For short lattes or long, LUX South Ari Atoll offers eco-friendly coffee cups that allow you to have your coffee and take it away too…
I love the creativity with which the resort welcome (and also bid farewell sometimes) to their guests as they arrive to the island’s shore. The latest addition to the cavalcade of cordial choreography is Kudafushi’s fish and wave greeting. A rendition opens their video holiday greeting the staff filmed.
One of the myths about the Maldives is that there is nothing to do there. One glance at the sheer scale of the Best of the Maldives “Activity” listing dispels that notion. There is a big difference between “you can do nothing” and “you have to do nothing”.
When you do decide you feel like a bit of stimulating action, there’s no better place than the picturesque surroundings of this tropical utopia. Where else can you play a few games of tennis framed by the dazzling ocean? LUX North Male Atoll’s uniquely positioned seaside court even features blue playing surface for the full azure effect.
In the Instagram era, if you don’t get your social snaps, then did you even go on holiday. Now nearly every resort offers a photo point (motivated by the free publicity as they almost always have the name of the resort plastered prominently on them. But no one has more than You & Me with its five different points:
The snappiest resort in the Maldives.
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.
We always describe the Maldives to people who have never been as “that iconic image of a plot of sand with a palm tree…1000 of those!” The diminutive sandy dots in the middle of mill pond still lagoons provides an intimacy with a gently inviting ocean. When we first visited, the resorts all sequestered us into dining rooms at mealtime. Eventually we asked if we could move our table out onto the beach by the water and they were happy to oblige. By the end of the week, a bunch of other diners had followed our lead and joined us under the stars with the mini waves lapping nearby.
These days all resort understand the charm of beach dining and offer a number of seating areas on the sand close to the water. But no standard dining venue (as opposed to specialty beach dining experiences) get you closer to the water than Shangri-La Villingili’s Javvu restaurant. Partly this proximity is due to a bit of erosion that has brought the water closer to the dining as much as the dining has approached the water. The tables are all set under a canopy of shore lining palms to that cosying up the seaside experience.
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.
