Retreating to a clear blue paradise

GO MALDIVES: The natural beauty of the Maldives, with its pristine beaches and azure waters, makes it a haven for lovestruck couples, but picking the perfect resort is key to making the most of a holiday there, writes CONOR POPE

AH THE ROMANCE of it all. Half-a-dozen honeymooning couples hold hands and giggle as they sip "mocktails" from coconut shells in the single bar on this tiny island. Older ones, celebrating enduring love with a once-in-a-lifetime holiday perhaps, play dominoes and hum along to the muzak version of Céline Dion's My Heart Will Go On,which is being piped through the sound system.

Everyone seems so loved up. Everyone that is, except me. I’m too busy scowling at the heavy black clouds that have been blocking the sun and showering us with rain for hours and staring in horrified awe at the couple who have appeared in matching his-and-hers swimwear for the fourth consecutive day.

The island on the north atoll of the Maldives, off the south west coast of India, is called Bodu Hithi and it is home to the Coco Palm resort. It is undeniably beautiful – in fact, it’s not just beautiful, it’s the most beautiful island I’ve ever seen outside of photoshopped tour operators’ brochures.

There are gleaming white sands, a warm sea of shimmering turquoise and a coral reef teeming with tropical fish just five metres offshore. My “island villa”, meanwhile, is bigger than many houses built in Dublin during the boom years and finished to a much higher standard. It has a private pool, a huge circular bath as a centrepiece, an 8ft bed, a full-sized, crescent shaped couch, a giant flat-screen TV and a wooden veranda big enough to accommodate two sun loungers, a couple of chairs and another couch. It also comes with the most stunning views of the ocean, which is a 10-second jog across white sand away.

It would, in fact, be almost perfect were it not for the rain. Weather is a great leveller and just as summer sunshine can turn Galway’s Quay Street into something resembling a bustling Mediterranean town centre, heavy rain can quickly make a paradise island in the Indian Ocean feel a bit like a Courtown caravan park on a particularly grim day.

The rain lasts a full day, unusual in the Maldives, a place where the weather is normally as delightful as the setting, with temperatures averaging 30 degrees and warm breezes adding to the pleasantness.

Eventually it stops, the sun comes out and the island comes to life, albeit in a bizarrely quiet way. The hotel’s 100 rooms are fully occupied yet the place still seems deserted. This is partly by design – each room is either buried in dense foliage or sitting on poles in the sea – and partly because the place is over-run with honeymooners who presumably have better things to be doing with their time than lounging by the public infinity pool or making small talk in the bar with me.

The Coco Palm has been built in a jungle of mangrove and coconut trees and nothing more elaborate than sandy paths connect the restaurants, bar and spa with the villas. All signs of humanity – electricity metres, lights, bins – have been carefully camouflaged with thick wooden rods and so disappear into the jungle.

Were it not for the wooden plaques all over the place commemorating romantic happenings, much of the island would look entirely uninhabited. These plaques are, frankly, weird. Weird and expensive. Couples pay $300 (€202) to have their names, a date and message worthy of Hallmark inscribed on them.

While the couples are presumably delighted to have their holiday romance marked in a permanent fashion – well, as much permanence as a wooden plaque near the shore of an island threatened by rising sea levels offers – from where I’m standing, they look more like markers of puppy graves than puppy love.

Couples who choose a marriage package costing between $1,000 (€674) and $2,000 (€1,349) do get a plaque thrown in for free. These packages, while popular in this resort, have no legal standing, largely because the government is reluctant to legislate for alternative weddings in a country which claims to be 100 per cent Muslim.

Despite the lack of official sanction, romance tourism has developed into a multibillion-dollar business here. Most of the resort owners have been careful to ensure their hotels don’t unduly damage the atoll’s picture-postcard appeal and all have carefully cultivated the Maldives’ reputation as the most romantic place on earth.

