A week has gone by and I barely had a little bit of time to put the previous post together. I took lots of books on my trip because I assumed I’ll quickly get bored on this little island. Gosh I was wrong. At least until few days ago the surf was epic every day.
The population of the whole island is only about 1000 people and you quickly meet some locals. All of them that I’ve met so far are extremely nice, however there are also a lot of people here from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka working at guest houses. The island is 100% muslim so there’s no alcohol on the island, the supermarkets are closed during praying times, and girls are not allowed to wear bikinis unless at designated beach called, guess what, “Bikini beach”.
There are 5 small supermarkets on the island. My daily routine to get the necessities looks something like:
- The first supermarket is closed, not a great start.
- I get two tomatoes and a Snickers in the second one.
- Somehow, I manage to get a ripened banana in the third one.
- Finally, I get some water in the fourth one.
- No need to go to the fifth store, because luckily I got everything.
Most of the time I eat in one of the three small restaurants on the island. I opted out having lunch and dinner at my guest house, since I wanted to have a bit of freedom when it comes to surf. And to be honest, there is less crowd in the water when everybody’s having lunch, muahaha.
Firstly I wanted to spend my holidays on one of the boats that cruise around the atolls and drop you off right at the surf spot. However, I realised that during July/August best waves are actually around Male where there’s plenty of accommodation available on the islands. Might as well stay on the islands and experience some local culture. The boat is still on my list and I’ll definitely book it in a different season one day.
It’ll be interesting to see how the island’s going to look like in the next five years. They’ve already expanded the land and brought tons of sand on the reef. There are also a few 3 to 4 storey apartments going up at the moment. I’m not sure if there are earthquakes in Maldives, but based on what I’ve seen, I probably wouldn’t recommend staying in anything that’s more than a single storey house. FYI, they make their own blockwork on the island. I was really impressed with that.
The Maldives are really cool to visit either by staying in a guest house, boat, or resort. The water is crystal clear, and by crystal clear I mean you can literally see 20m deep like there’s no water. Unfortunately, a lot of coral reefs are already dead but snorkelling around is still a very unique experience. Even when you just sit in the line up and wait for the waves you can see tons of fish, reef sharks, dolphins, and turtles playing around. I’ll focus more on surfing in one of the following blog posts.
