I've completly forgotten, but my mom remembered me about a Passport book I bought in the nineties while in high school. "The Maldives. The Paradise Isles of the Indian Ocean". A quite useless book, since I wasn't planning any trip at all. But internet was not available everywhere and books were still the most popular information carriers...
I had in mind another book, the Reader's Digest Sharks, which I've read front to back and to front, memorizing and dreaming about encountering these magnificent animals in my life.
It happened in February 2013, unexpected and amazing.
On a dull Friday morning we headed to the main Milano airport for a flight to an exotic, dreamt-of, never seen destination. At least for me.
Maldives.
My life has brought me to a turning point, where I feel I'm not entirely capable of understanding the flow I'm cruising with. So I just went for it.
As I stepped off the plane in Malé, I flashed back to Baja California, to the moisty and hot climate, to the quirky feeling somewhere in between sweating and pure connecting with the place. We've sat at the airport bar, sipping a fruit cocktail and letting the surrounding invade our pores.
Ready? 1, 2, 3, jump! And my eyes opened to my very first tropical reef scenery. "Castagnole!" (i.e. Chromis chromis, the small fishes you see in the Adriatic, dark when adult, electric blue when juvenile). Then I accepted the fact, that I was diving in the Maldives and that damselfishes were swimming hundreds of miles away. Some curious surgeon fishes have replaced them, dancing and smuggling among the bubbles we were leaving in the blue. And then I turned my head and saw my very first shark. A grey elegant figure swimming over the reef. I was too occupied with my diving gear to experience the encounter the way I've always imagined. But I guess that's the charm of peeping in an ancient and odd world, to human parameters. They are and they swim.
We have seen common reef sharks, grey sharks, I believe I've seen a tiger shark way in the blue (even if it sounds irreal, it's the most logical explanation of what I've seen, after excluding all the other possible fishes... and anyway, I love the thought!), we've been swimming with the calm figure of a whale shark. We' ve been lucky enough to float above a hammerhead shark.
At the end it's all about luck (beside the experience of the diving guides, which is simply amazing). The last day we woke up at 5:30 a.m. for a dawn dive into the blue, hoping to cross the path of the hammerhead sharks arising from the deep blue in the morning hours. We descended into the blue, set our buoyancy at -40m and waited. The most beautiful memory I've collected on this trip was the sight of the humble plancton, vivid blue particles disappearing into the depths. "My God, it's full of stars!" (thank you, A.C. Clarke). And then the sound of a steel stick banging on the air tank. Below, a majestic hammerhead shark slowly swims on his route to unknown destinations.
Our slow ascent to the surface was full of happy faces and smiling mounths hanging on the regulators.
p.s. finally Yiannis has published his collage of underwater impressions taken on the trip with Sachika. Check it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0bysHS1omhw
