History of Maldives Maps

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Maldives Maps 4

I love maps in general, especially oldie-worldie maps. And there are few places on the planet where maps were vital in the Old World than the Maldives which formed a minefield of reefs across the maritime East-West trade route. “The VOC’s mapping of the Maldives: navigation, shipwrecks, and cartography in the heart of the Indian Ocean” by Ruud Stelten and Wendy Van Duivenvoorde not only features a trove of maps (some featured here), but also provides an excellent account of the history of mapping this corner of the world:

  • “Throughout the VOC’s existence, its ships experienced numerous mishaps in the Maldivian islands, whereby vessels were wrecked, sailors died, and trade goods were lost. As a result, the Company made various efforts to chart the archipelago in order to better understand its physical layout and safely navigate its treacherous waters. This has resulted in a rich cartographic record, which, albeit limited in size, provides fascinating insights into the VOC’s development of knowledge of the Maldivian islands. Until now, however, it has been unclear how these charts came into existence, who made them and why, how the Dutch navigated the Maldivian waters, what dangers the islands presented, how many Dutch ships wrecked here, and how this influenced the VOC’s decision making on its sailing routes. This article aims to address these issues by exploring the role the Maldivian archipelago played in the VOC’s shipping network. By investigating how the Dutch came to understand the geography of the Maldives and how to map it, this study aims to provide an understanding of how the archipelago influenced navigation, shipping and commerce, and the establishment of shipping lanes. Furthermore, this study will examine how the archipelago’s dangers were mitigated, and what happened when ships did fall victim to its treacherous reefs.”

Maldives Maps 3

Maldives Maps 2

Maldives Maps 1

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7 Levels of Maldives Resort

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7 Levels of Maldives

A popular YouTube format is the “7 Levels of…” feature. Often, it is used for segmenting entertainment – ie. Rappers, Singers, TV Shows, Film Twists. But another common subject is luxury items – Watches, Wine, Megayachts, Hi-Fi Systems, Whiskey. I’ve often written about the gradient of differences between Maldives resorts to try to help make sense of the cacophony of reviews and ratings, so I thought that I would put out my own version of “7 Levels”:

  1. Guest House – The ultimate entry level is the “Guest House”. These were introduced in 2008 to provide low-cost options for budget travellers and to extend the benefits of tourism business to local islands (as opposed to the dedicated resort islands). In addition to providing a very wallet-friendly alternative, they immerse guests into the authentic daily life of the local islanders. However, these properties and their locations do come with a number of constraints imposed by the Islamic culture such as no alcohol, no pork, and no bikinis (except sometimes in special segregated areas). Furthermore, the guest houses themselves are typically quite simple affairs not much more than a basic B&B with few amenities (and sometime lacking in features such as air conditioning)
    • Price Range: $30-90/n
    • Equivalent: Bed & Breakfast, hostels, motel
    • Examples. West Sands, Royal Villa Royal Villa Fulidhoo
  2. Local Island Hotel – In addition to guest houses, some of the larger local, inhabited islands have small hotels built on them. These properties are more expansive and expensive than the guest houses. They are offer more facilities and typically a higher standard of décor and amenities. Most with have reception services, dining, even a pool.
    • Price Range: $100-$300/n
    • Equivalent: budget motorway motel
    • Examples – Hotel Jen, AIG Grand, White Shell Beach Inn, Arena Beach Hotel
  3. Budget 3 star – The Maldives started as simple, un-airconditioned villas catering to the diving community and you can still find a few very simple properties that still provide relatively basic accommodation, service, and food. You will have air conditioning, and the same dappled blue ocean and enchanting sunsets to gaze upon, but pretty basic services and often tired, dated décor.
    • Price Range: $100-$300/n
    • Equivalent: Butlins, holiday par
    • Examples – Eriyadu, Embudu, Bandos.
  4. Value 4 star – When we first started visiting the Maldives in the 90s, this segment was the most popular. It has more than the basics. Nothing truly luxurious, but well appointed.
    • Price Range: $300-800/n
    • Equivalent: Holiday Inn, budget chain hote
    • Examples. Gangehi, Reethi Faru, Kandooma
  5. Luxury 5 star –The luxury 5-star is the current hot segment dominating the new entrants. The vast majority of Maldives guests are affluent travellers who expect a high standard of aesthetics, cuisine, service and amenities that these properties deliver.
    • Price Range: $800-2000/n
    • Equivalent: Marriott, W hotel
    • Examples. Emerald, Siyam World, Amilla Fushi
  6. Super Lux – This is the “Wow” category. Table stakes here are elegant design, gourmet food, and typically some “wow” offering like an underwater restaurant, observatory, marine center, or observation tower.
    • Price Range: $2000-4000/n
    • Equivalent: Leading Hotels of the World collectio
    • Examples. Soneva Fushi, Velaa, Milaadhoo, Cheval Blanc.
  7. Private Island – The ultimate in Maldives island luxury is your own private island. In the past, billionaires have occasionally bought out an entire resort property, but it is difficult to do because guests may have already booked some of the rooms well in advance. Also, a small island can be 50 rooms (or 100 guests typically) and that’s a LOT of friends to invite on holiday.
    • Price Range: $50k/nt
    • Equivalent: Branson’s Necker Island
    • Examples – Soneva Secret, Four Seasons Voavah, Waldorf Ithaafushi.
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Myths of the Maldives

