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THE MALDIVES COLLECTIVE
One boat and nine very different surfers on a collision course with an unfamiliar culture
The only things that weren't obscured under black cloth were her hazel eyes. They were beautiful. She had enhanced them by applying ample amounts of rich, charcoal eyeliner, adding shadow to her lids and finishing the look with smooth, black mascara. I saw her glance at us as we crossed paths in the airport terminal. What must this dutiful Muslim woman think of us? There were six in our group, all females, dressed in low-cut tank tops and shorts, chit-chatting loudly as we wandered the terminal halls.
After some 35 hours of travel from LAX, we arrived in Male, the capital of the Maldives, around 10 p.m. and a whole day before the rest of our group would land. Luckily, my best friend Amy works as a surf guide there so she was kind enough to organize transportation, overnight accommodations and a day of surfing for us.
She warned us that Male would be a strange place but experiencing it was a whole different thing. It appeared that everyone, aside from the few other tourists we saw, adhered firmly to the local religion -- Sunni Islam. The cloaked woman from the airport quickly became a common sight and we promptly learned to avoid uncomfortable glares by covering up in tee-shirts and longer shorts. We were a bunch very different girls in a strange, new world.
After a long day of surfing, we returned to the airport to meet the other three girls in our group. I'm not sure how they felt but I was anxious. Not only were we in an unfamiliar country where females are a different type of citizen than males, but we were about to board a 90-foot boat for 10 days with bunch of strangers. To make matters even more stressful, I had helped arrange the group so I was well aware that the girls had a variety of personalities -- even their surfing styles and board preferences all varied. This wasn't your typical A-list pro trip; nor a trip for a mutual sponsor, and it certainly wasn't a tight group of friends. I wondered if bringing these girls together was a recipe for disaster.
It was almost midnight by the time we'd met up with our two Liquid Destination surf guides and boarded the Nautilus One. We were all too exhausted to get beyond simple introductions with the three new girls who'd joined us that evening. The groan of the boat's engine woke us just before sunrise and within a few minutes everyone was chit-chatting over fresh cups of coffee and bowls of corn flakes. It wasn't long before board bags were being unzipped and the bow of the boat was covered with longboards, funboards, shortboards, eggs, fishes and every other shape under the sun. Would these girls even want to surf at the same types of breaks?
It was only the first morning and iPods were already locked on replay, blasting the same tunes over and over again on the boat's stereo system. It looked like things could get tricky when tastes in music were expressed by various members of our crew -- what some liked; others clearly didn't. Everyone on this trip was different; different in what we liked to listen to, how we liked to surf and what we liked to ride. Little did anyone realize how well a boatload of different personalities could get along. Like they say -- opposites attract.
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October 27, 2009
