Maldives and Colombo, Sri Lanka

The Maldives include 1200 islands and coral atolls, none of which is over 1.82 meters above sea level. They are currently working on a plan for that day, sometime in this century, when the rising sea levels make their islands inhabitable. The current question is whether the people move throughout the world or whether they carve out a piece of land somewhere to build the “new” Maldives (where would that be????). The islands are spread over 37,500 square miles of ocean, but the land mass is only 115 square miles.

There is one international airport, which occupies its own island. Landing there you either take a commuter airplane to one of the 7 islands, which has its own airport, a seaplane to one of the other distant islands, or a boat to one of the closer islands. Picture 1 shows the port for taxis at the international airport.

So what do you do there? Dive! We were told it is a world-class dive site. Not being scuba divers, however, we chose to go down in a submarine (Picture 2) at the edge of one of the reefs. We’ve never done this before for two reasons: it seems one of those touristy things that real travelers don’t do and Betsy really doesn’t like to go under water! On the other hand, Rick’s eyesight is not good enough to enjoy snorkeling in a regular mask, so he’s never gotten the most out of their snorkeling experiences. Was it worth the expensive, which approached the cost of a custom snorkeling mask for Rick? Not really…. The reef was not in great shape and the fish can easily be seen snorkeling—no eels, no rays, no turtles, no big creatures. But we can now check off “ridden in a submarine under water” from our bucket list! Pictures 3 and 4 show some fish and coral.

Then we were off to Colombo, Sri Lanka. We were there last year and made a major excursion to visit one of the elephant camps, which are 2-3 hours from Colombo. This year we stayed in Colombo and saw some of the local sites.

We visited the Independence Plaza, which was constructed following Sri Lanka’s independence from Great Britain in 1965. It was a lovely carved stone structure, but the real interest there was a wedding that was about to start.  Pictures 5, 6, and 7 show the groom in traditional dress, the bride in white and one of the bridesmaids.

Second stop was the National Museum. The following 2 pictures are just 2 of the many fascinating things we learned. Picture 8 shows a 12^th century urinal from a Buddhist monastery—no simple sanitation system for these guys. Picture 9 shows the Caturmana  proportions for a seated Buddha statue. Not aware that such proportions were dictated, it was interesting to learn that the hairline to the floor, the right shoulder to the left foot, the left shoulder to the right foot and the foot to foot measurements must be the same.

Picture 10 shows a very large seated Buddha from the Gangaram Buddhist Temple (Picture 11). The proportions seem pretty obvious.

Also at the temple, there was the stupa shown in Picture 12. This one houses a relic from the Buddha. His body and possessions were divided into over 33,000 parts and each is stored in a structure like this. Small stupas are used to store the ashes of regular people.

While the national religion of Sri Lanka is Buddhism, there is religious freedom. We saw a few Christian churches and Picture 13 shows the Grand Mosque.

Finally, as with most large cities, the traffic is horrendous, as shown in Picture 14!