Best of the Maldives: Secret Bar – LUX* Maldives

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LUX Maldives secret bar

Secret bar! ‘Nuff said.

That was certainly the reaction by the TripAdvisor Maldives Forum when word got out about the ‘Secret Bar’ at LUX* Maldives. It’s just one of the countless surprises in the neverending adventure that is a stay at LUX* resort.

The ‘Secret Bar’ is on wheels so it can change location daily. When our family would visit the Maldives each year with our children, one of the ritual highlights was a treasure hunt we would stage for them on our own buccaneers isle. If we stayed at LUX* back then, I know that one way I would get an extra hour’s sleep and get them nice a tuckered out would be send them on a daily sortie to find Dad’s ‘Secret Bar’.

It works like a public mini-bar on an honesty system (genius) and so far they haven’t had any problems with unsavoury scallywags pirating liquid lucre.

Shiver me timbers! Me’ll have two black jacks’ of grog.

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Best of the Maldives: Desert Island Villa – Maafushivaru

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Maafushivaru Lonubo 4

Billionaire for a Day.

Maafushivaru’s neighbouring desserted island Lonubu evoked a billionaire’s paradise to me, one you could experience yourself for a night, from a number of different perspectives…

  • “Buying their own islands” – My professional alma mater, Microsoft, was renowned for its generosity in giving out equity in the company to all its employees (originally in the form of stock options and later in the form of vested stock). This largesse was a big contributor to my affordability of the luxury of the Maldives for so many years. But this munificence actually became a problem for the company in the late 90s as it became difficult to retain some of the top talent who had made small fortunes. I remember Bill commenting that his objective in giving out stock was ‘so people could by themselves a nice house, not their own islands…’ I certainly never made enough to buy my own island, but a night on Lonubo would feel like it.
  • Super-premium Micro-island Luxury – The Maldives is rivalling Dubai, Monaco and Mustique for the most exclusive bolt-holes. More than half of the resorts are 5-star to start with. Then, there is the arrival of the super-premium marques like Jumeirah, Four Seasons and even the rumoured Louis Vuitton. And beyond that, there are hyper-exclusive resorts like The Rania Experience and Dhoni Island (closed) with price tags starting in the $10,000 night range. If you need to be a millionaire to afford the 5-star plus properties, then these exclusive ones must be the playground of billionaires. Like Lonubo, these are eztremely small islands and it is not unheard of for customers to simply rent out the entire resort to themselves.
  • Lost’s ‘moved’ island – The most famous ‘deserted’ island of modern times is ‘The Island’ on ‘Lost’. In fact, one of the great storytelling innovations of this iconic and billion-dollar TV series was making the island itself a character itself in the epic. The whole Lonubo experience reminded me of Season Four’s final episode when Ben ‘moves the island’. You have your billionaire in Charles Widmore. You have your mystical deserted tropical island. But the clincher is that Lonubo has a helicopter pad (see bottom below) and a helicopter plays a big role in this episode. More importantly, the helicopter pad is old, dilapidated and even partially submerged underwater like an ancient Man in Black period relic. But the killer is that the reason the heli-pad is submerged is because in the decade since it was built, the Lonubo island…has moved! The seas are constantly playing shell games with the sand banks and islands (necessitating the omnipresent groynes and sea defences). In this case, the sands of Lonubo have shifted the island about 100 yards (no confirmed reports of rips in the space/time fabric).

Maafushivaru offers a number of ways to enjoy this facsimile of a billionaire playground…

  • Daily excursions – Every day a dhoni takes over resort guests for a visit to the island. Often special extras are organised like activities or a BBQ. Sometimes it is just an opportunity for a new place to snorkel or watch the sunset. For those short a billion or two, these excursions are entirely free of charge.
  • Private Dinner – You can book a private dinner on Lonubo. The cost is $320 per person…”Prepared by your own cook and served by your own waiter, accompanied by the sounds of the ocean and a bottle of sparkling wine. After dinner, stay on Lonobu and enjoy the peace and privacy of your very own island, a beach bed will be set up for you to relax and enjoyu the thousands of beautiful stars…pick up at midnight.”
  • Overnight Villa(s) – If you don’t want to turn into a pumpkin at midnight, you can also spend the night on Lonubo in one of their two villas (see below). These bungalows are what really set apart this desert island experience. You get the sensation of remote and solitary bliss…but with the comforts of home. A shower, bath, minibar, AC…even a TV to watch some old episodes of ‘Lost’. The cost of an overnight is $1,265 (for two sharing) which includes the special dinner. You stay until 10:30 am the following day when you are picked up by dhoni. There are two rooms so a family can even book the island if they like.

