THE OTHER BIG FIVE
A MALDIVIAN SNORKELLING ODYSSEY , BY AMI KAPILEVICH
I ’ m putting on my swimming trunks when I spot it : a grey blur on the deck that materialises into a magnificent heron .
We look at each other , the elegant creature of the air and the bare-buttocked , middle-aged South African man . The bird is so close that I can see the scales along its legs and the speckled tuft of feathers at its craw . I can ’ t say the heron was as impressed with what it saw .
“ We have three grey herons here ,” the resort ’ s front of house manager told me at dinner that night . “ All of them called George . Even the female .”
I had my first close encounter with George before I ’ d even properly changed out of my travelling clothes . This set the tone for the rest of my week in the Maldives , where the beauty of the resorts is only exceeded by the beaches and the abundant reefs they are built on .
There were steps leading from the deck of my luxury sea villa directly into the water , and within a few minutes of my first snorkel there a magnificent eagle ray glided past me . Of course , I had no idea at the time what sort of ray I was looking at . My snorkelling generally involves marvelling at the abundance of sea life and then labelling it from memory afterwards . But I knew from the amazing yellow spots on this creature ’ s back that it was something special .
The following day we took a boat out to a nearby reef and saw an octopus performing a show for a school of triggerfish as it changed colours , from blue to purple to a weird , transparent white . “ I don ’ t care what else I see out here ,” I thought to myself , “ it can ’ t get better than that .” But a few minutes later I was looking at a giant turtle drifting lazily in the current as we crossed a sandbank .
I had done enough snorkelling in Mauritius and Indonesia to know that I was onto something special here . I became hungry – greedy , even – for more .
Towards the end of my stay I set off to explore a famous drop-off around our resort and saw a moray eel slither from
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