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I previously did a post featuring my YouTube reaction video the “Top Tenz” creator who did a piece on “10 Places in the World That Actually Kinda Suck” which included the Maldives. Unfortunately (for the creator) and fortunately for Maldives fans, his video was packed with errors and misinformation (which I methodically debunked). Of the years, I have come across a number of cynical myths about the Maldives that probably put people off from experiencing this unique destination. So I thought I would post this piece to set the record straight:

  1. “Maldives are unaffordable” – While there are many super-lux billionaire properties, there are just as many if not more budget hotels, guest houses, special offers and value-priced resorts (check out my post “Bunking with the Billionaires on a Budget”)
  2. “The Maldives are sinking” – Climate change is absolutely happening, and one of the biggest areas of impact are the world’s ocean which makes an island nation like the Maldives particularly vulnerable in many ways. But the image of the islands “sinking” is really just compelling characterisation to draw attention to this more complex problem of intensifying weather events, rising sea levels, and the warming plus acidification of the oceans killing coral.
  3. “The Maldives is unwelcoming to gay guests” – Maldives is a strongly Islamic country and its legal system is very much governed by Sharia law principles which make same-sex sexual activity officially illegal and punishable by fines, prison sentences and even lashings. However, in practice, homosexuality is very rarely prosecuted. And any time it might apply the law, it has been and would only be to Maldivian nationals. While gay travellers might avoid the destination out of distaste for such policies on the books at all, visitors should rest assured that they will not be targeted nor unwelcome for their sexual orientation.
  4. “The sharks you see are dangerous” – For the longest time, despite the many sharks resident in the Maldivian waters, there had been zero shark attacks. We used to get very still in the water when we saw them snorkeling not because we were afraid…but because they were notorious scaredy-cats. If you moved suddenly, they would quickly swim away. Then Instagram happened which combined with terribly irresponsible excursion operators has contributed to several “attacks” in recent years. Actually, “attack” is a misnomer as the shark really had no intention of biting a human. A better descriptor would be “incidents where the shark got confused by so much tasty fish being thrown in the water that it mixed up the fish with the humans stupidly swimming in the middle of the shark buffet so they could get that cool Insta shot.”
  5. “There’s nothing to do but lie on the beach” – I’ve written over a hundred articles with the “Activity” tag covering the vat diversity of things one can do at a Maldives resort including riding a jet car, doing a parachute jump over the ocean, go on a treasure hunt, kickboxing, jet wakeboarding, make your own coconut oil, golf, qiqong, wine tasting, aerial yoga, etc., etc.
  6. “Hospital care is is only available in Male.” – Some guests consider limiting their resort options to those in the Male atolls in order to be close to the main national hospital there. While there a four modern hospitals in Male, there are also another 18 quite modern hospital facilities throughout the country an equally short speed boat ride away from resorts in those atolls.