So if you want to re-enact the Lost experience, but prefer the homey bungalows of the DHARMA Initiative to the rustic living off the land of ‘The Others’, then set your Daniel Faraday machine to Maafushivaru’s Lonubo.

 

Maafushivaru Lonubo 3

 

Maafushivaru Lonubo 2

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Best of the Maldives: Snorkel Guide – Vakarufalhi

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Vakarufalhi snorkel guide Tania

No matter how good you are at something, a local expert and guide is always a sound move.

My wife and I do most of our skiing (I snow board) with our best friends who happened to meet as ski instructors. We tag along to which ever of their favourite European slopes catches their fancy this season. Having such experts along transforms the experience. The stress is halved and the excitement is doubled. The stress is cut because you don’t have to worry about getting lost, or going somewhere over your capability. The excitement is doubled because they introduce you to places literally of the beaten path and point out things that you probably would have missed focusing on where you were going.

Those same slope benefits are the reason to grab a snorkel guide at a resort whenever you have the opportunity. My wife and I are advanced divers and have snorkelled over 100 times, but we still benefit from having a local expert show us around. In and among all those guided outings, the guides have all been superb. But we have never come across a guide quite so enthusiastic and proactive as Tania Gae Militello, the marine biologist at Vakaufalhi.

The fact that she holds daily routine guided excursions on the house reef is a key and relatively uncommon at resorts. Other resorts either have the marine biologist on demand or else they have periodic guided excursions. Her regular excursions mean that you can simply work it into your daily routine. You don’t have to feel self-conscious about asking for a guide as she is going anyway. She will also do special excursions to suit you for free as well (schedule permitting).

We took advantage of this ad hoc offer to do a sunrise snorkel (on the wise advice of TripAdvisor Destination Expert ActiveGirl) where we saw tons of sights. Lots of stuff we would have missed if it wasn’t for her trained eye as well as knowledge of the local seascape and knowing where the interesting critters tend to congregate.

One of the best examples is a loggerhead sea turtle named Camilla. She has a favourite resting space on the house reef drop-off ledge about 3 metres deep. Tania showed her to us. More importantly, without any provocation or disturbing her, Camilla popped out and came for a swim with our group when she saw that Tania had arrived. Camilla seemed to recognize Tania and seemed very comfortable around her (no, Camilla does not do any feeding of marine life whatsoever). As close to a guaranteed turtle sighting as you wil get.

As I mentioned at the top, a guide also allows you to push yourself further than you might. When we did our morning snorkel, Tania took us around the further house reef side…and a storm squall came in about 30 minutes into our venture. Normally, I would have been quite spooked being a good distance from shore with a dark, windy sky. But, Tania knew that we were strong swimmers and we were going with the current towards the jetty and reassured us that everything would be fine. When the squall (aka mini-monsoon) hit us, aside from some swells in the ocean and the tickle of rain on our back, the snorkel was as delightful as any. As a result, we were rewarded with some memorable sights we would have missed without her support.

She also took a number of videos and pictures on both of outings with us and loaded them onto a USB stick for us so we could have them.

Tania is passionate not just about the undersea world, but also about the snorkelling itself and makes it even more accessible and thrilling at Vakarufalhi.

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Best of the Maldives: Side Mount Diving – Vilamendhoo

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Vilamendhoo side mount tank

“Bruce, you might want to try this.” That’s how Lori greeted me when I met up with her after her dive at Vilamendhoo after seeing side mount diving for the first time.

Side mount diving has a number of advantages for certain situations. It is very popular with cave divers for whom the tank can get in the way of narrow passages. But also, the configuration more easily allows for double tanking for people who want very long dives. It can also be advantageous for divers with back problems especially maneuvering out of water.

