After a 22-hours journey and 3 flights from Mauritius to Maldives, we finally arrived to Malé. Our stay in the island state was divided into 4 different locations: Malé, Guraidhoo, Paradise Island Resort and Hulhumalé. We limited Male to one night and took the public ferry to Guraidhoo right the next day, where we spent 4 nights to experience people‘s everyday life and to use the time for diving.
Our hotel Luxury Beach was located right by the sea. The staff and all other people we met on the island were very helpful and friendly. The island is quite small and you can walk from one end to the other in roughly 15 minutes – one of the characteristics we loved about it.
As the Maldives are a 100% Muslim country, women are not allowed to be in bikini at all the beaches. Nevertheless, there is a designated beach area near the port and a connected bikini island, where you can sunbath in bikini as everywhere else. Unfortunately, the bikini island is not very well taken care of. However, the beach at the port is very nice and we enjoyed the sunset there every night.
We were amazed by all the sea life around the island and spotted several sting rays while sunbathing at the beach.
But this was no comparison to getting under water. During our first day with two dives we saw huge schools of reef fish, sea turtles and many more. But the best was yet to come…we decided to do an Adventure Deep Dive to 30 metres and came back stunned! During the dive we were surrounded by eagle rays, grey reef sharks, black tip sharks, tunas, barracudas, hundreds of fish and the cherry on top was a manta ray, which we found on our way back to the island. So we could cross out a point from our bucket list 😀
Awesome people we met
Aitor
Aitor was our dive guide and instructor at Manta Divers in Guraidhoo. The dive center is very professional and Aitor is a very responsible and passionate diver. We enjoyed several nice sunsets with him listening to his stories about the Philippines or simply chatting about life. Thank you again for the great dives and especially for all the dive information for the Philippines!