Many Maldives spas have relaxation areas often for chilling before or after a treatment, but Hurawalhi has a separate meditation room devoted to a higher plane of mindfulness. A range of comfortable mats and sitting adjacent to the “ringing bowls” for those who want to incorporate those into their practice.
If lots of folks want to put their feet up, Sun Siyam Irufushi has the most treatment rooms in the Maldives with their spa featuring 20. And that’s not counting the private treatment room in their Celebrity Retreat villa.
The underwater versions of parrot fish and other reef marine life will have a literally more powerful habitat at Angsana Ihuru as a result of their “Necklace Project”. Hotelier Maldives published a great article about the project, “’The Necklace Project’ to be presented at the GM Forum in April”:
Up the sky of the Baa atoll, it’s a fish named after a bird, it’s a plane…it’s Four Seasons Landaa Giraavaru’s latest seaplane inspired by one of the more colourful creatures on the atoll reef…
“A warm welcome to the 52nd member of our fleet!!! The magnificent Four Seasons branded aircraft!”
I might have to create a new tag for “Fish Planes”…
Look! In the sunny cerulean sky! It’s a bird…it’s a plane…it’s super Best Of! “Super” because skydiving in the Maldives is perhaps one of the most eagerly anticipated Best of the Maldives activity to date. It was featured in the very first “Haven’t Seen Yet” post nearly a decade ago. Since then, I have been teased regularly by a number of announcements that skydiving was coming to the destination. A number of initiatives never seemed to get off the ground (quite literally). Even the company who eventually pulled it off, Sky Diving Maldives, posted about it months before details actually were forthcoming. Until finally they teamed up with Shangri-La Villingili for a landmark jump. The plane takes off from neighbouring Gan airport and you land on Villingili island. Guests were able to sail through the blue sky towards the blue water in a tandem jump for $699.
Not quite the #TenYearChallenge, but another example of how things have so dramatically changed and expanded in the Maldives over the past decade. Back in 2012, I came across the first “birds nest” chair at Lily Beach. Now, they are standard equipment for fashion photoshoots. Here is a dozen eggs-cellent fahionistas in their nests…
In the Maldives, the more leisurely way to swing from the trees is lounging in one of their many swings swaying to the ocean breeze. I remember when I came across the first “birdsnest” swing a decade ago. Now they are common fare across the destination. Recently opened Joali literally does put the “bird” in “birdsnest swing” with its giant Heron head designed by Cape Town-based Porky Hefer. The plaque beside the piece reads, “Very often, birds are the first visitors or residents on the islands. This one migrated from Africa. Kara prefers the Maldivian weather and cuisine. Kara has decided to stay.”
Cocoon not only brought the inside…out, but it also made its outdoor workout facility more like the outdoors itself. Its “Tree of Well Being” is not just a functional fitness apparatus for body-weight training, but also provides a striking sculptural aesthetic as well
See the video below for a video demonstration of one of the exercises.
This is just the latest of a number of activities brought outdoors in the sun-soaked landscape so I’ve now added a new tag “Al Fresco” for things conventionally done indoors that resorts have taken outdoors.
People question why you would want to sit in a gym when you have travelled thousands of miles to be in a natural paradise. I was one of those guys who would do workouts on my Maldives holidays. I wanted to keep momentum in my training, I could get great sessions in because I was eating and sleeping extra well, and the general enthusiasm of the whole holiday gave me an extra boost. I did appreciate when resorts made an effort to bring the outdoors in with big picture windows and well situated views. But AaaVeee’s fitness center goes a step even further. Bringing the inside…out. Their gym is fully outdoors. It does have clear wind/rain sheets to lower during inclement weather. It is so outdoors, that it even has a palm tree going in the middle of it through the floor.
One of my other hobbies (with accompanying website) is rowing. Small-world coincidence, one of my fellow coaches at Marlow Rowing Club, Imogen Walsh, was one of the first rowing coaches in the Maldives stationed there for a year to help develop the sport. One of my first “Haven’t Seen Yet” items is finding a resort with a sculling boat (and there still are none). But the Life Fitness “water rower” at Hurawalhi is designed to most closely simulate the action of rowing in the water with a slider seat the resistance is actually created by a small tank of water at the foot of the apparatus. State-of-the art rowing training with a striking large window view of the nearby ocean to provide that extra aesthetic water feel.