A school of fish whooshed beneath my snorkeling goggles while an octopus glided gently out of view. The bright sunlight reached deep into the clear, blue sea, illuminating the dazzling garden of corals carpeting the ocean floor. Fish of all colours and transparencies darted in and out of the reef corals, while a moray eel peeked from a crevice. I swam across the warm tropical waters of Maldives, headed for a tiny island of sugary white sand in the distance.
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It was a sunny morning when our Sri Lankan flight landed on one of the 1,200 islands in the archipelago nation. The night flight from Mumbai to Colombo, the transit delay at Bandaranaike Airport and the pre-dawn flight to Maldives had left us famished and exhausted. I was fast asleep as the flight attendant called out to raise the window shields, push back the tray tables, and keep the seats upright. I lifted the window and squinted as the blue expanse of the Indian Ocean opened up below, with curls of foam lapping at the coral reefs. Yes, Maldives has more sea under its territory than land, most of which is uninhabited.
The plane taxied to a stop at the Male International Airport at Hulhule island, located close to the island capital of Male. Apart from fishing, tourism drives Maldives?so, you get a visa on arrival, provided you come with a return air ticket, accommodation details and sufficient money to pay for your holiday. After snacks and juice, we were ready for the speedboat pick-up, which soon arrived at the transit jetty.
Located south-west to Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean, Maldives is a curious country. Hulhule has little more than the airport and ancillary facilities, while Male is a speedboat-hop away. Unless you have business or sight-seeing to do in the capital city, you don?t see the urban part of Maldives at all. You are whisked away in a speed boat or a sea plane to your resort, a journey which could take from 30 minutes to an hour and a half, depending on how remote your resort is.
A speed boat or a sea plane trip does not necessarily mean a personal transport for you?it?s just not economical to send a boat across remote islands just to transport one or two. Resorts in Maldives, which receive many visitors on any given day, club tourists arriving by several flights before starting their engines. So, don?t be surprised if you?re held up at the airport for an hour or two. Most resorts are kind enough to arrange for refreshments while you wait.
The speedboat zipped across the waters, its journey leaving a long trail of foam far behind. In 45 minutes, we whizzed past Male and several other distant islands, before finally coming to a halt at the resort jetty. The palm trees of Hembadhu island swayed in the breeze, as the gentle, smiling assistants checked us in to our villa.
Maldives hosts a large number of resorts, mostly premium and super-premium, each of them occupying a whole island. The islands are quite small, and depend completely on the outside world for supplies. This means you cannot go out and do a bit of shopping or sight-seeing here and there or make friends with local people?make do with what the resort has for you! The resorts themselves are quite well-stocked, though the cost of transporting supplies across long distances by speedboat means tariffs are much higher than at a comparable hotel on the mainland.
Separated by vast expanses of water, the island resorts provide accommodation in various types offering various luxuries. Most of them have beach cottages built by the sea and water villas perched on stilts in the sea and connected to the land via ramps. Steps from the deck of our villa led directly into the waist-deep lagoon, where the water level would rise and fall with the tide. A variety of fish have made these waters their grazing pastures. Every day of my stay at Maldives, I sat on those steps watching the vibrant aquatic life below, marvelling at the colours, luminescence and transparency of the fish, which swarmed to my feet every time I threw a morsel of food. The open shower on the sun deck helped wash away the salt drying on my skin every time I returned from a swim.
What should one do in Maldives? The resorts offer a variety of ?things to do?, including scuba diving, snorkeling, kayaking, submarine trips and island-hopping. Most resorts conduct diving and snorkeling classes, and have glass-bottom pedal boats you can take for a spin. Well-equipped spas are also a Maldivian attraction, and is highly recommended if you plan a visit. At the stingray-feeding sessions at designated times, the large, docile creatures flock to the shore to eat fish pieces out of your hands and flop against you like friendly puppies. Baby sharks, too, join in the feeding frenzy, but we were warned against entertaining them. Some resorts have under-sea restaurants?glass bubbles, where fish and stingrays swim lazily above as you tuck into seafood delicacies. Yet others organise tourist visits to the capital.
Want to do nothing but laze around on the sundeck with your iPad? No worries, most hotels provide WiFi services, some complimentary, some for a fee. Dhiraagu, a joint venture between the Maldivian government and Britain?s C&W provides GSM cellular services on the island nation, including 3G and BlackBerry services.
Reputed as a honeymooners? paradise, Maldives, however, is now in a political flux. Mohamed Nasheed, a human rights activist who became the first democratically elected president of the archipelago in 2008, stepped down on February 7 this year, after which he said he was forced to resign in a coup staged by the military and police loyal to the previous dictatorship of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. Despite the turbulence, tourists continue to flock to these paradise islands, mainly since tourists skip the capital and travel straight to the resorts.
Sadly, these paradise islands may not be around for too long. Global warming and rising sea levels are believed to threaten the very existence of Maldives, where most of the land is barely a metre above the sea level. After the Asian tsunami of 2004, several atolls disappeared under the sea. As a long-term plan, the Maldives government has thought of buying land in neighbouring countries to re-locate its population. However, climate change deniers reject such a possibility, saying the sea level around Maldives has actually fallen. I hope they are right, or Maldives could become a Paradise Lost in our own lifetime.