If you want to put the “forever yours” into your Valentine, then OBLU by Atmosphere at Helengeli features a romantic heart wish tree. I ♥ Maldives.
Best of the Maldives: Spa Oasis – OBLU Helengeli
The de rigeur location for luxury spas are over the ocean, but OBLU by Atmosphere at Helengeli shows how distinctive you can make your spa setting over a different kind of water. They have developed a little spa oasis with rich greenery and seating cabanas set around a tranquil lily pond. One of the best renditions of the Zen garden concept of Seijaku (静寂) – a tranquility or an energized calm, stillness, solitude.
Best of the Maldives: 2 Channel Reef – OBLU Helengeli
I’ve already elaborated on the benefits of a channel house reef with its flow from the open ocean to the inner atoll often providing a highway for big creatures. OBLU by Atmosphere (Helengeli) features TWO channel house reefs as its extended shapes extends from the atoll edge into the inside. It’s rare find due to plateaus taking reefs far from island and making them less accessible.
Best of the Maldives: Best House Reef Video – Maayafushi
As promised, I have now completed my own list of post-tour challenges of getting all of the research material consolidated, profiles updated, notes organised, and as promised, expanded information on the resorts’ House Reefs. I’ve added a row to the Resort Profile devoted to House Reef details (see below).
Mostly, I have broken down the very crude “House Reef Rating” into several more granular ratings…
- House Reef Rating (focusing on the “drop off”)
- Drop-Off Coral Rating (focusing just on the coral variety and density as opposed to fish life or ease of access.
- Lagoon Coral Rating (focusing on the shallow water coral croppings)
As a part of my enhancing the House Reef information, I’ve also added a second video link to the resort profiles of footage taken on the house reef. Very often, the TripAdvisor Maldives Forum refers to such videos for first hand documentation of the reef quality. I’ve gone through the videos on YouTube and selected the best I could find in terms of showing the most of the reef (ie. not all close ups of fish and other sightings).
Through my house reef YouTube research, I came across a whole range of quality from grainy camera clips to Hollywood-style editted GoPro productions. The one that rose above as “Best Picture” (among some very worthy competition I must say), was “Maldive – The Movie” 39 minute feature film of the Maayafushi house reef.
Other special mentions include…
- Most Views – Filitheyo: 4934.
- Most Likes – Embudoo: 59.
- Best Soundtrack – Helengeli: (fun and apropos medley of tunes)
I’ve populated the ratings based on my visits and information others have shared, but it is at best less than half complete and could have some inaccuracies. If you have any information to share, please comment or email me.
Best of the Maldives: Caves – Helengeli
The Maldives are renowned for simple, easy, shallow dives. But for the advanced diving plenty of more technical dives abound. For example, there are over a dozen caves structures you can dive
And if you are interested in cave dives, I recommend Tim Godfrey’s book ‘Dive Maldives’ reviews 12 of the top cave dive sites in the Maldives. You might have put an alert for on Amazon since the book appears to be out of print and is increasingly hard to locate. All of his dive sites are graded on a 3-star scale and 4 of those 12 earn top marks – Lankan Caves, Maagiri Caves, Fulidhoo Cave and Velassaru Caves.
But the Mecca for cave diving in the Maldives has to be Helengeli as it has two of the top caves nearby- Trixies Caves and Fairytale Reef Blue Caves. Both receive 5-stars in Harwood & Bryning’s ‘Complete Guide to Diving and Snorkeling The Maldives’.