Moby_
Contributor
Hi all, thanks in advance for your opinions!
I'm based in SF and just found out I have to go to Pune, India for work. I'm looking for recommendations on where to go on vacation after my 2 weeks in India. The timeframe is early to mid March. The obvious choice seems to be the Maldives but I'm not sure it's a good fit for several reasons. My home base in Monterey, so 1/2 my experience is cold water diving.
Considerations:
I'm based in SF and just found out I have to go to Pune, India for work. I'm looking for recommendations on where to go on vacation after my 2 weeks in India. The timeframe is early to mid March. The obvious choice seems to be the Maldives but I'm not sure it's a good fit for several reasons. My home base in Monterey, so 1/2 my experience is cold water diving.
Considerations:
- My wife will go diving with me a few times, but isn't obsessed with it like I am, so ideally she'll have nice beaches and pools where she can relax and read or go for walks while I'm diving. The Maldives seems to make this difficult with a single "bikini beach".
- Since it's not 100% about diving, a live-aboard isn't really a good option, so we'll need a resort/hotel/Airbnb situation but we're open if it means saving a ton of money. We could potentially split the time between live-aboard and hotel/resort.
- Ideally there will be diving directly from the resort of diving close to the resort that doesn't require long boat rides (which would presumably make it more expensive).
- I'm not independently wealthy, so I'd like to pay a somewhat normal price for the vacation, probably in the $3-5k for 2 people range for accommodations (not including diving or flights).
- We aren't big drinkers but definitely like to indulge on vacation. The Maldives makes this difficult with the only alcohol being on a boat somewhere...
- We'll be taking all of our own gear, so rentals isn't really much of a concern.
- We like reefs more than wrecks.
- I'm really interested to see sharks, mantas, whale sharks, octopus, exotic fish, etc...
- I'm also very interested to try some drift diving which I haven't done yet.
- We've never visited Asia or anything west of CA besides Hawaii.
- All our vacations are beach vacations and we aren't super interested in spending a lot of time in cities or doing touristy things, although that would be a nice to have.
- All inclusive is obviously a nice to have but we're not opposed to cooking our own meals if shopping is relatively simple.