The Maldives

To finish off our vacation, we spent three days on Paradise Island in the Maldives. It was amazing. Below are some pictures from our time on the island.

First off, when you step out of the airport you are on a dock! Where you're picked up by a boat that takes you to your resort. This is our boat coming in. Just seeing the color of this water when you get off the plane is such a wonderful feeling.



Our hotel pool. It was really small, but most people spend their time on the beach anyway.



The main hotel bar, where we enjoyed evening cocktails before dinner and also the occasional espresso.



Some pictures taken while walking around the island. It took about 30 minutes to walk from one end to the other, in the sand, and about 3 minutes to walk the short way across the island. So it was really narrow but pretty long. It had 220 beach bungalows and maybe 50 water villas so it could hold a lot of people but the beaches were almost always completely deserted. Sorry if the pictures below are repetitive, I never get tired of seeing the colors of the water.



Our lounge chairs. Every room has their own lounge chairs on the beach, which was nice.



We ate lunch at a restaurant all the way at the end of the water villas a few times. This was the view from there.



There are many excursions that you can take from the island. One evening Martin went night fishing and caught three fish. One of the restaurants (the Italian one) cooked them for us and we had a little feast of the fish, some grilled vegetables, and pasta with pesto.



Post-sunset picture, taken from Martin's night fishing boat:



Every day, several things happen on the island. At 6:30pm, the sharks are fed. They are all relatively small sharks, but you see them in the ocean throughout the day so it's nice to know that they're well-fed. Thankfully, if they bite you, they don't do too much damage, but it's still not pleasant. We saw one woman with a shark bite but she didn't even need stitches.



They also shine a light on the beach in the evenings to attract the stingrays, then they feed them.



We went on a snorkeling excursion and the picture below is the reef we snorkeled at. This was the best snorkeling I've ever done - we saw so many different and colorful fish. And, on the way back, our boat stopped and hung out with about 8 dolphins that we found. Sorry we don't have any pictures other than the reef in the middle of the ocean - you'll have to go there yourself and see the fish and dolphins firsthand.