   

Posted in: Destination

QI: Atoll Formation

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Atoll formation Maldives

Q: How did the Maldivian atolls form?
A: Ancient volcanos who collapsed in on themselves and sunk?
Q: Buzzz…while that was the theory for year, put forth by none other than Charles Darwin, modern research shows…
Q: How long ago did the Maldivian atolls form?
A: Millions of years ago?
Q: Buzzz…the Maldives atolls are actually younger that the pyramids.

The revised understanding of atoll formation is the result of André Droxler, an emeritus professor of marine geology at Rice University in Texas who spent four months at the Maldives National University in 2023 as a Fulbright scholar recently featured in the Maldives Independent article “Younger than the pyramids: teaching students how the Maldives really formed”:

  • “For generations, Maldivian students learned that their islands formed through the slow sinking of ancient volcanoes, an elegant and intuitive theory proposed by Charles Darwin in 1842 that remains in textbooks worldwide. But a new supplementary curriculum is now teaching them what drill cores and seismic surveys have revealed: Darwin was working with incomplete information, and the real story is both stranger and more relevant to the future of a low-lying archipelago facing accelerated sea level rise…’These tiny atolls are just the last, last, last phase of this very long-term evolution of this reef system,’ Droxler explained. ‘The atolls have nothing to do with the volcanic plateau. It’s only the last half a million years, while this entire carbonate edifice is 55 million years long’.”
  • “Malé began forming less than 4,500 years ago. The island most likely took its current shape only in the past 2,000 years, making it younger than the pyramids of Giza. The islands of the Maldives Archipelago only formed in the last 5,000-4,000 years as the results of the local emergent accumulations of reefal cobbles, pebbles, and sands behind the active coral reefs, when the rates of sea level rise slowed down dramatically.”

Maldives atoll formation

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TA Revisited

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Ta Mentions chart Maldives

15 years ago, I posted a piece “Best of Maldives Online – TA Resort Popularity: Vilamendhoo – Maldives Complete Blog”. TripAdvisor Maldives Forum had been emerging as the pre-eminent travel community in general and specifically about the Maldives (compared to other TA Forums, it is especially active and authoritative). Back then I was just starting to get involved as a regular contributor and reader and I sensed that there are some resorts which seemed to be quite favoured in the online group as signified by the number of mentions. I wanted to test this perception with a highly unscientific but at least objective survey of the posts. I chose to count the mentions of resorts in the Subject line of the posts over a 6-month period.

3,700+ contributions later, the Forum has palpably changed. For starters, there are now lots of enquiries about local islands which people visit with the many new guest houses on the scene. Debates about children on properties, the weather and resort aesthetics have died down, but the terraforming debate is as intense as ever.

The graph above shows the distribution of mentions across resorts which more or less follows the same shape as 2011. There is a slight flattening, but not as much as I thought there might be with the number of active resorts doubling from 99 then to 186 now. The top two mentioned resorts – Hurawalhi and Vilamendhoo – got a combined total of 10% of the mentions compared to 8% for the top 2 back then.

The big surprise was simply the number of overall mentions which was less than half. I think this is reflecting simply fewer posts in TripAdvisor. I would put this down to a general maturity of the web with resort website providing much more comprehensive and easy to query information about their properties. Not to mention the emergence of Social Media providing another whole category of online community to consult for information and advice. I belong to a few Facebook Groups focused on Maldives travel. Curiously, the engagement is a much high quantity than TA Forum (ie. each post gets lots more replies), but actually the quality is much lower (ie. lots of people responding with inane information based on very limited knowledge of the destination).