The configuration requires special skills training both in the equipment and in diving itself. My wife Lori went on a dive with the Euro Divers dive master Hussein Ali who is a certified instructor in side mount. He teaches the PADI course offered there ($229 for course and $80 for certification) and the resort offers the equipment for guests interested in this unconventional approach

Tanks a lot!

Vilamendhoo side tank diving

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Best of the Maldives: Lobster Tank – Lily Beach

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Lily Beach - lobster tank 1

Lobster Season! (Duck Season!…sorry, obscure Bugs Bunny reference)

The Lobster Festival starts today in the epicentre of the lobster world, Maine. Having grown up in New England and spent many summer breaks on the Maine coast, I was raised on the sweetest variety of the most succulent crustacean on the planet. As a result, I am a bit of a lobster aficionado and always like to try local varieties when I travel to compare to the my hometown benchmark standard.

Of course, the very best restaurants keep a lobster tank so that these critters can be prepared completely fresh. And I have seen all manner of lobster tanks in my life, but I have never seen any quite as colourful and alluring as the one at Lily Beach.

The tank is filled not just with an impressive array of lobsters, but also a colourful collection of reef fish (for added colour, not for eating). It is also one of the biggest lobster tanks I’ve ever seen. An Olympic swimming pool of a lobster tank.

A bonus feature of the tank is ‘Sand Lobster’ (see picture below,) aka ‘Sea Seagull’ or ‘Moreton Bay Bug’ (see photo below…it is the two tails on the bottom front of the rock). I’ve sampled lobster all around the world and I have never come across this particular variety. It barely even looks like a lobster save its characteristic tail. In fact, it sort of seems like some sort of culinary mutation bred to be all tail meat.

Lily Beach - sand lobster

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Best of the Maldives: Match Volleyball – Paradise Island

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Paradise Island - volleyball matches

Let the games begin.

London proudly hosts the world this fortnight and Team Maldives has arrived to compete in badminton, athletics and swimming.

If the Maldives ever hosts the Olympics, the first sport sorted will obviously be beach volleyball. Beach volleyball is super popular in the Olympics and was the second fastest sell-out of tickets after Athletics. Lots of resorts offer great beach volleyball courts and many of the resorts sport quite competitive teams, but the Wembley of the beach volleyball circuit is on Paradise Island.

The resort pitch includes lighting (for night games) and a sheltered (against sun or rain) seating area. The picture above was against Club Med (playing in yellow and blue) where there was quite a buzz with a crowd of both staff and guests.

I made the quick switch from Maldives-trotter to flying over to New York to help with NBC’s Olympics coverage so I’m getting lots of beach volleyball, football, table tennis, field hockey and a dozen other sports on the go at any time.

I love the Telegraph’s profile entry on their Maldives in their Olympic guide which could almost serve as a cheer for the Paradise Island beach volley team: “The country’s history in six words – Paradise, paradise, paradise, tsunami, paradise, paradise.”

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Best of the Maldives: Simplicity – Gili Lankanfushi

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Gili Lankanfushi - no shoes

“Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication.” – Leonardo da Vinci

Gili Lankanfushi seems like is as designed by da Vinci. A Maldivian masterpiece with artistic flair and clever creativity, but at its core a pervading since of simplicity. That quality is what draws so many people to the Maldives and back again in the first place. A week or more of the simple island life. A plot of sand and a palm tree. What more do you need?

And it all starts with no shoes. I mean, it literally all starts with no shoes. When the speed boat transfer welcomes you on board with its fresh juice in simple bottle, the very second briefing they do (after safety) is the ‘no shoes’ ritual. One of the great charms of the Maldives is the extent to which you can just go barefoot everywhere. The soft sand is not solely the domain of the turquoise seashore, but invades the reception, dining areas and pretty much every nook and cranny of the best resorts like Gili. On most of my Maldivian holidays, we take our shoes off when we get shown to our villa and we don’t retrieve them until it is time to check out.

