Beach holiday

I can’t believe I waited I was until 36 to take a beach resort vacation. Well, given my experience with beaches during my early life you can’t really blame me – the mental model of the beach I had in my head was an urban beach, something of the sort of Chennai’s Elliots Beach, where all the action happens outside of the water.

At best you would roll up your pants a bit (or wear shorts) and wade a foot or two deep into the water, and let the waves hit you. The water was too dirty to let it touch the rest of you. You would instead spend time on the sand, talking and eating random things – stuff you couldn’t imagine doing an entire holiday doing.

My first “proper” visit to Goa in 2007 also left me underwhelmed. Again the water wasn’t worth getting into, and I didn’t understand why you needed to go so far to just sit in one place and eat and drink all day – that could be achieved in just about any bar in Bangalore.

And so in 2008 or so when the wife (then an “online friend” – we’d never met) asked me if I’m a beach types or a river and mountain types, I instantly chose the latter. Mountains gave you something to “do” – climb and walk around. My memories from bathing in streams in childhood were also rather pleasant.

Since then we’ve together visited two beach resorts, though both were as part of larger “sight seeing” trips of Sri Lanka. Once we went to Bentota, where we spent two days. We got bored enough after a day to spend the second evening watching inane stuff on TV. That Bentota experience had meant that on our next trip to Sri Lanka we had scheduled only a day for ourselves at Trincomalee, in one of the best beaches I’ve ever been to.

Two and two years (first in Barcelona; then in London) in Europe meant that most of our vacations in that time were “urban” – visiting cities and walking around them and taking in the historic sights and eating interesting food. It got a bit boring after a while, so when we got back to Asia earlier this year we decided it was time for a luxury “relaxing” vacation.

We went to this resort called Kurumba in Maldives, just a 10 minute boat ride away from the Maldives airport. It was among the quickest “get down to business” vacations I’ve ever been on. Our Air India flight touched down in Maldives around 4pm. By 5:30, we had been shown our rooms, changed and already hit the beach!

The next two days were spent there. While the image you have of a beach resort is that it’s a “passive” vacation (where you do nothing) this wasn’t so. I spent most of the time in water, mostly at the beach but also some time in the swimming pool (which the daughter found more fun – another post on that coming up).

We hadn’t taken along snorkelling equipment but that didn’t deter me. I put on my swimming goggles, waded close to coral reefs and just dived into the water. I saw lots of marine life in there – colourful fish and plants and all that. There were many more such reefs within 100 meters of the shore, and the shore was 200 metres from our room.

Wednesday typified our vacation. It was a bright and sunny day, which meant it was hot outside water, and that I now have massive sunburns all over my shoulders and back and arms. At 7am we had hit the beach. An hour and half of wading and dunking in water, looking at fish and chasing after one really beautiful turtle, we showered and went for breakfast.

After a long leisurely breakfast we were by the swimming pool, and due to the heat we were soon inside the water. Most of the morning was spent inside the water, and a drink and lunch were had at the poolside bar. Then we returned to our room and when the daughter refused to fall asleep, we hit the beach once again, for an hour or two. And then in the evening we went for a dolphin boat tour, before settling for a two hour long dinner.

It was a short vacation – only three days long, but it was a highly effective one. I think the volume of activity, even if it were in one place, meant that it helped take our minds completely off life as usual. Now I’m trying to slowly work my way back to life, and this post is part of that.

I’ll be back here again and again soon, to put more pertinent observations about this awesome vacation.

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