoming purrs are punctuated by excited shouting. Someone nudges me forward, and the doors open from the arrivals building to some kind of vestibule. The drumming swells in volume.
The second set of doors open up and I gasp.
Two rows of men are spread before us like some rite of passage ceremony, dressed in identical shirts and long skirts, singing at the top of their lungs. Some are carrying flowers and dancing, others bang on drums secured around their necks with straps.
“This—is this for us?” I squeak, and Becca nods at me, speechless.
It’s is like a page from a forgotten century, I think, it’s like—
A drummer grabs Sam and Anika, and I whip out my phone.
Behind them, I catch a glimpse of my carry-on luggage on a motorbike, someone’s arm draped casually around it, and they it disappears into the shadows beneath towering coconuts. I sigh with the relief of not caring, following the swell of my instinct to go with whatever these loving and celebratory people do. We walk with the women and without our million bags, to wherever we’re going. I have no idea. Don’t particularly care either.
A few hours later, Anika and I stand transfixed at the window of Sanoon’s Dad’s guesthouse-under-construction, looking down at the ocean. Dark shapes like angels with long tails wave through the turquoise shallows.
“Rays,” I whisper, not wanting to say the word ‘sting’ to Anika just yet.
I trace the rope of a boat’s mooring almost to the ocean floor. In the distance are several islands, dense with green coconuts and ringed in teal waves, waves peeling off the sides in streams of white.
Later that night the whole island is out to party. Sanoon’s family brings a precooked banquet out to beach chairs on the main drag–permanent steel frames with fishing nets attached. There’re several kinds of fish that are probably still twitching. I lick the caramelized, ground spices off my fingers and dig into a banana bread-pudding dessert. Voices in Dhivehi swirl around us. There’s a lamppost above the makeshift party, hung with a huge, illuminated crescent moon and Islamic-style skyline that casts its gold and blue light on us all–the fifteen or twenty of Sanoon’s Maldivian relatives, and us.
“Whoa look at that!” Anika points to a ten foot long “fish,” made from woven coconut leaf marching down the sand street, several pairs of legs scissoring below.
Tonight’s the last day of the celebration of Eid, a big-deal Muslim holiday. Which is the dominant religion here. And even more strict since the same 2004 tsunami that decimated parts of Thailand tore through the Maldives too, an island nation with an average elevation of less than five feet. Saltwater intrusion wiped out half of the cultivated land, and displaced tens of thousands of people.
At the height of the wave, islanders watched their community dying, drowning, in danger beyond help.
“Bodies washed ashore for months afterwards,” we’re told.
Now most Maldivians observe the strictest form of Islam, Shari’a law.
Over the next few days I’ll stand at the window and watch in some combination of awe and disbelief as women who used to swim bare-breasted navigate the ocean in full hijabs, the saturated fabric heavy and slow, though their smiles would never show it.
Five times a day the call to prayer rings out over the tiny island, a mile long. I didn’t know any Muslims before this trip. Didn’t have many thoughts about Muslims one way or the other, grew up too far from the epicenter of 9/11 to absorb the prejudice by osmosis, never had Islamic friends growing up. So when Sanoon’s mom stocks the fridge with treats for the kids, when his father takes them out fishing time after time, when the brothers fill their friends’ boats with petrol and take us anywhere, everywhere, this island, this surf break, this empty beach, I just think that’s who they are, I don’t stop to think about why, or how they were raised. I don’t really get it until I end up in the hospital.
But wait, let me back up.
We’ve just made it to the front of the Maldivian immigration line, after traveling from Maui to Honolulu, to Tokyo, to Singapore, and at last to Male, the island nation’s overcrowded capital city, largely reclaimed from the hungry sea by dredging.
“Where you staying?” Asks the bored faced Maldivian official, his mustache neatly trimmed, blazer sagging with the weight of metal pins.
“Uhh..”
I turn to Sam, “what’s the name of Sanoon’s dad’s place?”
He raises his eyebrows, shrugs.
“With our friend’s family,” I explain, and the immigration official pauses, his stamp-hand frozen over Anika’s passport.
“You’re staying with a family?”
He sets the stamp down.
“You can’t do that.”
I swallow.
“You need a sponsor for that.”
An image comes to me now from some government form: a drop-down menu of resort names, nowhere to fill-in-the-blank. What did we do?
There is a kind of stand off. We stare at each other.
Word to the wise—don’t come to the Maldives with no plan.
“Becca!” I turn and yell to her where they’re queued in the home country immigration line, “What’s the name of Sanoon’s dad’s guesthouse?”
We’ll soon learn he’s still building it—everyone knows tourism is coming. We’ll bump shoulders with men covered in gray cement dust coming in the front door and get electrocuted every time we try to take a warm shower. But anyway.
