My guilty pleasure
The Maldives are a fragile paradise – but Joanna Trollope just can’t help being swept away by the beauty and luxury lifestyle
IHAD always thought that the Maldives were a cliche. An idyllic cliche, of course – white beaches, blue sea, water villas on stilts – but a cliche nonetheless. The idea of the Maldives fell, in my mind, into the same category as words such as ‘luxury’ and ‘pampering’ and ‘heritage’ – a way of trying to dress up something fundamentally ordinary in order to persuade us to buy it and imagine we are getting something extraordinary in the process.
That is, until I went there. I was woefully ignorant right up to arriving in the capital, Male. I didn’t know that the Maldive Islands are the world’s biggest system of atolls – 26 groups of coral islands surrounding central lagoons.
I knew they were somewhere near Sri Lanka (about an hour’s flight south-east of Colombo, in fact) but not that they were almost on the Equator, nor that the Indian Ocean, and then the Southern Ocean, stretch all the way south of them to the next landmass in that direction, which is Antarctica.
I had no idea that their situation and their fragile composition of coral makes them, essentially, so dramatic.
It takes nearly 12 hours (British Airways flies direct to Male from Gatwick) to get there. Then I got into a local plane, and flew back some of the way I had already come, from the southern Maldives, where Male is, to the northern Maldives, and a runway carved out of the jungle at a place called Hanimaadhoo. It can call itself an inter- national airport since it has a flight once a week to western India.
We flew quite low, over an astonishing spectacle of luminous turquoise sea, graduated in intensity depending on the depth of the water, and flat green islands with curving arms of water villas stretching out here and there like antennae.
I was gazing at, I realised, a scattered but giant playground, a series of hotels occupying an island each, without so much as a slope, let alone a hill, between them. It was like looking at a living map, without contours.
At Hanimaadhoo, we changed from a plane to a speedboat. My fellow passengers – mostly Chinese honeymooners with comedy T-shirts and spectacular nail art – watched our journey through their cameras and smartphones as we sped across yet more of this improbably coloured sea.
We headed past small islands so low that they hardly emerged from the water, to our eventual destination, the Haa Alifu Atoll, and a crescent-shaped island, Dhonakulhi, facing east across a huge lagoon, aquamarine under a matching sky. This was my hotel, the Hideaway Beach and Spa, and everything underfoot, including some of the restaurant floors, was white, white sand.
I stood in the reception area with its high, Balinese-style roof, under a chandelier made of a shoal of ceramic fish, and felt I was somewhere very other, and strangely alien.
I was given a villa (on land, emphatically. Europeans, apparently, prefer beaches. Asians like the water villas) looking east over the lagoon. It had a huge garden bathroom, a football pitch-size bed, a cobalt-blue tiled pool big enough to swim in, and a white-sand garden that melted into an empty white sand beach.
It was in a row of villas but there was so much dense planting between them, and such ingeniously allocated spaces, that I had no sense at any time that there was a single neighbour anywhere.
There were extravagantly comfortable cushions and mattresses on every surface, inside and out, and all I honestly felt at the beginning was that the First World agitation that I had inevitably brought with me was going to render all this secluded quiet and comfort and beauty pretty pointless.
It took two days and two nights to surrender. On the third day, I was gradually aware that I had lain in a heap for a whole morning, placidly reading a satisfyingly fat book – Hilary Mantel’s A Place Of Greater Safety.
The rest of the day, and the next and the next, I read, and padded about the beach after the little scuttling shell crabs, and watched the sunsets, and ambled round the coastline of the island – and forgot, quite easily, to put on my watch.
I began to watch the wildlife,
mostly crow-like birds, and huge fruit bats with yellowish furry bodies and ears like Mickey Mouse, and the weather – purplish storm clouds piling up over the lagoon which never lost its aquamarine glow, sheets of tropical rain sweeping like gauze across the banana palms – and then, of course, the people.
I don’t mean my fellow guests. Apart from the fact that I only really saw them at breakfast (magnificent – of which more anon), the whole island is so designed that no guest ever sees much of anyone else unless they really choose to. I don’t think I have ever been anywhere more private.
But I was fascinated by the hotel staff, of which there were almost two to every guest. The manager was German, some of the senior staff were East European, Indian or Filipino, but most were either Sri Lankan or Maldivian.
My butler, Shafeeq (I have never had such a thing before in all my life), was born on an island visible across the lagoon. Tourism, and all that it entails, has brought prosperity, for some at least, without question.
It has also brought many other things. In the centre of Dhonakulhi island, concealed in thick jungle growth, was a wireless mast providing better mobile reception and wifi than I ever manage to get in West London. There was also, hidden from view by the foliage, staff accommodation, stores (every last bottle, bathrobe and steak has to be imported), generators and desalination plants. There was, deservedly, a palpable professional pride in delivering such service in such a place. But there was also, in the piles of snowy towels, the mountains of shocking-pink dragon fruit, the acres of debris-free pool water, a huge cost implicit in providing it.
I went, one abrupt tropical sunset evening, to watch the daily fish-feeding below a wooden restaurant deck. In the clear water, vast, sinister rays, bigger than paving stones, rippled silently above the sandy floor, overlaid with solid blue jackfish.
A waiter brought a bucket of raw fish scraps left over, he said, from the staff canteen. When he threw the fish into the sea, the water suddenly erupted into a boiling mass of fighting bodies, and I had an immediate sense that however much this place looks like paradise, it is, essentially, both fragile and fierce. Everything in those beautiful waters is preying on something else. There is as much fear and flight there as there is serenity, and I would be very surprised indeed if that didn’t, even i n subtler ways, apply as much to the people on the islands as to the strange and fascinating inhabitants of the lagoons. The management of Hideaway is keenly aware of the fragility. Guests are asked not to swim after dark in the sea to protect the coral. Watersports are supervised and permitted only within the lagoon. The stupendous fish – black and white striped sergeant fish, multicoloured parrot fish, unicorn fish that change colour when you land them – are protected. The balance between human need/greed and nature is a perpetual concern and constantly readjusted. The costs of all this doesn’t bear thinking about, and explains some of the marketing initiatives, which there is uneasiness over, even if accompanied by a reluctant acceptance of the need for them.
THE economic demands, and the corruption and inequality that go with them, are part of a familiar and historic human pattern, and these gorgeous places are especially vulnerable.
Hideaway is certainly gorgeous: private, beautiful, comfortable, welcoming and efficient. I have never seen such a breakfast buffet anywhere – every nationality of taste catered for, including three kinds of passion fruit – to be eaten on a deck only 3ft above the sea in which slim and menacing reef sharks swim by nonchalantly.
I have never had such a sense, either, of being simultaneously waited on and left alone. I did a great deal of people-watching – of course I did! – and beachcombing and reading and just drifting about in body and mind.
I can’t pretend I didn’t love it, however much I was concerned, or just intrigued, by some aspects of it. And when I climbed on to the speedboat to cross the sea back to Hanimaadhoo, and the first elements of the real world once more, I knew the Maldives can be anything but a cliche. Unless, of course, that is what you want them to be.
Joanna Trollope is donating the fee from this article to the National Literacy Trust (literacytrust.org.uk).