Maldives

After 14 hours of flying (from Paris) + a connection in Colombo, Sri Lanka, we finally landed in the Maldives the early morning of July 11. The resorts there have transport well organized: they are more than 100 booths in the airport arrivals hall, one for each resort, where a staff welcomed us and lead us and other tourists out of the airport, directly to a boat that took us to our island, Meeru.

The Maldives are exactly what you would expect it to be: white sand beaches and crystal blue turquoise water!

The temperatures are very constant here. No matter what month of the year it is, if it is sunny or rainy, daytime or nighttime, you can almost always expect the temperature to be in the narrow range of 27⁰C / 81⁰F to 31⁰C / 88⁰F. As to the water, it is fairly warm: around 26-29⁰C / 79-84⁰F.

Our villa was over the water!

View from the room with stairs going into the water on the right.

The best time to visit the Maldives is during the first 3 months of the year, January-March, where it is the less rainy. But since our trip takes us in Asia between July and December, we decided to visit them in July as it is one of the less rainy of the 9 other months. As a result, there were a few showers here and there, but they never lasted more than an hour or two.

Lauren in front of a small storm coming in.

There is a lot more marine life than I expected in shallow waters near the beach. We kept seeing the same group of 3 or 4 spotted eagle rays swimming by our villa, as well as another solitary member of a different species of ray (it could have been an electric ray). We saw multiple blacktip reef sharks about 1 meter / 3 feet long (relatively harmless as they are afraid of humans and swim away if we try to approach them). And we saw many, many different types of colorful fishes, with the most impressive being a big 1 meter / 3 feet long fish that looked like a tuna with a mesmerizing metallic blue color.

We had a great time: sometimes just relaxing on the beach, snorkeling, windsurfing, kayaking, playing golf (badly!), going to the spa for a massage, etc.

Cocktails on the beach. I tried every cocktail in the menu.

Golfing at the range.

Our sunset cruise was unfortunately dolphin-less.