Blogs from Maldives, Asia - page 2

Friday July 1 – Did not sleep so well last night, not sure why. Maybe the comforter again? Got to breakfast quite early and was the first. Same omelet as yesterday with some chicken sausage and beef bacon and a local breakfast of pancake with a mixture of fish and chili and other delights, all chopped quite finely. Tasty. After breakfast I changed and went for a snorkel on the reef just beyond the hotel. The water was quite choppy and the sand was all mixed up with the water. It made visibility low and the coral was mostly dead, and rather close and hard to see coming in the fog of sand. Not soon after I started I decided to end the snorkeling for the day. I put my stuff down on a beach chair ... read more

A world tour benefits most from involving all kinds of experiences in all kinds of places, at least that's what I began to think the moment the entire trek had started. Luckily then, I was able to work a budget-conscious trip to the Maldives into the equation, and that kind of episode came with impeccable timing, with the unhurried pace of island life being the perfect antidote to city life and the general headlong rush of getting from A to B and C to D in a bid to cram all sights into a relatively short time frame. The first night in this multi-island nation started on the airport-located island of Hulhumale, and with a couple of spare hours in the morning time to check out the sights, it revealed a few features which the nation ... read more

It’s going to be quite difficult to write this blog without it seeming like marketing from the Maldives Tourism Board. But these islands really are magical. Where it will probably differ is the advice and extremely strong encouragement to stick to the inhabited islands. While we didn’t actually visit any of the resort islands – despite getting an offer of a mates’ rates deal on a few of them through a friend, which she said were “mid-range” but the cheapest was US$2000 per night – we could often see across to resort islands and actually pitied the people staying on them who couldn’t have the experience we were having. First island: Hulhumalé When you arrive into the Maldives at 07:30 and have onward domestic flights at 15:20, what do you do? Certainly don’t linger in the ... read more

We had a bit of a scare as we tried to fly to the Maldives. When we got to the airport, we found out that there is a difference between the COVID Antigen test and the COVID PCR test and we had gotten the wrong one. So first we went to a place in the airport that offered both and got the right one but it would take 24 hours to get the results back. Since Lyon was such a small airport, there was no Lufthansa Customer Service so we decided to take our flight to Frankfurt. They let us take the Lyon to Frankfurt leg as long as our bags were checked to Frankfurt only so we boarded the plane, disappointed we would not be going to Maldives today and wondering how long it would ... read more

A total of 9 hours with a scale in Dubai, but it was definitely worth it. Malé, the capital is not a place to stay in the Maldives, as there is not much to do there. We just stayed there the last night as the weather was so unpredicable that we were worried about losing our early morning flight. There are many many islands in the Maldives and all of them are connected to Malé via speedboat, seaplane (only resorts) and domestic flights. Actually, it surprised us how easy it was to get to tiny islands in atolls and how disorganizedly organized things are in the Maldives (you don't know were you go, but they take you exactly were you need to go, either if you have to change transport 3 times). We chose a local ... read more