Male (Maldives)

It is holiday time again, it is time to forget about our unimportant daily work stress (looking from a perspective of a holidaymaker being already one week away) and to travel a bit around. A really great flight offer guided us for one day first to Malevides, to the capital city of Maledives, Male, a city with one of the highest population density in the world. I is just 1 x 1.7 km long, to visit it take a express ferry from the airport atol, I am quite sure you will not forget the ride there. Male itself absolutely doesn't fit into our postcard picture of the Maledives we have in our mind. OK, it doesn't have to. The roads are really cramped, a kind of body of architects doesn't seem to exist, so you will find buildings of different shapes, colors, highs and widths. What I really cannot forget is an tuned-up Audi TT in the streets, the highest speed you can drive on Male is around 20 km/h... The great thing is, you are leaving the airport and within 50 meters you can jump into skyblue water. Anyway, just google for following pictures "airport male" and you will get an idea of the very location of the airport. In a case a pilot is gonna make a mistake you will land directly in a lagoon blue water, hopefully the cars will give the plane way (look at the give way sign...). There is a land connection of the airport with an artificial built island called Hulhumale. Just take the express bus in front of the airport and go to the last and only stop at the end of Hulhumale, there is a white beach anywhere around and the water has the color you are expecting. There is one thing only where an improvement would make the place very special, the pollution of the beach side with all kind of plastics, bottles and whatever. To the Maldivian Authorities, just hire one guy and let him clean and keep clean the beach side on Hulhumale, then you can advertise for a very special beach stopover on all Asian flights, the color of the water is just unbelievable, it is even better than on postcards. Otherwise people need to use Photoshop to erase all the plastic bottles from the pictures taken during their visit on Hulhumale - but even using the erase function it is more than worth to get a feeling of that very special place....

Les


for more information look at:
http://wikitravel.org/en/Male