Maldives

We just woke up in our hotel room in Sorong after a five-hour nap, recovering from our redeye from Jakarta this morning. Craig and Lam, our lodge-mates for a night somewhere in the Bolivian desert, call this place “So Wrong”. It’s not quite that offensive of a town, but it’s pretty clear that the visitors who are passing through are here for one reason only: to dive in Raja Ampat. In a few hours, we’re going to meet downstairs to go out for pizza and meet the rest of our liveaboard crew.

The Maldives, like the Seychelles, were largely Alice’s project; when explaining our travels to people we’ve met, I’ve usually framed both these places as pit stops on the way to our “real” destinations, or to drop them entirely. But after a non-stop three weeks in Antarctica, Torres del Paine, and the altiplano, even I felt a little grateful to have a week to unwind. The islands were more or less exactly what one imagines them to be: atolls of bright turquoise from above, long white sand beaches, and overwater villas from which you can jump straight into an ocean teeming with life (and, unfortunately, the occasional man-made debris).

A relaxing beach vacation

Not a lot has changed since our last relaxing beach vacation in the Seychelles three months ago. Our concierge must have been overwhelmed as Alice packed our schedule with tennis, kayaking, waterskiing, snorkeling, scuba diving, and trampoline cardio. Spikeball would’ve been on that list too, but the other couple that was supposed to play cancelled on us. Biking wasn’t an official activity, but it was the best way to get around our little island, so Alice spent an hour or so one day practicing her turns and confidence. What Alice lacks in biking skill, she makes up for in the core strength needed to get up on a waterski; she was pretty much jumping over wakes within a couple of minutes, while I spent half an hour in the water getting dragged around by a boat, saltwater being pressure-washed up my nose.

Facial recognition AI

I always sort of knew this, but over the past few months I’ve come to appreciate just how advanced Alice’s facial recognition neural network is. Of course, she always builds catalogs of the whole cast of characters we see in the places we stay, and regularly recognizes—hours or often days later—the people in front of us in line during boarding or sitting in the lobby of our hotel. But it turns out her AI works on non-humans too; whether it’s from a Land Cruiser in Africa, while we snorkeled in the Galapagos, or searched for pumas in Torres del Paine, she would easily go head-to-head with our guides for picking out animals from the landscape, barely more than dots in the distance (to me, at least). In the Maldives, Alice spent a few late afternoons out on our terrace fine-tuning her overwater algorithm, searching for fish, rays, and the occasional shark.

Conservation Alice

After this week, we wondered if, in another world, Alice might have become a marine biologist. She was out snorkeling on the reef behind our villa every day, and for reasons I didn’t fully understand but was happy to see, seemed content to stare out into the ocean for hours looking for the occasional fin from a fish or shark to breach the surface. Apparently, her AI is also effective for finding trash; she found all sorts of stuff floating in the water (sometimes way, way in the distance) and swam out to retrieve it. By the end of the week, she had built a sort of grotesque showcase of some of the impact humans have on our environment.

Infinite oceans II

As we watched the sun set over the wide-open Maldivian ocean on our first day at the resort, I couldn’t help but to feel a little uninspired, and to wonder whether our time at Salar de Uyuni would cast some sort of shadow over future sunsets, making their stark demarcations of land or sea and sky look crude and rough. There was a moment though, towards the end of our week, where the clouds and the ocean and our pool lined up in just the right way to bring back a little bit of the magic in Bolivia.