Maldives here we come

This morning I woke up and looked around our incredible room at Aditya.  I looked up at the ornately carved, wooden headboard that looks like it was stolen from some ancient temple doorway; I looked out of the large glass doors in front of me at our private jacuzzi plunge pool; I looked up at the now bare ceiling that had been so spectacular last night with it's projected display of the night sky; I looked across the bed at my peacefully sleeping wife, in her element; and I thought, 'Bollocks.  Now we have to leave.'

I feel sure that we will be returning to this hotel one day.  There's something about it that makes it truly special.

Anyway, enough of that.  Back to business...

Keen to make sure he fucked up at least one more time before we got rid of him, Stanley met us at 8 am to inform us that, yes, we were indeed supposed to be saying goodbye to him yesterday, as Kuoni in their infinite wisdom managed to arrange another driver to come and take us to the airport.  Poor old Stanley, he really is quite useless!  Apparently not his fault, however, as his handler had told him he was taking us to the airport.  In any case, we filled in his survey form, said our very sincere thanks and tipped him 7,000 Rs (more to avoid any bad blood than becasue we felt he really deserved it).  He seemed happy enough.

We left the hotel around 8.15 am with the aim of getting to the airport by 12 pm.  Our new driver had obviously been to the same driving school as Stan the Man, and we slid through the  traffic like an eel on Red Bull.  That is, until we hit the Christmas shopping rush.

With today being a Saturday, hundreds of Sri Lankans were out trying to buy last minute gifts for family and friends.  Amazingly, given that 70% of Sri Lankans are Buddhist, they still go all out for celebrating Christmas (presumably the corporate version of things, as opposed to the newborn baby surrounded by livestock version...).  This meant that our driver ended up taking as many backroads as possible to avoid getting stuck - unfortunately, he wasn't the only one with this idea, so we kept getting stuck.

This would have been fine if both Amber and I hadn't both been in increasingly desperate need of a pee!  It was Catch 22.  We couldn't afford to stop becasue it was entirely feasible we might not be able to catch our flight to Malé, but on the other hand, no-one wants to arrive at an international airport having peed their pants.

Thankfully,  after three and a half hours of careening around Sri Lankan backroads, feeling every single bump in our bladders and trying desperately not to laugh and make matters worse, we arrived at the airport at 12.15 pm, bid our driver farewell and made our way straight to the toilets.  To any onlooker we must have looked hilarious, me pushing the trolley laden with bags and Amber hobbling beside me like a zombie - too afraid to run in case there was an accident!

Longest wee ever.

Colombo airport isnt very big, so we were through to departures in no time.  Amber was keen to try our luck at getting into some of the executive lounges, but despite our best smiles and cunning use of the honeymoon card we were turned away from all of them.  Amber has decided this means that she's a pleb.  Maybe they have a 'no Essex girls' policy when it comes to airport lounges and business class upgrades in Sri Lanka...

We didn't have long to wait at our gate before boarding in any case, so before we knew it we had already boarded the plane and taken off to start the second phase of our honeymoon.  We were both sad to leave Sri Lanka.  It really does have so much going for it as a travel destination.  Next time we will back-pack and dig a little bit deeper under the surface.  Looking out of the plane window it felt like Sri Lanka was sad to see us go:  The first truly overcast day since we arrived eleven days ago.

The flight to Malé took just on hour and fifteen minutes.  Long enough for me to watch most of a terrible movie called 'This Means War'.  It was already abridged for showing on airplanes, but the plot was so weak that I managed to skip through about half an hour of footage and still get the gist: Two CIA agent buddies compete to date Reese Witherspoon; much hilarity ensues (or not); they fall out; they team up to beat the bad guys; one of them ends up with Reese Witherspoon; THE END.  This movie has lowered the bar significantly in terms of how I will rate movies in the future.  You would have to work really hard to make a worse one.

Touch down!  The plane landed before we'd even realised we were anywhere near the ground.  Immigration went very smoothly and we were greeted by a chap with a Kuoni placard, who passed us onto another guy, who took us to our awesome speedboat.

We had the speed boat to ourselves, which was lovely, and as we shot off towards Velassaru I thought to myself, 'This is how it should be'.

In no time at all we were disembarking onto the jetty at Velassaru, where we met Sam Willems, our Kuoni rep.  He was extremely polite, helpful and full of information about the island, which we lapped up, sitting in the Fen Bar sipping on fresh juice.  We're booked onto the all-inclusive Indulgence Package, which entitles us to the breakfast buffet, a three-course lunch with drinks in any of the smaller eateries on the island (Turquoise and Chill Bar) and dinner in any of the restaurants in the evening (Teppanyaki, Vela, Etesian and Sand).  As Sam described the quality of the food, we were both salivating!

We were shown to our water bungalow.  These are the over-water bungalows that you always see in promotional material for the Maldives - wooden huts with thatched roofs suspended over the sea on metal beams and connected to the island by means of a wooden jetty.  Tropical paradise eat your heart out.  As expected, the sea is crystal clear and teaming with marine life.

As far as I could tell, our room was perfect.  Nice bathroom with bath tub and shower looking out to sea at the neighbouring island; huge bed; Bose home theatre system connected to large plasma screen telly; private sun deck and ladder down to the water.  Sweet.

Amber was less convinced, but then her standards when it comes to anything meeting expectations are (in)famously high - a fact which makes me feel quite proud of myself every day!  It all boiled down to the fact that the bathroom was a little bit scuzzy: mould around the base of the shower, growing in the grouting between the tiles and around the base of the sink; and a nasty stain around the plu hole in the sink itself.  For the amount of money you pay to come to the Maldives, Amber's right, you should be blown away by the levels of cleanliness in the room, and we weren't.

Despite being halfway through our complimentary bottle of champagne, I put a call in to Sam to see if we could look at another room.  He went to check with reception for us.  The response was that there was another room available, but that hotel policy dictated that guests weren't allowed to see rooms until they had been cleaned.  The room wouldn't be ready until 8 pm.  All we wanted to do was have a shower, unpack and get ready for dinner, so we decided against hanging around until 8 pm.  Sam handled the situation perfectly.

For dinner we thought we'd try our luck at getting into Teppanyaki, as it's supposed to be the best restaurant on the island and has pride of place over the water at the end of a long jetty.  We got lucky, they had availability at 8.45 pm.  We headed to Fen Bar to kill some time and had a nice chat with the very friendly bar man, who it turns out is from Sri Lanka.  He also makes an excellent caipirinha!

Dinner was very good.  We were given a very romantic corner table, so we could watch the big fish swimming around beneath us.  They clearly throw the offcuts of fish from the food prep over the side, so the fish beneath us were all playing the waiting game.

The food is Japanese themed, so we had sushi, followed by excellent wagyu beef to share (the waiter also brought me a plate full of sake-marinated grilled prawns becasue he didn't want me to miss out on the seafood!).  We ordered two different desserts.  Amber's was very good, mine was VERY odd - grapefruit-flavoured curd with wasabi icecream anyone?!  The wonderful food was accompanied by an equally wonderful pinot noir.