Home » Sri Lanka Maldives » The Trouble in Paradise

Our Indian Airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur landed in Chennai, a city of 5 million people in southern India, formerly known as Madras. The plane was still slowing down as nearly every Indian in the plane stood up, opened up their overhead compartments, took out their oversized hand luggage and then just stood there, crammed in the aisle, while the plane was taxiing to the gate! Patience must not be their strong point.

The Trouble in Paradise

Odv
2006-04-15 18:40:16

Displayed times (last time: )

for food are far greater. Although there is no alcohol, which is strictly banned outside of the resorts and more unfortunately no good beaches and reefs to swim or snorkel on (though there is a beach on the nearby island of Villingili).

Strangely enough some residents of Malé have acquired sport cars, even though the speed limit is just 30 km/hour! Furthermore with a taxi costing just 15 Rufiyaa (less than 1 Euro), just think of how many rides you can get for the price of one sport car. It just does not make any sense to own a car at all!

When arriving at the airport without a resort reservation, you will be able to find something on the spot from one of the many stalls outside the arrivals gate. However it seems wiser to first spend a day or two in Malé, to explore the capital and find some last minute cheaper deals through travel agents in town, taking care to check out the resort of your choice on the Internet.

Resorts are not really our thing, but we choose to go to a resort for a 3 day period (out of the 12 days that we spent in the Maldives). We arranged our own transport at a fraction of the transfer costs normally charged by the resort.

I found the resort pretty boring, except for the excellent house reef, where snorkeling was extremely good. There were stingrays, a shark, fish of every color, but the best was a turtle that did not swim away. I managed to observe that turtle for more than half an hour, sometimes it even swam towards me, until I finally left to go see something else. The turtle was tearing up dead coral, looking for food. At one point it must have found some fish eggs, because one small fish kept trying to bite it in the eye. The turtle just waved it away with his flipper.

In the evenings, to counter the boredom, the resort organized some small event, such as the obligatory crab race. Which some people take surprisingly seriously, even taking other people's crabs! How pathetic.

During our stay in Malé I went on 8 dives as well as some snorkeling trips and Maris did her first introduction dive. I have had the luck to see, giant morays, all kinds of other morays, some sharks, sea turtles, sting rays, a manta, lionfish, triggerfish, huge napoleonfish and many many other types of fish. I also dove through a cave and through the cabin of the Victory shipwreck! The latter was very exiting!

The underwater world in the Maldives is definitely a big highlight of this island nation. That aspect as well as the resorts is unfortunately the only thing most tourists ever experience in the Maldives as most visitors go directly from the airport to their resort. There is much more to the Maldives and it turns out that there is some trouble in paradise!

The president has been in power for 27 years. There are no opposition parties and those who criticize the government are either exiled or imprisoned. Because the Maldives has only 250,000 inhabitants not much attention is paid to the Maldives in the foreign media.

The resorts are heavily taxed by the government, approximately 60% of their takings go to the government, but the people feel that this money is not spent on them. Every government building is "protected" by bunkers and armed guards. Surely they don't expect an imminent invasion? It seems that what these buildings are really being "protected" against is the people's anger that occasionally boils over!

That said, the country is a lot better developed than its neighbors and living standards are much higher, but as one Maldivan told me, it could be so much better.

If you would like to be notified or no longer want to be notified of our travel updates please e-mail me.

otto2003(at)de-voogd(dot).com Otto de Voogd