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There’s something of a competition among the resorts in the Maldives as to who has the longest jetty – the walkways that connect the water villas to their islands. At 850 m, Halaveli’s is one of the longest. So long, in fact, that the spa and fine-dining restaurant are situated halfway along its reach to Ari Atoll. -
The grounds of the resorts are not so much kept as carefully curated. Clandestine nooks and spectacular spots allow couples to slip away for a private moment. -
As if letting your mind drift along the horizon all day, every day, isn’t relaxing enough, Constance Resorts’ Maldivian U Spa treatment centres are all set over the water. Watching fish swim below you through a glass pane in the floor adds to the therapeutic effect. -
The grounds of the resorts are not so much kept as carefully curated. Clandestine nooks and spectacular spots allow couples to slip away for a private moment. -
Halaveli’s overwater bed is inspired by traditional Maldivian undohali swing couches. On the country’s 200 inhabited islands, the community leader will usually sit on an undohali while adjudicating local grievances and official matters. At the resorts they serve a more relaxing purpose. -
Wind-sculpted palm trees. Salt-bleached coral beaches. Coconut cocktails over eye-blue water. It’s a cliché until it’s a dream come true. -
Dinner service preparations at Moofushi’s à la carte restaurant on the water. Whereas other resorts insist on a strict dress code and even closed shoes, Constance’s philosophy of barefoot luxury eschews such formalities. True class dines with its toes in the sand. -
There’s no need for footwear at Halaveli’s pool. -
Upon arrival at Moofushi’s reception area you are presented with flip-flops and a bag. Your shoes go in the bag, and you probably won’t put them on again until you leave. -
There’s no need for footwear at the buffet restaurant with its sand floors. -
There’s no need for footwear at the beach, where yoga instructor Tiffany Brook Langley fell for the lure of a hammock. -
Magnificent Maldives Resort -
The U Spa reception area at Halaveli immediately engages all your senses with its polished interior, soft music, air conditioning and cotton recliners. -
The U Spa reception area at Halaveli immediately engages all your senses with its polished interior, soft music, air conditioning and cotton recliners. -
A rare balance of romantic privacy and shared splendour. All accommodation options at Halaveli have private plunge pools, but guests who want to do longer laps don’t need to lower their standards. -
The resort’s fine dining restaurant Jing has the most coveted wine cellar in the country. -
Wood-lined daybed nooks along the Jahaz Bar at Halaveli. Tiffany is one of the lucky people of the world who gather here to shoot the breeze over sundowners or a digestif. -
For all its beauty, the Maldives is a resource scarce country. Almost all the wood used for construction comes from Indonesia, but you will also find teak, pine, marble and cane to blend into the island’s natural textures. -
For all its beauty, the Maldives is a resource scarce country. Almost all the wood used for construction comes from Indonesia, but you will also find teak, pine, marble and cane to blend into the island’s natural textures. -
For all its beauty, the Maldives is a resource scarce country. Almost all the wood used for construction comes from Indonesia, but you will also find teak, pine, marble and cane to blend into the island’s natural textures. -
For all its beauty, the Maldives is a resource scarce country. Almost all the wood used for construction comes from Indonesia, but you will also find teak, pine, marble and cane to blend into the island’s natural textures. -
For all its beauty, the Maldives is a resource scarce country. Almost all the wood used for construction comes from Indonesia, but you will also find teak, pine, marble and cane to blend into the island’s natural textures. -
The balconies of the water villas at Moofushi are angled for maximum privacy and offer direct access to the reef in front with its dazzling array of fish and rays. -
For all its beauty, the Maldives is a resource scarce country. Almost all the wood used for construction comes from Indonesia, but you will also find teak, pine, marble and cane to blend into the island’s natural textures. -
The balconies of the water villas at Moofushi are angled for maximum privacy and offer direct access to the reef in front with its dazzling array of fish and rays. -
The Maldivian dhoni is the country’s traditional sailing vessel. Originally made of coconut wood and lashed together with ropes and vines, today’s dhonis are made using more modern materials and methods, but still sport the traditional elaborate prows.
WORDS Ami Kapilevich PHOTOS Micky Hoyle
Slip into a life aquatic in the Maldives, where primordial splendour and the finest modern amenities can exist side by side. And then some.
I don’t think you could ever get used to it: the first glimpse of a sleek grey shape below. The pulse of your breath in the snorkel stops. Caught between fight and flight, you float. Two blacktip reef sharks slowly curve their way along the drop-off below. “Relax,” you tell yourself. “Stay calm.” Instead of putting distance between you and the sharks, you follow them. Look at you: David Attenborough in the Maldives!
The sharks remain at a tantalising distance before disappearing into the blue. You swim on through the dizzying variety and proximity – the infinity – of underwater life. You’ve already seen a large octopus, a moray eel, an eagle ray and a turtle, but nothing gets your heart racing like a shark. You turn to watch a jellyfish flap past, and there they are: the same two blacktips, right behind you. They must have circled round and started following you. Checking you out. Hunting you! Your heart leaps into your craw, and stays there until you sit giggling with relief on the beach of the resort.
“We have the friendliest sharks in the world,” laughs Moofushi’s front of house manager Mevin Ramasamy over dinner that night.
Moofushi is one of two resorts that our host, Constance Hotels & Resorts, offers in the Maldives. The other is Halaveli, on the eastern end of Ari Atoll. Both are among the best in the country, but what is it that distinguishes Moofushi and Halaveli from all the others? “Service,” Mevin replies, “and the wine.”
The guest relations staff at both resorts are cosmopolitan and not just widely but also deeply travelled. People who regale you with tales about exotic destinations – Aruba, Holbox, Gerring – as if making it onto this sliver of paradise has let you in on an even bigger secret.
“One thing I’ve learnt,” says Constance’s Sales and Marketing Coordinator Kersley Calou, who relocated to Halaveli from Mauritius, “is that Maldivians are naturally welcoming. It’s not an act; it is a sincerely friendly culture.”
Constance’s cellars boast 19 000 bottles of 1 306 varieties. Enthusiastic sommeliers plied us with complex Bordeauxs, rare Italian Merlots, Pinot Noirs from Southern France and a 2009 Argentine white called Zuccardi Serie A made from Torrontés grapes that will change your life. “How ironic,” you muse as you wash down your wagyu steak with a 2009 Grange des Pères, “to have all this at your fingertips on such a remote patch of land.”
Tourists have been flocking to the Maldives since 1972, when the first Italian pioneers were welcomed into private homes in the capital of Malé. Ten years later, tales of naked hippy couples surviving on otherwise uninhabited islands prompted the government to regulate the industry. Today, more than 100 resorts offer their dreamscapes to a lucky clientele. All the resorts make use of their greatest asset: the magnificence of the island itself. From my quarters in Moofushi I took the stairs from the balcony to the water and saw an eagle ray waft past. At Halaveli my villa’s bathroom was a tropical courtyard with stepping stones leading to a shower and pergola-covered sunken bath, both ingeniously screened by layers of wood and wall and Indian almond.
Some come for the thrill of swimming with the friendliest sharks in the world. Others come to prove that sometimes money can afford you things that most of the time money cannot buy. Everyone leaves the Maldives with a coral-island-shaped hole in his or her heart. And everyone returns a better person for it.
