I won a pair of round-trip tickets on Qatar Airways at a silent auction benefiting Citizen Schools. (This item also included 2 nights stay at a 5-star hotel in Chennai, but that's not really relevant to this trip.) The details said that this was redeemable for any destination Qatar Airways flew, excepting Australia and a few other fine details. The origin was limited to a small handful of US airports, including JFK and ORD, but excluding BOS. This cost $1200.
My husband worked with a Qatar Airways rep to redeem this certificate for actual plane tickets to the Maldives. The process itself was simple enough: a few emails were exchanged, and boom, done. Unfortunately, the certificate only covered the fares for the flights, not the taxes. It was here that I finally understood why my colleagues despise the YQ/YR surcharge. For 2 travelers, the taxes and fees added up to another $1000.
Notice, now, that we have to somehow get from BOS to JFK. Thanks to Google Flights, we were able to find some reasonably timed flights on Delta Airlines that didn't involve sitting around in the airport twiddling our thumbs for too long. We waited a bit too long to book this part of our travel, so we were out yet another $1000.
For those of you following along at home, our round-trip from BOS to MLE totaled roughly $3200.
Delta's flight from BOS to JFK was straightforward enough. The $25 fee for the first piece of checked luggage was annoying, but that's the way the airline industry has gone, so meh. Getting from the domestic terminal to the international terminal at JFK was pretty straightforward too. We had a bit of a wait to board the plane for our next leg, but with Kindles, it passed reasonably quickly.
JFK to DOH (Doha International Airport, Doha, Qatar) was a rather long flight. The listed duration on our tickets is 12 hours and 20 minutes. I successfully slept for 9 of the 12 hours, so it didn't seem too long. I'm pretty sure I missed a few meals or snacks, but that didn't particularly bother me.
With a roughly 6 hour layover in DOH, my husband and I grabbed a meal at a decent Italian restaurant, wandered around the terminal, took a bunch of photos of the Bear Lamp and the animatronic dinosaur, and drank a huge quantity of Moroccan mint tea at a tea and sweets cafe. I regretted the mint tea on the flight afterward, where the caffeine disrupted my sleep, and the liquid surged sickeningly in my stomach before demanding, urgently and repeatedly, to be purged.
For our final leg, we were pleasantly surprised to have been upgraded to business class. It was pretty damn swank. We had enormous couch-like seats that reclined to more or less horizontal. The dinner menu looked delicious, and was complimentary, so we stuffed ourselves some more. There was also complimentary wine. I found myself growing more and more uncomfortable as the flight progressed. Near as I could figure, the slight angle of the seats off the direction of travel (they were pointed a bit away from the center aisle) made me extremely motion sick. Those 5 hours were some of the most luxurious yet sickening flying hours I'd ever spent.
Finally, we arrived at MLE, Male's Ibrahim Nasir International Airport. I was ready to collapse or vomit. It was shockingly hot and humid after the frigid air conditioning of basically everything leading up to arrival. We weren't given a moment to rest, however, as we were almost immediately greeted by our fishing guide.
Getting to MLE took a total of 28 hours, including the taxi from our house.
Stay tuned for more adventures!
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