Eat, drink and be lazy
Rugby star David Flatman heads for the Maldives – and finally learns the three rules of a beach holiday
THE notion of a lazy holiday in the sun is somewhat oxymoronic in my simple view. A lazy holiday in Devon or Cornwall can be achieved, but only because one can step into the car, select a forward gear and be on holiday when one gets out again. But a chilled, zero-effort trip to another country? No. I’m not having it.
Travelling, you see, is inescapably a load of graft. First there’s the whole destination research piece, then dates have to be massaged and dog-sitters communicated with, and all of this administration is undertaken in order that a supposedly relaxing holiday can result. Then comes the drive to the airport, the car park maze-following, the terminal bus-catching and the queuing. The endless, sweaty queueing.
My hatred of such admin and kerfuffle comes partly from being that slightly overweight chap you see in airports, perspiring in his polo shirt, and partly because I think so much of it feels so unnecessarily torturous.
However, Mrs F’s happiness of course overrides my body-heat and patience issues, and holidays to hot countries are now part of our summer routine. There is, though, an easier way to get the job done. When I recently recommended tour operator Turquoise Holidays to a friend, he wondered why anybody would need anyone else’s help to book a holiday: the bits we find laborious, they find comically easy.
So I called them – as I did last year – and asked if they wouldn’t mind doing all the work for me. Three hours later, I had booked flights on Etihad (very comfortable indeed with superb service and a properly tasty lamb tagine), and a week’s stay in a resort called Velassaru in the Maldives. I was warned that this was their rainy season, but I kept schtum in case Mrs F vetoed me on grounds of weather, and secretly prayed for some lovely, chilling rain.
The rain never came, but this place was so fabulous that I might even have forgotten to notice the heat. We were lucky to stay in a water villa and this meant that, every half hour or so, we could step down into the ludicrously transparent ocean to cool off, occasionally grabbing our snorkelling gear and engaging in some inter-coral networking.
From the elegant, raised walkway paving our route to the main island, a wondrous array of fish was visible, in colours that seemed to change as we gawped. Once under the surface, a million more appeared beneath and between us, almost translucent, appearing and disappearing in the sun.
We’ve all seen images of the Maldives but, unless you have been, it’s tough to describe what the water there is like. It appears to be an electric blue, endlessly inviting. Once in, though, it is as clear as mineral water, only warm and marginally more boisterous. It is otherworldly, and we felt privileged just to look at it, never mind bob up and down in this liquid paradise.
The Maldivian routine is a simple one: wake up late, eat, read, eat, do something that feels energetic but really isn’t, eat, sleep, repeat. If you’re one of the 99.3 per cent of grown-ups who never actually get to press pause on life, being this relaxed and having this little to do feels, frankly, a bit odd. Well, for about a day and a half, at which point you realise that this regime is yours to design and that no colleagues, children or pets have any pull whatsoever over you, and joy kicks in.
When my joy kicked in, I decided to have a kip at roughly midday. I woke up three hours later and fancied a cold drink and a medium rare tuna steak, so I ordered it and it arrived. Goodness me, I thought, this must be what it’s like to be Rod Stewart (but fatter).
We lunched on lobster one day, grilled local reef fish the next. Mrs F quickly became addicted to their ‘cucumber cooler’. So aggressive was her habit that one of the lovely and numerous waiters would have one sent over before we’d even looked at a menu. For breakfast we balanced our penchant for made-to-order Nutella crepes with mountains of fresh fruit, ensuring that guilt levels were kept in check.
We decided to get stuck into the list of suggested activities during our stay, and it was a good decision. Mrs F was pampered in the hilariously opulent over-water spa (Sandy the masseuse was so good that she went back three times), and I even had a pedicure.
We hopped aboard an original wooden sailing boat and sipped cold beers as the sun set over the Indian Ocean, and we were taken alone by four staff members to a proper desert island in the sea, where bean bags were set into the untouched sand and a beautiful, huge lunch was served. That afternoon in particular had us pinching ourselves.
WE SAVED the best activity for the last day. Part of the package we purchased was a complimentary photo shoot as a couple with a professional photographer. This is Mrs F’s idea of hell, but by day seven she was struggling more with giggles than with self-confidence.
I think we should return with our daughters, aged three and five, next summer – it was that wonderful. Only the three-hour midnight stop-off in Abu Dhabi airport put us off this time, but I think Velassaru makes up for that and then some.
We came, we read, we slept, and we ate. We bathed and we paddled, we sipped and we laughed. A friend of mine warned me we’d get bored after five minutes, but he was way off. We accepted the peace for what it was and, with the odd injection of sashimi and dips into the sea dotted in for overall vacationing balance, our lives finally slowed down.
It was more glorious than we had even dreamed, so glorious in fact that I’ve already emailed Turquoise Holidays again...