Vogue Australia 2015-05...

198 – MAY 2015

first CLASS

M

HARMLESS BABY

REEF SHARKS

LEISURELY TRAWL

THE SHALLOWS IN

TWOS AND THREES

y first morning in the Maldives

starts way too early, courtesy

of a six-hour time difference

and a touch of jet lag. I get my

bearings when I throw open the blackout

curtains in my villa to reveal a beach of

white sand dimly luminescent in the pre-

dawn gloaming and a stretch of dark green

water rippling with tiny waves. Late last

night I landed at the island airport next

to the capital of Malé, walked out of the

terminal, crossed the road and stepped onto

a speedboat waiting at the water’s edge – no

taxi queues here. After 40 minutes of

bouncing through unseen waves, looking

out at an expanse of black punctured by

the occasional arrow-straight line of distant

lights of buildings on passing islands, we

arrived at the island of Gasfinolhu, the

home of Finolhu Villas.

This is Club Med’s first stand-alone

luxury offering: a couples-only, butler-

serviced villa resort a five-minute boat ride

from the group’s more mainstream offering

on the island of Kani. Finolhu Villas, which

opened in January, occupies the length of

a  small sandy island in the neighbouring

atoll, and it really is small: it would take less

than 10 minutes to amble from one tip of

the island to the other. Perched on what is

really a long sandbank, the resort is one of

the more environmentally sensitive in the

Maldives, a nation of around 1,100 low-

lying islands in the Indian Ocean singularly

vulnerable to rising sea levels, with an

average of three islands lost to inundation

each year. There are some 4,000 solar panels

powering the island – the resort runs

entirely on solar energy – with panels

doing double duty as shading on the

gangway from the arrival jetty to shore,

and along the length of the walkway

connecting each of the over-water villas.

Right now, though, I need to clear my

woolly head with a dip in the lagoon facing

my beachside villa, a shallow body of water

protected from the ocean by a mass of coral

(the string of islands that make up the

Maldives are essentially the peaks of an

underwater mountain range formed in

ancient volcanic eruptions, each one

sur rounded by a ring of cora l reef ). Wa l k ing

up to the water’s edge there’s a moment

of dissonance: the powder-fine sand that is

already clinging to my ank les seems littered

with bleached cigarette butts. I look more

closely and see each of these “butts” is

a washed-up twig of sun-whitened coral.

It’s obviously low tide, and even after

walking almost 50 metres out into the

lagoon, avoiding the odd lumpy rock in the

sand, the warm water is still only lapping

my thighs, so I have to make do with sitting

down and lolling about in the shallows.

I eventually try a flattened freestyle stroke

into slightly deeper water to get some

semblance of exercise, and end up coming

face to face with a large pale-green fish.

I don’t know who is more surprised, but

the fish certainly back-pedals faster than

I can. It’s a bit of wake-up call, so to speak,

that I don’t really know enough about my

surroundings – are there sharks here?

I have no idea, and there isn’t another soul

in sight at this time of the morning, so

I decide it might be easier to do some quick

laps in the resort’s saltwater pool.

It turns out there are indeed sharks where

I swam, but they are harmless baby reef

sharks – the protected waters of these

lagoons serve as hatcheries for all sorts of

sea creatures. After that first morning I see

them every time I venture down to the

water’s edge, cute 40-centimetre-long

shapes leisurely trawling the shallows in

twos and threes. When I ask a local

whether grown-up reef sharks are

dangerous he laughs and makes a sweeping

gesture out across the water. With so much

food out there, he says, they don’t need to

bother with you. I’m reassured over the

next few days by several Maldivians that

there’s nothing in the waters here that will

harm you, although as an Australian who

is all too aware he’s taking a step down the

food chain when entering the ocean I take

some convincing.

Back on land, and back on top of the food

chain, deciding where to have breakfast is

straightforward. There’s only one place to

dine on the island – a restaurant called

Motu, which sits over the water facing the

prevailing waves, a long wide space divided

Over-water villas stretch

out along a solar-panel-

covered walkway from

one end of the island

of Gasfinolhu.