Becca can’t hear me.
But in that moment I remember something else.
“Dhonvelli!” My brain seizes on this morsel, and I swivel back to the immigration officer.
“We’re staying at Cinnamon Dhonvelli,” I add, smiling, trying not to sigh with relief.
It’s not the guesthouse, but the all-inclusive resort we’re staying at after Mulah.
The official lets his stare linger a beat longer, and probably because there’s a long line of people foot tapping and scowling at the delay, he types something into a computer, stamps our passports and waves us off with a grunt.
Thank God.
Here’s the scoop on the local islands:
You CAN get beyond the resorts. You CAN stay in a local guesthouse, and this type of travel is gaining traction, especially near Sanoon’s home island of Mulah, where a new airport has been installed on Muli, a five minute speedboat away. But there are some considerations.
Finding a guesthouse could be a thing. You might need to book one online, on a more mainstream island, talk to locals and secure a guesthouse deeper into the local islands, bribe a local fisherman for a ride. But with the authentic, rustic life of a deeply local atoll comes a world that doesn’t cater to tourists, (yet) where everyone smiles at you, the marine life is rich and varied, and the access to local culture is off the charts.
On Mulah, we are the only foreigners, save for a few girls from India working at one of the two cafes on the entire island. English is spoken, eh, here and there. And a guesthouse may or may not have a kitchen. There’s no big grocery store on Mulah—most families catch their fish, eat and trade local fruit, make homemade chapatti, rotti and rice, and supplement with provisions from Male.
But there’s all sorts of goodness, if you’re willing to risk the unknown, talk to people, experiment, explore. There’s one guy (one!) on Mulah who is trained in the art and science of coconut kefir, tapping and fermenting the coconut’s inflorescence to perfection, and you can buy plastic bottles of this nectar. And the mangos are so plentiful in the summer the locals sweep them into piles, unable to use the sheer numbers of them.
Surf: Tiny Mulah is home to several breaks, including Mulah Point and The Barrel, a deep to insta-shallow world class slab. Sam went out with one of Sanoon’s experienced cousins, who quickly drifted back to Mulah Point, saying “it’s too much, man,” leaving Sam alone and dazzled in the glory and consequence of The Barrel all to himself. I like the more mellow left just across the channel in front of the island of Veyvah, where we jump off the cousins’ borrowed boat and surf with…again, no one.
I’m head down, spearing the heavenly blue with my covered arms, ahead of Sam and Anika. You don’t show skin here, in a bow of respect to the devout Muslim population. Even my shorts and shirt and pushing it, and only with family and on the boat. Maybe the culture of modesty will buffer this beautiful atoll from becoming an Instagram slut of a place, I think, passing a sting ray fluffing up sand on the ocean floor. I slide under the pier, ogling at fish orbiting the cement pylons like they’re planets.
Golden light slices through the pier’s boards overhead, seaweed dances in the current, and an electric blue-and-magenta parrot fish wriggles past. I pop up, take an excited inhale and then shoot under the pier again. A little surge heaves through the water, moving my body, and all of sudden there’s a strange feeling on my ankle. I look down, blinking at a canyon of missing skin. It takes a few seconds to connect the feeling of my ankle thumping the pylon covered in barnacles to the missing chunk of my body. Sharks, I think. Yeah. With one foot, I kick towards a wooden ladder dangling in the water. Still no blood, I notice, curious.
I heave myself out of the water, dripping, and as I inspect the wound it comes, the blood making a dark red lake on the wet boards. I stand up, try to hobble towards the shore but the blood pumps faster, makes a mess, makes me dizzy. I sit back down, squinting at Sam and Anika. Weird that it doesn’t hurt yet. I wave my arms, yell, but they’re head down, kicking for the pier. I sigh. I can’t even see the wound anymore, under the flood of crimson.
There’s a squeal of brakes close by.
Someone is walking towards me. An uncle? I scan for his name but it doesn’t come.
Then I’m on the back of his bike. “No, no not the clinic,” I seem to be saying. “Just the guesthouse, I just need to put something on it.”
He shakes his head at me smiling, driving with one hand and speaking in fast Dhivehi into his cell phone with the other. The clinic is two “blocks” away, and they take me in immediately.
On the white paper covered exam table I start to shiver. The A/C is strong, and I’m still soaked.
A woman in a full kaftan covered from face to feet, cleans the wound and tells me she’s going to grab me a tetanus shot. When the door opens, I see that the waiting room, to my amazement, is filled with people, where it was deserted just minutes before. I recognize Uncle Murcit, Sana, Sanoon’s dad…and I lay back, the pain starting now, but it’s buffered by something else. Care? Kindness? I can’t pin it down.
