Maldives On The Cheap(ish)

After being let down by work, I found myself with at least a week off on the 30th December. A search on Google Flights didn’t find any flights to the Caribbean for less than 4 figures but it did find a flight to Male for £852 with Virgin Atlantic on New Year’s Day.

The resorts all looked very expensive, so I decided to look at options on a local island. Manta Divers on Guraidhoo looked promising. They’re close to some of the good channel diving sites in South Male atoll. They will do packages, but as it was so last minute, I ended up booking the accommodation myself with booking.com. I paid US$426 for 7 nights at Ninos. Manta booked my speed boat transfers for me.

So I arrived at Male airport and after rather a lot of hanging around, got the Escape speed boat to Guraidhoo. I did wonder how easy it would be to spot, but asked around about where it left from, and it actually had “Escape” written up the side in metre high letters.

I should have mentioned to the guest house owner that I had a big bag as he came to pick me up with his moped, which was an interesting trip, but fortunately only a couple of minutes.

The room was clean, had an ensuite bathroom, AC and a hot shower. The WiFi was reasonably fast. It did include breakfast, but I missed it most of the time as I did the early morning dive.

The weather was unseasonably wet for the first couple of days, with strong winds, but we still got out to dive. The sites outside of the atolls were too rough for the first couple of days, so we did some of the sites inside the atoll. This means there was less of the big stuff, but they were still nice dives.

When the weather improved, we went out to some of the classics like Kandooma Corner and Lhosfushi Kuda Kandu. I saw quite a few grey reef sharks, a big black tip and several turtles as well as the usual reef fish.

10 dives plus the speed boat transfers cost £471. Diving was done from the customary dhoni boat. Manta Divers staff all spoke English, some of them also spoke Spanish. Nitrox was available.

There are several minimarts on the island, so buying fruit, snacks etc wasn’t a problem. There’s also a coffee shop with an espresso machine by the harbour.

There are several cafes for lunch and dinner. Something like Nasi Goreng or chicken fried rice for lunch was costing me about 65MYR, which is less than £4. At dinner, I generally spent a bit more, but not much. There is a pizza place, where 120MYR would get you a medium pizza with several toppings.

As it’s a local island, there is no alcohol, so it was a very cheap week for me. There is an ATM on the island but it’s a Bank of Maldives one and it charges 100MYR for every withdrawal. There is another ATM at the airport, just outside of arrivals, for the Habib bank which doesn’t charge, though it gave me a slightly worse rate than the exchange counter there gave for pounds in cash. It also only accepts Visa, not Mastercard. The Bank of Maldives takes both.

The only downside of the island was the lack of anything to do in the evening. After dinner at about 8pm, it was usually back to the room to read a book. I should have probably taken a tablet or laptop with some content to watch.