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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.

Looking for a new resort to visit in the Maldives, I found Rahaa and was interested because it was quite reasonably priced by Maldives standards and it is right in the south in Laamu Atoll, somewhere I’ve never previously visited.

So I booked with Blue Bay Travel, but as it got nearer the time, I noticed the reviews had got steadily worse. I then saw reports that the Bank of Maldives had put the island up for sale because of a load default. https://edition.mv/features/37040 but it appears this never happened and the newer reviews were more positive.

Most of the bad reviews concerned the food including one poor man who was forced to live on bread rolls for a week, but then I reasoned it couldn’t be as bad as my first visit to the islands in 1995 where there was only one choice of meal, which was usually fish, and the only alternative was an omelette.

So after landing at Male airport, I then made my way to the domestic terminal and got a 45 minute flight to Kadhdhoo Airport and from there, it was another 30 minutes by boat. It was a long day.

So how bad was the food? I must admit, I was fed up with it after two weeks. It was the lack of variety that was the real problem. For breakfast, there were eggs, pancakes, crepes and waffles cooked on demand. If you were happy with this plus some toast, then you were fine.

The only other hot options were almost the same every day. There were baked beans, which I never saw anyone eat, hot oatmeal, chicken sausages, scrambled eggs and some unappetising mushrooms, which I assume were tinned. At some point in the 2nd week, the mushrooms were switched with grilled tomatoes. So if you wanted a cooked breakfast, your choices were very limited.

Lunch, they would cook pasta on demand with about 5 different sauces. There were also sometimes shawarmas made on demand with chicken, tuna and vegetables. At dinner, they sometimes had spaghetti cooked on demand.

Other than the pasta, there were only ever 3 choices of main course, plus white rice, noodles, another rice variant like chicken fried rice and one vegetable dish, which was usually either grilled vegetables or pumpkin. I think they had potatoes 3 times in two weeks.

There were only about 15 different main course, so they repeated a lot and they were mostly pan Asian, so a few curries, beef massaman, stir fired beef, pepper beef, fish tempura, chicken in ginger, that sort of thing. None of them were very spicy, it was all quite bland, but I didn’t find myself living on bread.

There were lots of very sugary desserts in some very unnatural colours and usually bananas, papaya and water melon.

Everyone was all inclusive. There was a short list of cocktails you were allowed, plus basic spirits, beer and wine. The beer was called Camel and was from Vietnam, a country famous for neither beer nor camels. The rum was at least from the French Caribbean and the gin was from Brazil of all places. The wine was a very cheap Spanish brand, so the white was a bit sharp, though the red was alright. I didn’t try the rose.

The rooms were big, with a big TV but no signal, and the only app that appeared to work was YouTube, but I still found something to watched occasionally. I would have taken my Firestick had I known, so I could have streamed my usual subscriptions. You might need a VPN for that though.

The bathroom came with two sinks, a big bath, an indoor shower and an outdoor one, plus a toilet obviously. It was open air, which is one of those things that sounds great in principle. In practice, it meant sitting on the toilet trying to kill the waves of mosquitos coming at you like a bad video game with bitey, itchy results.

The dive school wasn’t very busy. I had my own boat for the first couple of days, which was obviously great.

Most of the sites were inside the atoll because Rahaa sits in an enormous lagoon with one reef around it and surrounding islands on both sides. The nearest channel dives was Manta Point on the corner of Hithadhoo, which was about 40 minutes away.

We did Manta point 3 times, but only saw the one manta. They see them there all year round, but it’s busiest October-January. However, it’s still a very good dive even if there are no mantas. There are about 5 resident green turtles, loads of schooling fish and I saw 8 eagle rays there on one dive.

The other sites had good coral, probably because they’ve been kicked by far fewer divers than the central atolls. There are only two resorts in Laamu. There were the usual big shoals of snapper and fusiliers, plus the occasional white tip reef shark, passing tuna and a big shoal of bat fish on one site.

The lagoon at Rahaa is also very shallow as well as being very large, so it’s not really feasible to swim out to the drop off. There was a snorkel boat at 9am and 2am, which took snorkellers out to the edge. They were free and appeared very popular. One of our dives was also there, and it’s a good reef with plenty to see.

The beach area in front of the bar drops off quite quickly, so you can go for a swim there if you want. It’s too deep to stand up in.

Despite what one of the reviews I read from someone apparently at the resort at the same time as me, there was entertainment 6 nights out of 7. It started about 9.30/9.45, so I think the reviewer actually went to bed before it started. They had a disco, crab racing, a Maldivian night with bodu beru and karaoke.

The weather in April was nice. I had one rainy evening followed by a rainy morning. If anything, it was too hot some days.

So I think the one star reviews are uncalled for. They need to do something about the food. They are well aware of this. Whether they will, remains to be seen. It is quite a bit cheaper than a lot of islands, so if you’re expecting luxury, you’re going to need to pay quite a bit more. I can’t really justify the extra expense when my main focus will always be the diving.