Then comes the tetanus, the lidocaine needle! I scream. I feel bad. I scream again.
The sweet, covered nurse is bustling around in cabinets and drawers when Sanoon’s dad comes in, says something to her. He sits on the blue plastic chair at my side, looks at me, and nods. We don’t have any common words. Except sukria, similar to the Arabic shakran for thank you, which is very coming very alive in my throat right now. He puts a dry, warm hand on my ankle, and I lay back, softening. I tilt my head, the paper cover crinkling, and watch him, head bowed. Sometimes he moves his hand to the other side of the wound. He doesn’t even know me, I think, but it feels like he’s doing something. Praying? It’s stupid, but in this moment I feel like his daughter. I close my eyes over this warm, hiccupy feeling, picturing the whole family sitting in the waiting room, in the middle of the day. For me.
When the doctor comes to push four stitches through my bunched skin, Sanoon’s dad gets kicked out but the feeling of his warm hand, his silent presence moves up into my heart. And it just… stays there.
For the next few days, we go to neighbor islands to fish (ten seconds later: got one!)
snorkel coral gardens and surf, (well, they do) nap, visit family, have beach picnics and walk the few blocks to Sanoon’s mom’s house for home cooked Maldivian meals.
And like a movie, every time the kids start to complain, “I’m tired,” “my feet hurt,” not a minute passes before a magical brother, sister or cousin rides up on a motorbike and whisks the kids off over the sandy streets and flattened yellow mangoes back to the guesthouse.
“Byyyyye!” Anika leans back and waves with a sudden, rejuvenated flourish, one hand in the air, the other around Uncle Murcit’s waist.
“Is this–normal?” I turn to Becca. “I mean…” I don’t even know exactly I want to ask, but it’s like she reads my mind.
“You know, the inside of a Muslim family is one of the most comforting places in the world,” she muses, looking up at a giant mango tree where bats are zooming into their perches for the evening.
I think of Sanoon’s dad at my side in the hospital, the cousins cooking us fresh caught snapper over glowing coconut husks at the beach, Maama hovering over the kids at dinner, making sure they have just one more bite, pulling treats out of her kaftan, the sliced green coconuts placed in our hands, the free guesthouse, our huge, tribal welcome, even the way four aunties instantly appear with water and cloth when Anika slips in the mud one evening on the “main street.”
And it is so foreign to my latchkey kid life in Northern California that it takes me a minute to catch my breath again. So this is what it’s like, I think, to have a huge, loving, connected family. And I guess it’s a little overwhelming, and maybe too connected because some people that grow up in this abundance long for freedom and diversity and leave, maybe like Sanoon, and it’s probably too much for me too–
but for this week, for this moment–
I let it fill my heart to overflow.
Meanwhile the implications of our little misunderstanding at the immigration booth are becoming more clear.
There are NO tourists here on Mulah. Like, zero.
(Me after accidentally ingesting betel nut candy.)
But of course they are no tourists—because all the visitors get funneled into resorts—which I soon learn have dredged, sandbagged lagoons that make perfect habitat for cute rainbow colored fish, for turtles, for baby sharks—see em? But the environment is cajoled, the wildness beat out of it.
We arrive at Cinnamon Dhonvelli, awed by the reception, tickled by the cold beer, and then,
“You are on the list sir?” The greeter nods to Sam’s surfboard bag.
Sam tilts his head. “The list?
“The surfing list.”
“Uh, no. We don’t know about any list.”
The employee chortles, wincing.
“We have had some–misunderstandings about this recently.”
Yeah. It doesn’t say on their website that it costs three hundred dollars a day to surf here. In learning this, Sam goes pale. I go to the bathroom. This is in addition to the all inclusive hotel price, which we were super lucky to get some relief with thanks to Sanoon, since Maldivians, like us on Maui, have like one degree of separation.
Like the immigration line, it’s a standoff again. We refuse to pay.
The second day, slightly smug that the wind comes up. But the third day the swell starts to hit. We go watch, we say we can’t watch. Anyway, there’s plenty to be distracted by. Like food, already cooked, no cleaning! Three times a day!
The buffet at Cinnamon Dhonvelli, like most resorts I imagine, looks glorious. But under the extravagant presentations, it’s a cafeteria.
We drink beer fifty feet from the break, weave coconut leaf “extensions” into our hair, and smoke hookah mixed inhaled with thick salt spray from the crashing waves.
On the last day at Dhonvelli after bitching for five days straight, Sam and I suck it up and pay to surf Pasta Point and Sultans.
We drop in on these fiercely protected and famous breaks and chat with the global surf elite who can afford this extravagant privilege, but still dreaming of the wild, empty waves of Mulah.
Comments 1
I love reading about your adventures, and I always feel like I’m right there with you.