This is why an apparently insignificant and childish insult – in a different resort to the Coco Palm – had such reverberations last year. A video appeared on YouTube of a Swiss couple being called “swine” and “infidels” in the native language in what was supposed to be a vows ceremony.

When the story broke, it caused an uproar. The Maldives’ tourism authority went into crisis mode. Those responsible were jailed, which was perhaps a bit harsh. Yes, what they did was rude, juvenile and mean, but is spoiling someone’s vow renewal ceremony a crime worthy of imprisonment?

The government also introduced new regulations under which wedding ceremonies must be conducted in a language chosen by a couple, following either a set ceremony or personal vows.

GIVEN THE IMPORTANCE of tourism to the Maldives, it is strange to think the industry is less than 40 years old. In 1971 an Italian traveller exploring nearby Sri Lanka was told to check out the islands across the sea. He took a small boat across and was immediately entranced.

At the time, the islands had absolutely no infrastructure: no paved roads, no telecommunications and virtually no electricity. While in the capital Male, he met a young and entrepreneurial Maldivian and together they set about building a rudimentary 32-bedroom resort on an island close by.

In 1972, the first tourists, from Italy, arrived. In their wake came photographers and journalists who marvelled at the islands’ beauty, and its fortunes were dramatically altered and its future fortune secured, at least in the short term.

Things could be even more dramatically altered in the next 20 years if the prognosis of many of the world’s climatologists comes to pass. Most of the Maldives’ 1,200 islands are not much more than one metre above sea water – the highest point anywhere on the atoll is just 2.3m above sea level – and are very vulnerable to rising seas.

For obvious reasons, then, the country is to the fore in highlighting the crisis of global warming and is putting in place plans to become carbon-neutral and energy-independent by 2020, under the slogan: “The first to act, not the first to disappear.”

Coco Palm resort, like the 100 other resorts in the country, is also acutely aware of the dangers posed by even more dramatic sea level rises in the form of tsunamis. Each room comes with two life jackets and guests are given clear instructions where to go in the event of a warning – the bar is, incidentally, the only two-storey building on the island.

The resort is just four years old yet feels more settled than that. It is visited by just a handful of Irish tourists each year and if prices seem high – a week-long break will cost in excess of €3,000 – it is actually one of the more competitively priced five-star resorts in the atoll.

Club Coco, on the other hand, is not competitively priced, not by a long shot. This club is the private part of the resort and rooms – to call them rooms does them a great disservice – cost an eye-watering €1,400 a night – and that’s not the rack rate, that is the actual rate people pay. For that they get their own butler, an enormous room on stilts over the ocean, a private pool, regular champagne and canapes, afternoon tea served daily in their suites and a fast-tracked registration and check-out process.

If that sounds ridiculously expensive – and it really should – it will soon be left in the ha’penny place by the resort’s latest plan. A five-bedroom villa on a neighbouring island that will open in November for just one lucky, loaded guest and their entourage at a time.

In addition to the massive villa, with its three pools, guests will also get a separate apartment for their staff (they will obviously have staff), 24-hour spa therapists on site, two gourmet chefs, round-the-clock security, a helipad and the most lavish of concierge services. And how much does it cost? €14,000. A night. The hotel is hoping to lure the likes of George Clooney and the newly married Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to the island in the initial phase to generate some positive press for the six-star resort.

BUT BACK TO reality. When it comes to a Maldives holiday, you are picking a resort more than the country – only 10 per cent of guests ever make it as far as the capital for an excursion – so choosing wisely is of great importance.

Get it wrong and you will spend a couple of weeks bored senseless and fighting with your beloved. The recriminations may even lead to you pulling up your wooden plaque and storming up the perfect beach in an almighty strop.

This resort will not be the wrong choice. Apart from the beautiful surroundings and amazing hotel rooms, the food is very good and there are a lot of staff to cater for your whims, however capricious. In fact, there are 300 staff, catering for a maximum of 200 guests, and they are attentive. If anything they are too attentive, and as soon as you have finished a drink or put the last forkful of a meal in your mouth they have whisked the glass or plate away and are offering you more.

