Describe your most memorable vacation.
December 2015, Andaman Islands
Sometime in 2014, my older sibling had completed her dive certification and decided to ensure all of us completed the certification as well. So, towards thes second half of 2015 we started to plan a dive trip to the Andamans. The most important thing here is that as a family, we occasionally plan such outings and everyone’s invited – family only. The last time the four of us were together were at the Everest Base Camp. So, December 2015 was the year the entire family decided to get certified. Certified insane was more like it. But there we were – the whole clan. We were the dirty dozen – a family group that included 2 adults and 3 kids.
Christmas vacations are the only vacations that overlap for all of us -working members and the students. So, we picked out 5 days where we would overlap and wanted to complete the certification as one big group. Mum flew in with one sibling, and Amma flew in with us. While Mum had already deided to join the outing, Amma’s trip was purely an accident. Quite literally so. She had come to visit us as she was feeling slightly unwell and had been with us for a few days. The plan was for her to stay back at home while we went for this trip and then she would eventually head back after we returned and were reassured that she was fit. A week before we were to depart, she had gone down for a walk and had tripped and fallen down. A neighbor had seen this and had come rushing to tell us that she had been injured. We immediately took her to the hopsital and found out that she had a hariline fracture. Now we were confused on what we should do. Amma was injured and we wanted to stay back to take care of her. But Amma insisted that she would be fine on her own, although she would not have one hand fully functional. That didn’t sit well with us, so we convinced her to join us at Andamans. Of course, we enquired iwth everyone else if it would be allright for her to join us as we did not want her to be by herself. We thought about it for a couple of days ourselves and realised that Amma and Mum would enjoy each others company and it would ensure that they would not be alone either. So we coaxed Amma to join us and off we went, as one big family to the Andamans.
We flew from our hometown to port-blair where we spent a night and then from there we caught the ferry to the Andamans. The crossing from PortBlair to Andamans was a very memorable trip, where Amma took a couple of pills for motion sickness and ultimatley managed to puke the pill as well as everything else in her belly during the crossing. I dont know if my son was sympathetic and reacted as so, or if he had motion sickness as well, but, I had a puking Amma on one side and a puking kid on the other. The older kid got bored of the drama real fast and kept rolling her eyes. An hour and four puke bags later, we slowly pulled into the jettty. Andamans is a small island situatied closer to Myanmar, Thailand, and Malaysia than to India, and yet it is an Indian Territory. Anyway, we were herded into a van of sorts and traveled to the diveshop.
Mum loved going to the beach and Amma also loved walking on the sand, so Andamans or our first view of Andamans through Dive India was a welcome surprise. The kids intially assumed that Amma would not be joining us and were feeling sad that they would not get to spend time with her, and when they found out that she wuold be a part of this trip, they were super excited to have both grandmothers on this trip with them. I was thrilled that I did not have to cancel on this family gathering because I stayed back to help Amma get better. This wasn’t out of some misguided sense of martyrdom, but a more practical reasoning. But Amma joining us was a superb alternative.
Dive india was out dive shop of choice and we had blocked most of their rooms for the duration of our stay. We were all accomodated in adjoining tents and our banter started first thing every morning. The kids were slightly young and could not be certified so they were left with the seniors at the dive shop and usually spent their time frolicking in the ocean. The beaches in Andaman are pristine and safe and the kids loved hanging out. A few days at sea almost everyday and the kids had tanned four shades darker and loved every moment. I remember starting my open water course with everyone and then panicking and being left behind.
Evereyone else finished their open water certification in the allocated 5-days and I had to rebook for a vacation in a few months to re-do my certifications. My older sibling volunteered to host the kids for a month so I could certify myself and that’s how we got to go on our second honeymoon – well almost, considering we had to wake up at the crack of dawn to get ready for the dive every day. The only similarity with our first honeymoon was probably the location, we were at the beach on both ocassions. And that was it. I got certified a few months later, a lot wiser and a lot more qualified than I was a few months prior.
The best part of the vacation was the fact that I was with everyone who mattered to me, at one place and even their largest table was not able to accomodate all of us. And the most memorable part of this vacation was not me getting certified, but Mum getting into the ocean to do a discover SCUBA dive. Mum did not know how to swim. Mum had never been to the ocean apart from the fleeting visits to Mumbai and Chennai. So, for her to wear full snorkel gear and get under water was something else entirely. It made me realise how important it was to grab opportunities as and when you got them. And Amma coming along iwth us, was a reminder that when one door shuts, another opens.
Just a little more 