Maldives

 A few years ago, Brandon and I took the children to Dubai.  It was the first time we'd taken a trip where we weren't visiting family.  Everyone had a wonderful time, and the children have been remembering it with fondness ever since it happened.  So when we moved to Tashkent, I started making plans for another trip with the children.  We had been planning on going to Bali, but when COVID happened and Bali shut down to tourists, we had to make other plans.

Europe wasn't really an option, and we weren't looking for a European vacation anyway.  Europe is great for older children who understand and appreciate things like architecture, history, and art, but really terrible for smaller children who get tired and bored very, very easily.  So until our younger ones grow more interested in those kinds of things, beach vacations are the best vacations for us.

Thankfully, the Maldives has been welcoming international tourists for awhile now, with no quarantine requirements upon arrival.  All we needed were negative PCR tests, valid passports, and a hotel reservation.  

The older children had spring break this past week for their online classes, so we decided to travel during that break, going for an entire week.  The travel wasn't that bad in comparison to traveling to the US, leaving Tashkent at four in the morning and getting into Malé, the capital of the Maldives, at two in the afternoon.  But the best part was that we never changed timezones.  I've never traveled internationally before and stayed in the same time zone.  It turns out that it's a lot easier to get over a 1:30 am start time when you only have to get over the lack of sleep and not a nine-hour time difference to boot.  

The Maldives is a country entirely composed of tropical atolls, located three degrees above the equator in the Indian ocean.  There are about 1,200 individual islands in the Maldives, an a majority of the hotels are resorts that are located on their own private atoll.  The resort we were staying at was far enough from Malé that we had to take a seaplane to get to it.  With only sixteen seats in the plane, we made up half the passengers and had to leave half our luggage to come on a later flight because there wasn't enough room for it.

Our hotel was on a small island, 500 meters long by 200 meters wide, and all the villas were either oceanfront or over the water.  There were lots of families with children, although none of them with seven, so we were in good company at breakfast, dinner, and by the pool.

Both Brandon and the children, when seeing the clear, blue, tropical water for the first time, were completely amazed.  "I didn't know water could really be this color!" exclaimed Kathleen, "I thought all the pictures had been photoshopped.  It turns out that they weren't!"  The island was a small blip in the ocean, covered with coconut palm trees and surrounded by white sandy beaches.  For me, I can't think of a more perfect picture of paradise.  

Everyone had a wonderful week of swimming, playing in the sand, taking walks on the beach, and snorkeling.  The island was located on the edge of an atoll, so the reef was literally right out our back door.  All we had to do was put on our gear, swim out fifteen or twenty feet, and then gently drift with the current along the two-hundred foot drop off.  We saw all kinds of tropical fish and coral, giant clams, sea anemones with their attendant clownfish, a moray eel, blacktip sharks, and a group of five manta rays swooping across the reef.  

One of my favorite parts of the week was not cooking or making children eat anything they didn't like.  Every morning William enjoyed two doughnuts for breakfast while Elizabeth ate a whole plate of fresh pineapple with her own doughnut.  Brandon had fish curry every breakfast, and Kathleen drank at least three glasses of fresh juice.  Despite having new kinds of delicious food every night, Joseph stayed true to his favorite meal, rice with ketchup, a roll, and fruit finished up with a bowl of ice cream.  William had potatoes wedges and a roll to even out the two bowls of ice cream.  The rest of us enjoyed more variety, but what mattered to me was that I didn't cook it, I didn't clean it up, and I didn't have to make anyone eat their food.  

By the end of the week, everyone had been burned multiple times (tropical sun is fierce even when you do reapply sunscreen), the children's hair was several shades lighter, and we had collected at least a pound of beautiful seashells.  We all regretfully boarded the seaplane, wishing we all had at least several more weeks of paradise.  

When I asked Brandon what he would have changed about the trip, he thought for awhile before answering.  "I would have brought the baby monitor.  And another bottle of sunscreen."  We both thought for a little longer before agreeing that we couldn't think of anything else we would have done differently.  And that is when you know that you've had about the most perfect vacation possible.  I'm already making plans for a return trip.