LIKE sex, scuba diving is something many people enjoy lots of before they have children. But for most, the call of the “underwater world”, as my dive instructor (Belize 1998) insisted on calling it, is usually drowned out by nappies and routines. New parents put away their snorkels and fins with a sigh and book bucket-and-spade holidays. Which is a shame. Diving with your partner can be one of the most intimate, romantic and moving experiences.
My wife, Carolina, and I learned to dive in Belize on our first big holiday together and then spent a good part of all our big annual holidays together diving. We loved it — we loved being nervous together, we loved learning new skills together and we loved the intensity of the shared experiences. Scuba diving is special because you can’t talk to each other — so you have to communicate using hand signals — and mutual comprehension can mean the difference between life and death.
The buddy system in diving — where you pair up with someone who checks your equipment for you and with whom you stay during the dive in case there are any problems — intensifies the trust. Now, I would never contemplate diving without my wife because it would not be the same and I wouldn’t trust anyone else to be my buddy.
So when this year our boys Tom and Jo-Jo began to emerge from super-dependent toddlerdom (Tom is 3 and Jo-Jo 2), we thought back wistfully to our diving days. Is it possible, I wondered, to go diving with two small children in tow? After all, thousands of Britons go skiing every year, merrily throwing their children into crèches and ski schools.
With the help of the travel company Kuoni, we tracked down Kurumba in the Maldives, a five-star resort on the island of Vihamanaafushi. It offered a kids’ club run by British-trained nannies, a highly respected dive school and the promise of beautiful reefs and lots of big fish. It seemed too good to be true.
And so it proved. A couple of weeks before departure, word came that the kids’ club was being closed down. But then the resort decided to keep it open with local childminders and promised a nanny to take care of any particular needs. We boarded the Sri Lankan Airlines flight for our week’s holiday with many misgivings.
We arrived at Malé airport for the short boat transfer to the resort. Kurumba is on the island closest to the capital of the Maldives and therefore the transfer time is a mere 15 minutes. The downside is that the views of the airport and the town do spoil the isolated desert island experience.
We were just happy to be facing a short trip to our rooms with a chance to settle the children soon. We were even happier to discover a speedboat waiting for us and to be met by Hussain, who introduced himself as our butler. A little taken aback, we let him take our bags and then lift the boys on to the boat. Evidently, the resort had decided to pull out all the stops.
I have never had a butler before and it felt, to start with, uncomfortable. For Hussain took his duties seriously. He had a golf buggy and we were seldom allowed to walk anywhere — even though it took only about 15 minutes to stroll around the island. We never managed it. Hussain’s main focus was mealtimes. He made our reservations and served us. Kurumba’s big selling point is its restaurants — there are five establishments serving international cuisine and a regular evening buffet. The standard was incredibly high. And it was amazing how quickly you can get used to having someone hovering at your elbow, ready to do the smallest task. Two active little boys who rarely sit still at mealtimes for long also helped us get over any embarrassment about asking Hussain for a glass of water to replace the one that had just been sent flying.
We stayed in a “pool villa”. The resort has 180 bungalows and villas ranging from smallish superior rooms to the royal residence where presidents and kings have stayed in the past. The boys slept in the living room separated from our bedroom by sliding doors. The inconvenience of this was swamped by the wonder of having our own private plunge pool as well as a small stretch of beach. The pool came into its own mostly because the temperatures stayed happily up in the 30s and from 11am to 3pm the beach was no place for little ones. The main pool near the restaurants complex was also a favourite for a dip before teatime.
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