Day 299: Omadhoo - Malé (މާލެ)

Jan 27 - Up by dawn to eat and walk the five minutes to the harbor, where a speedboat shows up by 7:30. Cloudy and stormy today, though with little rain. Notice right away the difference at sea, with swells battering the speedboat for almost the entire ride. It takes 30 minutes longer than normal due to slowing down for sets of big waves. The woman next to me clutches at the seat in terror for most of the trip. At one point we pass some life vests floating in the ocean, must have fallen overboard from another vessel. When we reach the eastern chain of atolls, the captain steers the boat off course and through a large atoll lagoon. This gives us about 15 minutes of peace before exiting the atoll and once again running headlong into swells.

One last look at Omadhoo. This will be the last quiet, peaceful town we will be in for awhile.

Drop a bunch of tourists off at the airport docks before heading to the jetties at Malé. We disembark and walk the five minutes to the Unima Grand Hotel, an alarmingly upscale place that was my cheapest option when I was booking this country. I originally didn’t want to book anything here at all, preferring to stay on the island and taking the speedboat directly to the airport day of flight. However, there was uncertainty about the departure times of speedboats, meaning that unless our flight could leave at night, we would take a risk of not arriving in time. My guarantee that this would all work meant staying one night in Malé. Plus, leaving in the evening from here meant that we would arrive midnight or later in Kuala Lumpur (three hour time difference).

Malé is a city that completely covers the namesake island. It almost seems to heave over the edges. In fact, the original island was smaller, and was built out to the end of the enclosing reefs to give more space. Few building are less than five stories, and our hotel is ten. Many of the streets are narrow, wide enough only for small cars and parking for the thousands of scooters that buzz everywhere.

It is also a big immigrant city. As little as the Maldives seems, it has an enormous tourist economy, and Male is the heart of how that all works. It is estimates that half the population of this island is composed of workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. There is invariably a lot of crowding, everywhere space is a premium.

We are able to check in to the hotel by 10:30, freeing us up to wander the island the rest of the day. It is Friday, so the mosques are crowded to overflowing. We walk along the northern edge, past the ferry docks and dockside markets.

There are blue water pipes everywhere here, lining the sides of the streets. They apparently are for draining underground water from construction sites. I read a newspaper article from 2019 saying that the mayor promised to remove these pipes once the streets could be upgraded. Obviously none of that happened.

A residence with a particularly rich cover of vegetation.

Republic Square, with the police headquarters in the background.

A typical street, single lane with hundreds of scooters parked on the side.

The Al-Sultan Muhammad Ibn Abdullah Mosque, near the western edge of the island.

Tsunami Binaa Maizaan (the Tsunami Monument), memorializing the 2004 tsunami that occurred offshore of Sumatra and caused havoc all across the Indian Ocean. Nearly all the islands in Maldives were flooded by this event. It caused at least 82 deaths and nearly half a billion dollars in damage. The country did not have any emergency procedures in place for a disaster of that type.

The Sinamalé Bridge, that connects Malé and Hulhulé (where the airport is), is 1.39 km long and mostly funded by aid from the Chinese government. It was the first inter-island bridge in the country, and completed in 2018.

King Salman Mosque, just a block from our hotel.

There is an amazing-looking park in the middle of the island called Sultan Park. There are several museums around it (all closed today). The park itself only opens at 16:30, so at that time Odette and I stop by. It turns out to be a real focus of energy for the city, obviously popular and very well maintained. There is both a traditional music concert and karate class going on at the same time, as well as a ton of children playing in an involved, net-like playground.

Odette really enjoyed this setup, where kids could climb inside what look like weaverbird nests and emerge into an upper net platform where they could jump around.

Koi ponds never get boring.

These suspended ring chairs were the main photoshoot objectives of the park.

A Traditional Maldivian drum and dance routine called Bodu Beru.

This monument commemorates the martyrs of the terrorist attack of November 3, 1988. On this day, the Tamil Tigers attempted a takeover of the Maldives in order to use it as a safe base from which to further their war in Sri Lanka. Eight servicemen and 11 civilians died in the attack.

The Tamil Tigers have nearly disappeared from view, as they were overrun in Sri Lanka and ceased as an insurgent group. But the Maldives, billed as such a beach paradise, has seen problems since, in the more currently recognized form of terrorism, that of Islamic extremists. This same Sultan Park saw a bomb attack in 2007 that killed 12 tourists. Extremism has affected the islands for several reasons, all related to how comprehensively the country has changed since tourism became an overwhelming factor in the economy (about a third of GDP). Before 1985, hardly any foreign workers resided here, yet almost a third of the entire nation is now composed of them (and half of Malé, as related earlier). The urban crowding and predictably lopsided economic benefits of exclusive resort tourism were fertile ground for radicalizing of young men by fundamentalist ideas that were already popular in the Middle East. The infrastructure collapse that followed the 2004 tsunami accelerated this process.

It seems such a juxtaposition to read about the ‘radicalization’ of Maldivian youth and see how life is on these islands, from the albeit limited view of a tourist. Few places on our trip have felt more relaxed, even in the squashed urban settings of Malé and Hulhumalé. No one seems to be in a hurry, and there is a sense that time is in slow motion.

Maldives