Gili delightfully ritualises this ethos by inviting guests to remove their shoes immediately right on the transfer boat. (see above) The boat captain explains the ‘No news, no shoes’ ambience of the resort and hands out special little canvas bags for you to put your shoes in (so the staff can take you shoes to your room with your luggage). It has all warm and inviting grace of an Asian home. I always feel a bit more intimately welcomed in a home where you are encouraged to take your shoes off. I don’t wear shoes around my own house, and when I take them off in someone else’s, it’s like I’m at home myself. It is a smart move by Gili because no matter how obvious it seems to walk around shoeless, the practice so extreme in Maldive resorts and a fair degree uncommon in posh resorts around the world, that we see many people not really getting the hang of it until well into their stay by which time they’ve lost a few days of barefoot bliss.

I was intrigued to compare Gili with Mirihi which is a resort renowned for its simplicity as well and which I coincidentally also visited this tour. They are both stunning resorts made more so by this emphasis on no-nonsense naturalness. Curiously, they go about it from completely different directions. Gili is a big resort that simplifies by eschewing the little things; Mirihi is a little resort that simplifies by eschewing the big things. Mirihi has elected to avoid major items in their resort concept – TVs, pool, tennis courts. Gili simplifies by stripping away the little frills and trimmings. One of their big little touches is that they don’t garnish their drinks. No lemon slices stuck on ther side of the glass, no maraschino cherries with toothpicks in them, no little colourful parasols. All of the resort’s design reflects this approach of clean, straightforward, unadorned simplicity.

The aesthetic cousin to simplicity is nature. And nature is just as fundamental to everything at Gili. The striking seating made of tree root (see below) are found everywhere. I was regularly struck by the innovative ways in which they were able to incorporate a natural approach. They have air conditioning in the bedrooms of their villas, but otherwise all other areas (bathroom, lounge) are all refreshed naturally in the open air (which works well since all of Gili’s villas are over water). Even the coat hangers in the closets are made from sticks and coconut hemp rope.

The ‘No Shoes’ custom is just the tip of the thila to a deep and colourful simplicity that permeates Gili Lankanfushi. This simplicity is the heart of their concept and is reflected in every little detail. I won’t go into to many details here because I want to write about several as their own ‘Best of the Maldives’ features in the future

Gili Lankanfushi exemplifies simple rustic elegance.

Gili Lankanfushi - seating 2

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Best of the Maldives: Job Title – W Retreat

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W Retreat Insider Mijung Kim

Best job ever. Well, at least the best job title. “W Insider” is the title for W Retreat’s service special agent whose mission is to target the very best experiences tailored to each guest. To some extent, it is a fancy name for a ‘Concierge’, but W positions the role as a bit more…

  • “You are the soul behind the brand and you bring it to life. We don’t call W employees ‘Talent’ for nothing. Creative. Exciting. Innovative. W Talent are naturally attracted to the Brand and they ‘get it’. W Talent are as unique as the Brand itself, and cultivate the witty, whimsical, cool W environment.”

The title is a standard position at W Hotels around the world, but Mijung Kim (see above) is the first appointee in the Maldives.

I put Mijung to the test to find me some real hidden gems about the W Retreat. I sort of fancy Maldives Complete as a ‘Maldives Insider’ for all the resorts. W Retreat is one of the resorts that I have been fortunate enough to stay so I have already ferreted out a league-leading 21 ‘Best of the Maldives’ pieces about the W. So I was curious to see what she came up with. Her first stab was a collection of fine recommendations that would have been ideal for a Maldives neophyte, but as a veteran I wanted something a bit deeper. So she shared some more hidden (and fun) tidbits of the island including [bird] security, pro snapper, natural medicine and ‘Angelina & Marilyn’.

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Best of the Maldives: Bocce Ball – Club Med Kani

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Club Med Kani bocce ball

 

 

This weekend featured the World Championship of Bocce Ball in Del Mar, California, but the champion bocca ball pitch in the Maldives has to be Club Med Kani’s. Anyone can throw a few balls in the sand and call it ‘bocce’. Kanu has chosen a select place under a sprawling palm canopy by the ocean’s edge. They have levelled out the sand pitch and marked it off with boarding on all sides. Finally, just for that added touch of official-ness, they have a special bocca ball stand in native palm-frond style.

 

Club Med Kani bocce ball stand

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