Maldives travel guide

Travel to Maldives between Nov – Apr. Those are the months the weather, the crowds and the airfare line up — outside them you trade one of the three.

Currency

Maldivian Rufiyaa — US dollars accepted everywhere in resorts (MVR)

Language

Dhivehi; English at every resort, and Hindi with much of the staff.

Time zone

MVT (UTC+5) — 30 minutes behind India; many resorts run their own clock an hour ahead

Plug type

Type D / G, 230V

Flight time from India

3 hrs

Flying from

Mumbai · Delhi · Bengaluru · Ahmedabad

• 

  Snorkel the house reef, twice a day

  This is the actual reason to come, and it is free. A good house reef starts thirty metres off the beach and drops into a wall of coral with turtles, reef sharks and a thousand parrotfish. Go once at nine and once at four; the light and the fish are completely different, and the afternoon session is the better one.

• 

  A sandbank picnic

  A bare crescent of white sand in open ocean with nothing on it — no tree, no building, no other people. The resort drops you with a hamper and an umbrella and comes back in three hours. It is the single most photographed thing in the country for a reason, and worth doing on a rising tide so the bank is at its largest.

• 

  A discover-scuba dive, or the manta and whale-shark trip

  You do not need a licence for a supervised first dive to twelve metres, and every resort runs one. If you would rather stay on the surface, Baa Atoll from May to November and South Ari year-round put you snorkelling beside manta rays and whale sharks — both harmless, both enormous.

• Sunset dolphin cruise and night fishing

  Spinner dolphins travel in pods of fifty or more in the channels between atolls and the boat finds them most evenings. Night fishing off a dhoni with a hand line is the other classic, and the kitchen will cook what you catch — worth booking even if you would rather just sit on the deck.

• A local island day: Maafushi or Thulusdhoo

  Most resorts will arrange a half-day to an inhabited island, and it is the only way to see how Maldivians actually live — coral-block houses, a boatyard, a school, a mosque. Dress covered when you step off the boat, and change on the marked bikini beach if you want to swim.

• The overwater spa, and the reef in the floor

  Most resorts build the spa on stilts with a glass panel in the treatment-room floor, so an hour of massage comes with a reef running underneath you. It is the one indulgence that is genuinely specific to the Maldives rather than available anywhere with a beach.

• Mas huni with roshiVegetarian

  The national breakfast — shredded smoked tuna, grated coconut, onion and chilli, eaten with a flatbread that is essentially a roti. Not vegetarian, but worth knowing because the roshi and the coconut sambol beside it are, and they make a good breakfast on their own.

• Garudhiya and fihunu masVegetarian

  A clear tuna broth with rice, lime and chilli, and reef fish grilled with a chilli paste — the two dishes that define Maldivian home cooking. Fish is the foundation of everything local here; there is no traditional Maldivian vegetarian cuisine to speak of.

• Hedhikaa — the short eats counterVegetarian

  Afternoon tea in the Maldives is a tray of small fried things: bajiya, gulha, keemia. Most are tuna-filled. The vegetarian ones exist, usually a plain samosa and a sweet coconut bun, so ask rather than picking blind off the tray.

• The resort buffet, honestly assessedVegetarian

  Almost every resort keeps an Indian section and most keep an Indian chef, so a vegetarian eats perfectly well — dal, paneer, rice, roti, at every dinner. The catch is repetition over seven nights and the price of anything outside the meal plan. Half board plus lunch bought separately usually works out worse than full board.

• For a Jain traveller — declare it at bookingJain friendly

  This is the destination where the rule matters most. A resort island buys nothing locally; every vegetable arrives by boat on a schedule set days in advance. A Jain requirement raised at check-in cannot be met, and a Jain requirement raised at booking almost always can. We put it in the contract, not the arrival note.

Set a meal preference — vegetarian, Jain or halal — when you book and we brief every hotel and restaurant on your itinerary.

• Be honest about this: there is almost nothing to buy, and everything in a resort shop is imported at four times its price
• Lacquered wooden boxes (liyelaa jehun), the one genuine Maldivian craft
• Thundu kunaa — hand-woven reed mats from Gaafu Dhaalu, sold on local islands rather than in resorts
• Coconut oil, dried tuna and Maldivian chilli paste from a shop on Maafushi or in Malé
• Male local market for fresh fruit at a tenth of resort prices, if you are transiting anyway
• Velana airport duty free on the way out — the only place where the prices are ordinary

Transfers are the whole logistics problem. A speedboat runs at any hour and reaches islands within about ninety minutes of Malé. A seaplane reaches the far atolls in twenty-five minutes but flies only in daylight, carries a strict 20 kg checked and 5 kg cabin allowance, and will not operate for an evening arrival. Distant atolls use a domestic flight plus a boat. Once you are on the island there is nothing to get around — you walk it in fifteen minutes.

• Book the outbound flight to land in Malé by early afternoon. Seaplanes do not fly after dark, and a late arrival means a paid night at a Hulhumalé hotel plus a lost resort night — the most common and most expensive avoidable mistake on this trip.
• Local islands are conservative Muslim communities. Off the marked bikini beach, shoulders and knees stay covered for both men and women; alcohol and pork are illegal outside resort islands and cannot be carried in from duty free.
• The channel currents between atolls are strong even when the lagoon looks like a swimming pool. Snorkel with the resort boat and a guide, always with fins, and never swim out past the reef edge on your own.
• Wear reef shoes. Coral cuts are shallow but become infected quickly in warm water, and standing on live coral damages a protected reef and is fined. Fire coral and stonefish are the two things to look at and not touch.
• The nearest recompression chamber can be an hour away by boat. Leave at least eighteen to twenty-four hours between the last dive and your flight home, and build that into the last day rather than discovering it at checkout.
• Green tax and a service charge are levied per person per night, and are frequently outside the quoted package. Ask for the all-in figure including transfers, taxes and the meal plan before comparing two resorts.

Per person, per day, on the ground — meals, local transport and entry tickets. Flights and hotels sit in the package price, not here.