Swimming with Giants in Maldives

Maldives is an excellent place to go for vacation with beautiful reefs for snorkeling and many sea creatures! My family and I have been to Maldives before, but we had a lot of new experiences during this trip. We saw a lot of whale sharks and manta rays, which we had not seen before! We also went diving for the first time! This trip to Maldives was very special.

Maldives is one of the best places in the world to see whale sharks! Whale sharks are very cool creatures! They are the largest fish in the sea, but instead of asserting their dominance and eating big fish and sharks and stuff, they decided that they were content to just eat tiny plankton by opening their mouths really wide and filtering out the sea water. Good on them.

Many hotels have whale shark expeditions to try and see them. However, a lot of the times the whale sharks swim too deep for us to spot them from the surface. They swim way faster than us, so it’s hard for us puny humans to catch up with them. As such, once a whale shark has been spotted, people on boats have to get off very quickly and swim in a mad dash to the whale shark before it goes away! There can be a lot of boats in one area too, so swimming through lots of people can be a challenge.

On our first adventure snorkeling expedition we only got to see whale sharks briefly, and they were relatively deep. On our second and third trips, however, we saw some that started out pretty deep but gradually swam higher until they were almost on the surface! We spent a long time swimming as hard as we could to keep up with them. I was pretty surprised that they didn’t just try to avoid us (but I’m not complaining!).

Maldives also has quite a few manta rays. We saw a few when we were walking on a bridge in the hotel! Apparently they’re attracted to the lights on the bridge, which is why they show up there at night. They would would sort of swim in circles, where they would go close to the surface and then deeper over and over again. They also moved to different parts of the bridge a lot, so we would spend a long time chasing after them. We could see their big mouths opening too!

We also saw three manta rays on one of the snorkeling trips. They look even bigger when you’re swimming with them, and they swim very fast!

One random but interesting sight that we saw were schools of sardines clumped together near the shore of the beaches. We could see huge groups of thousands of them right next to the beach! When we swam in between them we could see them swim very quickly and sometimes surround us. It was fun messing with them.

During this trip my family and I tried diving for the first time! We only learned enough basics so that we wouldn’t drown, and the whole time there was a guide moving us around and controlling how deep we went, so we basically just kicked a little bit while the guides pulled us around.  Even my dad was able to do it, and he doesn’t even know how to swim. Nonetheless, my family and I want to become certified divers so we can do some cool diving trips on our own. 🙂

While diving, we saw many things we ordinarily cannot see while snorkeling. Since I was used to seeing small clumps of coral in shallow reefs, I was very surprised to see that the corals actually grow really tall! We saw mountains of coral that extended the full 14 meters that we dived. There were also some cool dark caves and some fish we didn’t see on the surface, including many black fish that would hide in holes in the coral.

Of course, we saw many other cool things while snorkeling, including lionfish, turtles, and sharks!

A random thing we saw was purple surgeonfish chasing each other in circles. I saw a few different surgeonfish do it for some reason!

A warning: the food at resorts tends to be extremely expensive (one bottle of sparkling water at our resort was 14 dollars!), so bringing snacks is a good way to save money. It is optimal to bring snacks that you will not get bored of (we brought lots of cup noodles, which we enjoyed).

One thing we did find was different on this visit to Maldives compared to previous visits was that the corals had actually changed a lot. We hadn’t visited for many years, so this time we noticed that the corals were less colorful than before. This is likely due to coral bleaching, which is a big problem in many reefs because of global warming and too much carbon dioxide in oceans! Coral bleaching is one of the reasons why rising temperatures and carbon dioxide levels are very problematic. Hopefully we can reverse these problems so we’ll still have beautiful reefs to visit in the future.