Homes festooned with Christmas lights to herald Santa’s arrival around the world, but if you don’t want him disturbing your tropical holiday with his festive cheer, then the two little green and red light on the outside of LUX North Male Atoll’s villas are its “do not disturb” system. Just flip the switch inside that illuminates them. You can choose between a silent night or a bearing gifts ye traverse afar. Merry Christmas everyone.
For the squinting crowd whose arms are not long enough to hold a menu far away enough to see it, the romance of under-the-stars candlelight might add to the romance, but it also means you can’t figure out what you can order for dinner. Resorts have come up with a various solutions to this problem including the fiddly clip-on mini light or the serve holding a torch. But Faarufushi has introduced electronic menu tablets with soft back lighting to provide optimal visibility.
Another two things I love in the Maldives are logging apps (with maps) and whale sharks. Now the Maldives Whale Shark Research Organisation has brought these two great things together in their mobile whale shark tracking app:
Whale Shark Spotter on steroids. They’ve also merged two general features of Maldives Complete – (a) a spotting tracker, and (b) a database lookup (with individual profiles). Add a blog and you have Whale Shark Complete!
Two of my favourite features – island maps and bed decorating. Both are quite distinctive in the Maldives with their “all on one island” resort properties and their tradition of elaborate blossom bed creations. Kudafushi has merged the two together for a mattress-based map of the island’s landscape (thanks Paola). One of the most exquisite works of bed decorating I’ve seen.
While most Maldives aficionados seek out the best house reefs (with their plummeting walls of coral), the Maldives lagoons are equally as distinctive. They might not make for the finest snorkelling adventures since they are essentially just shallow pools of water with sandy bottoms. Typically, not much marine life to see except for a few foraging sting rays and the wandering couple of goat fishes. But the lagoons are what give the Maldives its distinctive palette of soft blues and provide ocean swimming that is as calm as a backyard pool.
Rahaa’s “salt water” lake is one of the most distinctive resort bodies of water in the Maldives (thanks Francisco). Other resorts feature “lakes”, but none so front and center. None with villas on the shores and none you can swim in. Now whether Rahaa’s “lake” is really and lake or a totally landlocked lagoon is a bit of a semantic fine point. It is as notable a water feature as you’ll find in a destination that epitomises water features.
Sometimes you are the one polluted by toxins Joali features its own ingestible cure with a wide range of breakfast elixirs served in the breakfast buffet. The Ayurvedic tonics treat a variety of conditions including:
When most of what there is to do all day is savour pina coladas in the sun (or whatever your favourite tropical tipple is), plastic straws can pile up. Most resorts are moving away from plastic to a variety of sipping tools (so much so that with this post I have introduced the “Straws” tag). LUX south Ari Atoll has introduced another variety of edible straws:
Black Friday! The biggest shopping day of the year. Of course you will need something to carry all those purchases and you don’t want to be adding to the landfill with shopping bags. If you do your early Christmas shopping at Conrad Rangali you not only get a useful and stylish bag for your shopping and more, but the bag itself doesn’t just stop added plastic consumption, but it actually removes waste plastic from the ocean. The bag is made from recycled plastic removed from the ocean. Parley’s website describes
Bag for Sea Life!
Happy Thanksgiving and a big welcome to all those Homecoming Queens riding in on their colourful floats…
No matter how many toppings or how exotic the flavours, I have not come across any item on the menu as exotic as You & Me’s underwater restaurant H2O – plankton! More for a whale shark’s palette than appetite as it was presented in an eye-dropper bottle as part of the seafood platter. You sprinkle the “plankton” on the delicacies for that extra bit of taste of the sea. It didn’t really taste of anything other than just some seawater, but I guess that for mantas and other filter feeders, to them its all just sea water to them too. Something small (actually microscopic) before the big feast of Thanksgiving tomorrow.