TripAdvisor comparison of Maldives resort mentions

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Maldives Vintage Map

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Maldives vintage map

I love me a good map, and after featuring so many here, I felt that I had to have one of my own to grace the walls of our home. There are lots of vintage maps of the Indian Ocean and a number that just feature the Maldives. The one above is the one I ended up purchasing a print of as it seemed to have the most aesthetic charm. If you want one for your own memento (not recommended for modern navigation), and Google Image search can find several for sale pretty readily.

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Abandoned Resorts of the Maldives

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Recently, a video about an abandoned resort in the Maldives went viral and I was curious to find out which one it was as I have come across several. My further investigation has uncovered five specifically:

  • J ALIDHOO – We actually had the distinction of staying at J Alidhoo went it was in the final stages of decommissioning. Our tour report mentioned “operational issues” as we thought that the property was having a bump in the road as resorts sometimes do, but I guess it never recovered. Our visit was actually quite surreal. We arrived and the marketing manager who had invited us had left the company a couple of days ago and had not passed on our visit details to the staff. So we arrived at the jetty and they were all a bit surprised (but they saw the correspondence I shared with the invitation and they happily welcomed us especially and the island was 95% empty with only a handful of other customers there. The spa was closed and the F&B operation was severely constrained (as mentioned in our earlier report). We were happy to see the place being in the neighbourhood so far up north, but it was a bit of an eerie experience even before it fully shuttered a few months later.
  • ZITALHI DHOLHIYADHOO – The “Out Chasing Stars” blog posted a pretty comprehensive photo essay about this place, “Walking an Abandoned Resort in the Maldives – Out Chasing Stars”, in addition to the video (see bottom).
  • FARU – Faru was one of the earliest resorts in the Maldives and was a renowned budget property (pretty much one of the cheapest resorts in the 1990s), but they never invested in some of the basics (eg. air conditioning) that the new waves of Maldives visitors were looking for and got left behind it seems. I heard rumours of the island being revamped, but nothing specific seems to have emerged.
  • J RESORT RAALHUVELI – This is the one that is causing all the fuss recently with the Kale Brock video (see below).
  • VELIDHOO – I’ve long heard about Velidhoo, but couldn’t find much about it and the video directly below explains why.

   

  

   

Posted in: Destination

Coconut Stages

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maldives coconut

Eskimos (Sami) have between 180-300 words for “snow” and “ice”. In the sunnier climes of the Maldives with its swaying palm trees, it’s the coconuts that have all the words. In Dhivehi, the Maldivian language, there are indeed twelve distinct words for the different stages of a coconut’s life cycle:

  • Rukuehth (ރުކުއެތް) – Flower bud
  • Rukumaa (ރުކުމާ) – Coconut palm flowers
  • Gobolhi (ގޮބޮޅި) – Just formed nut
  • Miri (މިރި) – Young coconut with no meat
  • Gorugobolhi (ގޮރުގޮބޮޅި) – Phase between Miri and Kihah
  • Kihah (ކިހައް) – Immature coconut
  • Kurumba (ކުރުނބާ) – Drinking phase
  • Gabulhi (ގަބުޅި) – Phase between Kurumba and Kaashi
  • Kaashi (ކާށި) – Eating phase
  • Kurolhi (ކުރޮޅި) – No water, hard meat
  • Mudi (މުދި) – Germinated coconut
  • Raa Rui (ރާ ރުއި) – Coconut sap

Each stage has its own unique characteristics and uses in Maldivian cuisine and culture.

Posted in: Destination \ Tagged: ,

What is in a name…of the Maldives

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Maldives map

One of the blog features has been a dive into the colourful linguistic tapestry of this exotic land (and sea). The resort database includes a field for the Dhivehi meaning of all the resort names as well. So I especially enjoyed this piece in the Maldive Independent – “What’s in a name: Maldives throughout millennia” – which explored the etymology of the name “Maldives” itself as well as a variety of other monikers it had through the centuries:

