Faarufushi has made cultivating flora part of the internal décor with stylish vases holding germinating coconut saplings. When they get mature enough, they are transplanted outdoors on the resort.
Not all the tropical landscape just happens upon the islands. Most resorts have a nursery to germinate a range of the more colourful plants and flowers with which to accent the property. The largest we have come across is Reethi Faru’s extensive garden. Spread over a number of acres, the various saplings and young plants are organised in an inviting way. And you can explore the greenery from top to bottom as the resort has added an elevated platform in the middle to survey the lot as well as a hundred meter arbour (see below) to stroll under the shade of various flowering plants.
Going natural on the beach facilities can extend to the sports scene as LUX South Ari Atoll has demonstrated with their beach volleyball pitch set up perhaps the way beach volleyball was meant to be played.
long grappled with the ocean shifting the sands all over the place historically. The properties there have figured out a variety of means for reducing this erosion with sea walls, groynes and other measures to address the impact of currents.
For many guests, these protruding measures can detract a bit from the archetypal image of a round plot of sand in the middle of the ocean. Some creative resorts have made lemonade from these aesthetic lemons by dressing up these structures in a number of way (many of which I have shared and now have collected in the new tag of for “Groynes”). I like the approach by OBLU Select Sangeli to smooth the groynes (as opposed to making piles of rocks) and painting them a brilliant white to blend in with the adjacent coral sand beaches.
Kudafushi features an artistic tribute to its guests with its “Wall of Memories”. The feature is complementary for any guest who sends a special note. One of the most extravagant guest books ever.
Guest books were especially popular in resorts in the early days where guests were intrigued to know perhaps what celebrities had visited this already prestigious destination. Those guest books prompted me to add the “Celebrity Guest” field to the Maldives Complete database. And the popularity of that information and piece I wrote about celebrities, contributed to the “Fashionista” series when the Instagram wave hit.
If you are keen for a plaque for your wall, I recommend Joali and their exceptionally high spec evacuation map. Most room maps are simple printouts with maybe a bit of lamination. The luxury villas might have a printed plastic sign up. But the Joali is an artistically etched brass plaque. No troubles finding the way out with these directions as the aesthetic allure of it draws your eye to it.
Is Maldives Complete the “Best of the Maldives” for blogs?
With the new year, the awards season ramps up a bit. But don’t count on Maldives Complete being featured. I’ve submitted the site for consideration to a number of online awards only to be rebuffed by clarifications that the awards were only open to advertisers. Not that it comes to any surprise to me. In many decades of marketing, the shill schemes are pretty standard practice – “you give us lots of money for sponsorship/advertising/etc., and we declare you the best of contrived category”. Some “directories” won’t even list you, unless you pay them. Being an “amateur” (Maldives Complete makes no money from advertising, sponsorship or sales), I don’t have the funds for such vanity accolades.
So I’ve decided to toot my own horn a bit for the record. In two areas, it does seem to stand head and shoulders above the rest:
When I first started blogging about the Maldives, resorts didn’t even know what “blogging” was (based on all of the confused looks and questions I got from them when I described that part of the Maldives Complete website). A couple of resort websites dabbled with this new digital medium throwing out a couple of posts and then abandoning the initiative. For a number of years, blogging had been considered a bit passé. Overtaken by the “micro-blogging” (small posts to the extent of hard character limits on Twitter) format of social media. But lately, blogging is making a bit of a comeback. Travel bloggers, especially, are a bit of a rage coupled the lifestyle porn theatre of Instagram.
The most prominent travel bloggers do boast big numbers, but most of these Followers are living vicariously through the posts admiring a destination they will never have the means nor inclination to actually visit. These bloggers get their readers all excited with no place for them to go.
The Maldives Complete Blog has never really been about getting people excited about the Maldives. Lots of conventional travel media like Conde Nast and your local city paper does plenty of that. This blog has always been about providing posts that can help people decide on the right resort for them. By tagging the various properties and sub-topics, people can explore distinctive details by either resorts that interest them, or the aspects that do. The most prevalent question I get from readers is “With all the Maldives resorts (increasing in number every day), how do I choose?” The answer is (as described in my most popular post “How to Choose the Perfect Maldives Resort”) to (a) filter to short list by core objective criteria (mostly budget, but a few other fundamentals), and (b) look at the posts about each property on the short list to get a subjective feel for the property’s particular strengths and personality.
But the popular “Best of the Maldives” Category is not the only area covered in the blog:
First on the playlist for a morning serenade is Mantreas’ music video on location in the Maldives. Jumeirah Vittaveli posted “The new Spanish band @mantraes filmed the video for their launch hit song ‘No Te Esperaba’ at Jumeirah Vittaveli – watch and dream…”
If you can have a show breakfast in the pool, then why not a breakfast show in the pool? German radio station RTL has flown its morning crew to Heritance Aarah for a month of pool-side performances: DJ Arno reports:
No better way to start you day. In the Maldives, that is.
