Mood: Sleepy 
Weather: 27°C, Cloudy
Location: Alif Dhaal Atoll, Maldives
I’m really sleepy this evening so I’m going to try to go through this as fast as I can.
Woke up earlier than I wanted to, around 8:20am or so. I started by rubbing liquid soap to the inner sides of my iPhone’s waterproof casing. It worked wonders. However, I noticed that it takes the iPhone some time to adjust between the cameras and because of this, it really affected the photographs that I had wanted to take today especially.
We had a briefing before we set off to sea for whale shark snorkeling. There were 3 main rules:
1. No flash photography
2. No touching the whaleshark
3. Keep your distance
We were briefed on other things: the plan was that we were supposed to approach the side of the whale shark, after being dropped off to the side of its path. In reality, we were dropped off right in front of it. I literally have a blurry video of the whale shark right in front of me because that’s where I ended up as soon as I jumped from the boat. At the time, I was doing my best to swim to the side of it but there were people behind me and basically everywhere around me. It was absolute chaos. We had to move to another location to see the second whale shark – it was slightly bigger than the first one but they were both juvenile whale sharks. For some odd reason I had expected to see a giant, magnificent creature. I’m glad I finally got the chance to see a whale shark in person but I wouldn’t go for “whale shark snorkeling” again. Yes, there is a cruelty aspect – you have about 10 or so boats full of tourists trying to find a whale shark. The first boat that spots it calls the other boats in and so you’ve got about a hundred snorkelers in the water kicking and shoving each other for a shot at the whale shark. This doesn’t really physically harm the whale shark as long as nobody touches it, but it does disturb their peace. It’s just out there to feed.
My pictures and videos didn’t come out as I had hoped, but really, we were out there for about 3 hours and the whale sharks that we spotted disappeared into the distance in no time. So it was actually quite exhausting. When we were on our way back to the shore our 2nd cousin assisted in ordering a vegan pizza with mushrooms and pineapple #TeamPineappleOnPizza so my sister and I shared in an extremely vegan cheesy pizza as soon as we got back to our room. It was quite alright, but there was just far too much cheese. It tasted like vegan cheddar.
We then went snorkeling from our water villa to the beach bar, and after I had a Sprite Zero while my sister had a Carlsberg, we returned to our room on foot. We didn’t want to spend all day just lazing around in the room so we walked to the bar where they held the marine biology lecture the other day. I had more Sprite Zero while my sister drank coffee. My sister set the AC down really low yesterday so I felt really cold all night. I wore the bathrobe to bed and it was still too cold for me! I woke up with a throat dryness feeling, and I still feel it this evening. I’ve tried to hydrate as much as possible but to no avail, I still feel it. This evening we’ve switched off the AC so that I can try to heal. I’ve been feeling chills since yesterday (or was it the other day?) so I do wonder if I have a fever. After the snorkeling experience my sister felt she wasn’t ready to have a scuba diving orientation session and so we cancelled today’s afternoon dive. We will consider having it on the 2nd of May if we both feel up to it.
My sister’s phone casing wasn’t sealed properly prior to jumping in the water for the snorkeling session. I remember seeing it slightly open and asked her about it, she told me that the manual told her to set it up that way. I told her numerous time that she needs to hear a ‘click’ sound to know that the casing has sealed securely but she didn’t listen to me. Water got into her casing, the battery inside it was damaged by the sea water and we’re also waiting to see if the sea water has damaged the casing’s motherboard. This evening her phone’s screen went black after being unresponsive. She’s waiting for the battery to die out so that it can be rebooted.
Anyway, we returned to our room. I prepared a cup of decaf tea (I actually brought it all the way from Seychelles together with my sweetener because they don’t usually have decaf tea here at the hotels and I like only one specific type of sweetener: saccharin. We then went to the buffet to have dinner. Let’s just say I’m not proud of how much I’ve consumed today, definitely well above 1k calories! Tomorrow will have to be an extremely low calorie day. I definitely don’t want to make a habit out of overeating.
My employee showed up to work today. She probably got sick leave but decided not to take it. Today was payday for her and we had to deduct a small amount from her salary this month because she had incurred a loss during the month of April. I asked her what happened to that money or if she knows where things went wrong, i.e. did she give too much change? Her response was “don’t know”. I’m pretty sure she’s crazy mad at our decision to deduct from her salary.