  • 1500-500 BC: “Maladvipa”, (“Mala” meaning garland and “Dvīpa” meaning island) in Vedic literature including the Mahābhārata and Purāṇas.
  • 483 BC: “2000 Parittadipa” (small islands) by the Buddhist Pāli texts Aṅguttara Nikāya and Khuddaka Pāṭha.
  • 59-62 AD: “Coral Islands” by Greco-Roman periplus, Periplus of the Erythraean Sea written in Koine Greek describing sea navigation and trading routes.
  • 150 AD: “Manioli” by Claudius Ptolemy’s Geographia (Book 7, Chapter 4) describing “1378” islands located southwest of India.
  • 420 AD: “Islands beyond India” referenced by Bishop Palladius of Helenopolis in Historia Lausiaca.
  • 5th century AD: “Mahiladipika” (Island of Women) by linguist Wilhelm Geiger derived from the Pali words Mahila (woman) and Deepika (islands), reflecting a matriarchal order.
  • 7th century AD: “Dweepa Lakshman” (Hundred Thousand Isles) byPallava dynasty documents.
  • 658 AD: “Mo-lai people” by Tang Dynasty records.
  • 9th century AD: “Diva Kauza” (“Islands of Shells”) by Iraqi merchant and writer Diva Kauza (Islands of Shells).
  • 10th century AD: “Munnir Palantivu Pannirayiram” (Twelve Thousand Islands and the Ocean Where Three Waters Meet), referring to the Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean, and the Bay of Bengal by Chola dynasty inscriptions.
  • 12th century AD: “Dheebat al Mahal” (“Islands of Women”) by Arabic historians Al-Masudi, Sulaiman al-Tajir, Al-Biruni.
  • 1225 AD: “Liu Shan” (Island Country) or “Liu Shan Guo” (Country of the Flowing Mountains) by Chinese customs inspector and geographer Zhao Rugua (1170–1228 CE), of the Song Dynastry period in his work Zhu Fan Zhi (Description of Barbarian Nations or Records of Foreign Peoples).
  • 13th century AD: “Pāpalam Theevu” (Pāpalam meaning cowries shells and Theevu meaning island in Tamil). Tholkāppiyam, by Tholkāppiyam the oldest extant work in Tamil literature.
  • 1300 AD: “Island of Male” by Marco Polo (referenced, not visited).
  • 1343-46 AD: “Deebath Al Mahal” by Ibn Battuta.
  • 1414 AD: “Liu Shan Tieh Kan” (Islands of Peaks) by Chinese admiral Zheng He’s scribe, Ma Huan, while Fei Xin, who also accompanied the commander names it “Liu Shen Yeng” (roughly translates into “Divine or Mysterious islands in the vast ocean or across the sea).
  • 1507 AD: “Maldives Ilha Dywe” by Portuguese explorers.
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Dialed Up Dipole

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Indian Ocean Dipole

Warming sea temperatures, El Nino, Crown of Thorn Starfish. After all of these threats to reef health, it’s no wonder Maldive reefs have been struggling. And now a fourth (!) assailant entered the scene – Indian Ocean Dipole. The BBC describes the IOD, aka “The Indian Ocean El Nino” (“Indian Ocean Dipole – What Is It?”):

  • “Temperatures in the eastern part of the ocean oscillate between warm and cold compared with the western part, cycling through phases referred to as “positive”, “neutral” and “negative”. The dipole’s positive phase this year – the strongest for six decades – means warmer sea temperatures in the western Indian Ocean region, with the opposite in the east.”

And this added boost to ocean temps isn’t only a hazard to corals, but to other life in the atolls. Notably, in the recent loss of mangroves as examined in this month’s Nature article “Sea-level rise and extreme Indian Ocean Dipole explain mangrove dieback in the Maldives”:

  • “Mangrove forests enhance Small Island Developing States’ resilience to climate change, yet in 2020, a mangrove dieback impacted ~ 25% of mangrove-containing islands in the Maldives…We attribute this dieback to salinity stress driven by record-high sea levels in 2020, linked to an extreme positive Indian Ocean Dipole event.”

Indian Ocean Dipole 2

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