Indian Ocean

De Havilland Canada Twin Otter

Cool picture of a cool airplane on the beach in The Maldives. We've been there before. The flight log shows it operating out of Male Int'l, so let's take a look:

Two populated islands in the Malé Atoll
Male / Velana International Airport

Okay, there's the jetport, but where do the seaplanes dock?

Maldives Seaplane Docks

That's a bunch of seaplanes.

Maldives Seaplane Terminal

Might be the biggest seaplane operation in the world. They have docks for 55 seaplanes.

Where are The Maldives? Middle of the Indian Ocean, that's where:

The Maldives & Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean

For Patrick O'Brian fans, Mauritius and Reunion are in the lower left corner.

It's hard to get a handle on the scale of The Maldives. There's a zillion tiny islands spread over a zillion square miles of ocean. This political map gives an overview:

Atolls of The Maldives
Roughly 500 miles top to bottom

Note that an Atoll is not the same as an island. The two islands shown above are part of the Kaafu administrative area / Malé Atoll:

Malé Atoll
The placemark is on the airport

Bonus: I'm poking around looking at The Maldives and Tam turns me onto this BBC report about Diego Garcia. It explains why we don't hear much about the place. The report has several pictures, but nothing recent.

Update 3 days later:  Why is the UK handing the Chagos Islands back to Mauritius? - Aljazeera

                                  Chagos Archipelago - Wikipedia

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A post I started back in July 2014 but never published:

A Malaysian airliner got shot down in the Ukraine this morning, which reminds us that there is a new conspiracy theory circulating that the Malaysian airliner that disappeared a couple months ago was diverted to Diego Garcia by the CIA. Irba tells us that Diego Garcia is basically a ring of skinny islands around a big lagoon, and the lagoon is fresh water. That seems improbable, so I do a little checking.
    Diego Garcia gets a hundred inches of rain a year, which is a boat load. Oregon, the rainiest place in the USA onlty gets about thirty some inches. Diego Garcia is a coral atoll, and as such is very porous so rain water soaks right in. Since it is going into this porous rock, there isn't a lot of mixing going on, so it basically collects on top of the salt water that has soaked in from the ocean. This fresh water can be extracted via shallow wells and as long as you don't take too much out of any one spot you can get all the water you need. I mean a hundred inches of rain a year is a stink load of rain.