15th Wedding Anniversary @ Maldives

Time: July 8th-12th, 2023

Company: Wife and Daughter

Place: Maldives

Highlights: Well, always wanted to visit this place but never had the opportunity. So, the 15th wedding anniversary seemed to be the appropriate moment. However, we spent a lot of time mulling should we or should we not. Since it was a weekday, we almost dropped the idea but just a few weeks before decided that it was a special milestone that justified weekday break! However, this delay impacted us badly because what could have been a non-stop both legs became a one-stop with long layover both legs. Once we booked the flights, we researched on where to stay. It was a relatively easy trip to plan since not much to do, except to be on an island and laze away looking at the ocean all around. Or that's what I thought, until I started the research on finding the right resort to stay...

Maldives is a phenomenon by itself. I came to know a lot about it as part of this research. My initial perception was that it is a group of islands where each island has few resorts and local shops, local cuisines, restaurants, small hotels, etc. and we had to just choose which island to stay. But I was wrong. While it is true that Maldives is a collection of islands, (or atolls, actually) what I did not know was that each island/atoll is privately owned by an individual resort-owner. So, the entire island is a resort by itself! Which means, nothing to buy outside of the resort, like a Subway or a Pizza or even staying in a budget hotel! If we go to an island, then we have to be in their resort, eat in the resort, shop in their resort, etc.! This was a mind-boggler!

Second issue was in finalizing a resort. Unlike choosing hotels in other vacation places, where we can simply go to booking.com or something similar, here we need to individually go to the resort website to research the room type and figure out their costing. Reason being, each island is located at varying distances from main airport island of Male. So, transportation from Male to island resort also varies by type (whether speed boat or seaplane or seaplane plus speed boat) and hence the costing for each. All of this information is unavailable in Booking.com kind of websites.

Hence, what I assumed was a near-zero research-time turned out to be absolutely wrong, and I started making notes on all the island-resorts of our interest, details of which included the room type (on the ocean, ocean-facing, garden, etc.), food-type (breakfast/lunch/dinner or bf/lunch or bf alone, etc.), transportation and even viewed their gallery to see how it looked. Plus since we were three of us, some of the resorts which only cater to couples got excluded. Some of them were beyond our budget. The seaplane is expensive too, and is charged per person basis and not per family.

Thankfully my wife had a condition on how the resort should look like - with a thatched hut. So a bulk of resorts got excluded with this condition. Mind you, there is no filter of any kind to get to this! One has to look into the gallery of each and every resort to figure it out! So, it was a laborious work indeed. We shortlisted 10 resorts and then got it down to 3 and the winner finally was Adaaran Club Rannalhi. We chose only two nights in Maldives - one on the ocean and one in Male itself. So, tickets booked, we were ready to depart!

Day 0: Sri Lankan airlines to Male via Colombo. Our first in this airlines and our first to Sri Lanka as well, even as a transit. Not a great airport to have a long layover, we reached at about midnight and had to sleep on the chair till 6 am. Took the next leg flight at 7ish to Male.

Day 1: Reached Male, munched on bread given on airlines at the airport as breakfast, took the 45-min ferry ride to the resort. Even during the ride, the color of the ocean changed from green to blue, which was fascinating. We reached at noon, and had to finish the check-in formalities. The host made us aware of all the rules of the resort, where was what and what services were available. And then they gave us the keys to our water-villa. Luckily, ours was the last, so had the whole corner to ourselves. Views all around were splendind!

Walking on the bridge (with no rails), and the tide licking up the gangways, was indeed an experience. It was like walking over an ocean. But if we thought that was an experience, the whole room itself being in the middle of an ocean, was another fantastic experience as we could hear the tide in the room, even while sleeping, right underneath us! The bathroom had clear views of the entire ocean, miles ahead of us. So one could gaze as far as possible while taking a shower. There was a water-front patio where we could relax and just look at the ocean - which seemed like we were sitting on the ocean itself. In addition to all of this, there was a short series of steps directly to the ocean bed from the patio, so we could enter the ocean right from our room! No wonder, these water-villas cost so much - but it is totally worth it and definitely once-in-a-lifetime experience. It was just fabulous.