Then there are the Coco Palm “experiences” – a sedate series of fun and/or romantic activities designed to stop you crawling the walls.

There's the snorkelling, which is awesome and at €27 per person for two hours comparatively cheap. Having been schooled in fish by repeated viewings of Finding Nemo,I am childishly delighted when I see a clown fish (Nemo and Marvin) coming out of a sea anemone only to be confronted by a regal tang (Dory).

Hours later I am not marvelling at the beauty of fish but killing them. The resort also organises sunset hand-line fishing trips on board traditional dhoni boats for guests three nights a week. The dhoni pulls up at the jetty as the sun falls into the ocean to the west and takes you a couple of kilometres offshore where you get a large spool of fishing line, a hook and a hunk of tuna.

I am pretty confident I won’t catch any fish, but within 15 minutes I land three red snapper and a giant(ish) barracuda. At least one of the snapper will be cooked for me by the restaurant staff while the rest of my haul is whisked away to be, hopefully, eaten by the boatmen.

If you’re not looking at or killing fish you should probably be eating them. The seafood on offer is uniformly excellent.

Three nights a week, for €90 a head, guests can partake of a lavish barbecue with prawns, lobster, tuna, steak and lamb as well as an array of sides served to tables on the beach. It is expensive but lovely and it makes a change from the nightly buffet.

Most of the guests are here on a half-board basis and, while the food is good, a buffet always comes with limitations and there is only so much even the best of chefs can do with those constraints.

Another “uniquely Coco” experience is “movies under a Maldivian sky”. For €90 a couple get to sit on the beach in front of a private cinema screen which by day looks like a boat. They can choose a classic movie to watch, eat canapes and sip champagne. It is hard to imagine a more over-the-top way to watch a film.

There’s also wind-surfing, kayaking, dawn yoga, evening yoga and the most incredible spa offering dozens of high-end treatments in rooms with glass floors through which you can gaze as tropical fish swim by.

It really is a very chilled-out place and if that is what you’re looking for, it is hard to top. If, on the other hand, you’d rather your break to have a frisson of unpredictably or at least the vaguest possibility of adventure then it is, perhaps, not ideal.

WHILE THE COST of a week’s half-board at the resort comes in at about €3,000 per couple, the actual price of a holiday is likely to be higher. The Maldivian currency is the rufiyaa, but chances are you’ll never catch sight of it, never mind buy anything with it. Prices here, as in all resorts, are in US dollars, and everything is charged to your room, allowing you to settle on departure.

The problem with a cashless resort is that you inevitably end up spending a lot of cash. And things are pricey here. A lunchtime burger will set you back $30 (€20), a bowl of chips is a tenner. But for many people the biggest expense is alcohol. It is forbidden to bring any into the country, though the resorts can sell it. But it comes at a price. A bottle of Mateus rosé wine, which costs less than €4 in Ireland, costs €50 (€34), while a small glass of beer is $8 (€5.40). At these prices holiday hangovers are a lot less frequent and less severe.

Suddenly my time in paradise comes to an end, and when that moment comes, I feel bad for all my internal grumbling about couples in matching swimwear and Céline Dion and it dawns on me that I am going to miss all the luxury terribly. It takes just 17 minutes from the moment the airport-bound speedboat pulls away from the jetty with a thunderous roar for the island to disappear over the horizon. It will probably take a lot longer for it to fade from memory.

* Conor Pope travelled as a guest of the Coco Palm Bodu Hithi resort. A seven-night stay in an Island Villa at the resort starts from £1,843pps (€2,073) and includes flights on Emirates Airlines from London Gatwick or Heathrow and speedboat transfers. To book or for more information, please contact CHIC Locations on 00-44-2089441973 or visit chiclocations.com.