here comes the rain

So, I told you earlier that this is officially rainy season in the Maldives. Well, it rained for the first time today. The whole shower lasted about 15 minutes, and I was underwater for most of it so I nearly missed the whole thing because after the storm passed, the sun came out again.

We essentially spent the whole day snorkeling. We dove off our deck and snorkeled all the way to the main island and around it to the other side. We saw lots of fish, coral and even a sea turtle (there are lots of pictures on facebook, but here's one of the turtle and fish).


After we got back from snorkeling, Mary took a quick nap when I decided to keep on swimming. One of the best parts of the room is the deck in back. I showed you the tour earlier, but in short, there's a private plunge pool, the day bed, two lounge chairs, the sitting area, a dining table and a barbecue grill. But, the best part of all is that the deck literally goes right into the water, and jumping off is a lot of fun. So...I wanted to give you a first hand perspective of what that's like so I took this video.

Dinner tonight was at Fire restaurant. It's basically a big barbecue restaurant with part luau. You choose what you wish to barbecue and they do it for you. We chose a whole fish, some beef tenderloin and tiger prawns. We also had hibachi-made fried rice with chicken and shrimp, pork belly and stuffed turkey. The food was very good, but a lot of it. Dessert was a banana-chocolate egg roll thing with ice cream. It's was ok. Again the food was fairly reasonably priced...$75 all you can eat including the whole fish. Not bad.

I mentioned earlier that one of things I love about the W is all the little touches. I forgot to mention that every afternoon someone stops by our room with a small snack. Our first was a honey almond cookie thing, yesterday was fresh made marshmallows with chocolate dipping and today was a mango jelly dessert. It's always small, but it's a nice touch.

More tomorrow...