After exploring our room, we headed to lunch. It was multi-cuisine buffet, so we could take whatever we wanted. Food was good. Post lunch, we roamed around the island and went back to the room since it was getting too hot. We were lucky there was no rains, apparently the previous week it was raining all day, that'd just spoil the fun. At about early evening, we took snorkelling equipment and with great difficulty tried to catch the glimpse of the corals. However, it was hard, how much ever we tried. We got back to the room, and decided to see corals by walking down the stairs from our room patio. Boy oh boy, were we shocked looking at the corals! 

It was another mind-boggling experience. One can never imagine how it is until one sees it for real. It is right there and yet unless you have the right equipment to see it in water, you cannot figure it out. This is what I have heard about enlightenment - that it is so obvious that people just miss it! Thankfully, all three of us could enjoy the OMG moment although we were scared water could enter from the air-pipe! Anyways, we had our share of coral-viewing and we refreshed ourselves and headed for sunset cruise which we had signed up for. 

This was a small cruise that took us slowly around the island and stopped at various points for us to get a good view of the sunset. It took about an hour, and was very pleasant indeed. We took various pics. Once back, we went to the bar where there wa live music and the songs were sung well. A very soothing time overall, and then we went to have dinner. After that lazed around the beach, the waterfront, the gangways that took us to the watervilla, etc. When night had fallen, we could see millions of stars on the dark sky. Stars on sky, water below us - it was like a fairytale! We just soaked it all in, and finally retired for the night. 

Day 2: Got up early for the sunrise. Although we could not see the sun rising, we could see the golden hue of the risen sun. It was awesome. Spent more time taking pics. Freshened up, and had our breakfast. Then went one more round the island exploring all aspects like the hammock, different views of the water villas, etc. There was even a swing on the ocean but the tide was high, so we skipped it. Overall, we were pretty satisfied with the time spent on Adaaran. Usually, folks opt to stay on beach-front for 2 or 3 more days after 1 night on the water villa but we did not deem it necessary.

Our ferry was at noon to drop us back at Male airport. We reached by 1 pm and we had pizza for lunch there until our driver from the next hotel-stay came and picked us up. This hotel was also beach-front on Hulhumale beach. It was a small hotel but very cute. Ambience was sea-faring, so it was good, we could see the beach from the balcony. We went walking a long way on the beach to what we thought was a pure veg restaurant but it did not look good. So we went to an Indian diner, which was not pure veg but veg food was good. Then did some shopping for the kiddo and finally retired for the night. There was hopes of seeing Bioluminescence in Maldives but we were unlucky both nights. 

Day 3: Got up late, checked out of the hotel and the driver dropped us off at the airport. We checked-in to Sri Lankan airlines and flight to Colombo was uneventful. On the way, we could see the many atolls which Maldives is famous for. In fact, this is one reason why people opt to go on Sea-planes so that they could see the atolls. Luckily for us, we got a good view from the commercial plane itself!

Once again, a long wait at the Male airport. This was our 15th anniversary day, and one learning was that we should not travel or spend time at layovers on the anniversary day! We lazed on the chair, munched on items we had, had pizza at a local diner, did window shopping, etc.. Our original flight actually had just an hour of layover but unfortunately they cancelled that flight and hence this long layover. Finally, it was time to board and rest of the journey to BLR airport from airport to home was uneventful.

Epilogue: Maldives was always in the list since a very long time. Had heard a lot about it, and was thinking it is just another island with beautiful views. But after having been there now, I feel this is a country that needs to be experienced for sure. It is not like just any other island country. In addition to the country, one has to definitely experience a water-villa stay. That is top of the charts. 

After 5th in Mexico, 10th in Europe, felt good that we could celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary at Maldives. It was indeed very special and memorable!