Jah Cure’s ‘Longing For’ drifts across Sun Siyam Iru Fushi’s Water’s Edge beachfront bar. The Maldives is a place you long for – a place most people have seen a thousand times and never been to. It’s every perfect picture postcard, the palm trees leaning over the beach lapped by turquoise sea. The overwater villa, the ladder into the shallows, the sand so white it looks bleached by long days of reggae and sunshine.
Even as the seaplane leaves from Malé – and their box-metal interior where the pilots have to climb past you to reach the cockpit – it’s hard to reconcile the picture postcards with the place itself.
You pass island after island, each one a jellyfish suspended in dark water – a green body, a bell of pale reef around it, and the whole thing mottled and fraying at the edges. And then, 45 minutes later, the plane descends and The Maldives flickers in close up across the windows.
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From here, at Waters’ Edge, two paths fork out into the sea, turning into piers – three of them forking out again from the left path, to the dive centre, the arrivals jetty, and another jetty for boat excursions; the right to a loading jetty that supplies the island.
The fronds in the loose-limbed palm trees flicker in the breeze, which threatens to kick up the fine white sand, but never quite gets around to it. You could be anywhere – the Turks and the Caicos or Costa Rica, Negril or Nusa Dua.
Then the drumming starts.
At the jetty where the seaplanes land a boduberu strikes up, a double-headed drum slung across the drummer’s front. Two women pick up the beat and clap along. They wear matching red libaas – the long Maldivian dress – with heavy gold thread in the kasabu collars and repeated at the cuffs.
And out front, leading them down the pier, a man grips a white parasol and steps deliberately toward the beach.
The seven or eight guests who just stepped off the seaplane bunch behind them. Some pause to take in the blue of the sea, others snap photos, and a few are wrapped up in conversation with the Sun Siyam Iru Fushi team who joined the welcome party.
It is the first thing here that could not be happening anywhere else.
Dorothy Bahati is one of them – tall and graceful, her laugh cascading down the pier. She’s Director of Operations here. “We made the arrival like that so the moment you step off the seaplane, you’re immersed in the island and its culture,” she tells us later, when the guests are all checked in and whisked to their overwater villas – set along two more piers curving out from opposite ends of the island.
“The only thing we hear when guests arrive is ‘Wow!’ But it’s not only them. We also feel it’s ‘wow’ every day here.”
Their dedicated butler meets them at the jetty too. No scanning through menus on the TV to find out breakfast times, no fretting over finalizing departure details – the butler shoots a joyful message in the mornings with a cheatsheet of things to do. “And that already calms them. Someone is here to look after us, they think. We’re home.”
“It’s amazing to watch guests just focus on relaxing – sunbathing, swimming, snorkeling – instead of thinking about arrival times, departure times, where they’ll have dinner, who is picking them up for the excursion, when to head out to the spa.”
Wow days start and continue like that. And Dorothy has seen a lot of them – she’s been here for 19 years. In that time she’s watched the guests come and go, the team mature like the coconut trees she plants. “I do a lot of planting,” she admits. “I love plants and I love the natural inheritance of the beaches. So I do a lot of planting of coconut trees.”
But when she says she’s “seen them grow in front of my eyes,” she might as well be talking about her colleagues. “When I see them today – some of them are general managers, some are directors of operations, resort managers and front office managers – it makes me so happy.”
There’s another assumption about island life, though. “People say – oh, you live on an island, you must be doing the same thing every day.” She shakes her head. “It’s not the case. Different people arriving, different people leaving. Every day is a completely different day.”
Dorothy and the team pack that spirit into everything they do. The island has an easily walkable perimeter and a single ring road running around the interior. Just when you think you know it, a bell sounds and you chance upon an artisanal ice cream cart – called ‘ice block on the go’.
Or in early evening when the setting sun draws you to the beach on the sunset side of the island, a bar has appeared, and its two proprietors excitedly wave you toward it, offering a spritz as orange as the sky will be in 20 minutes or so, and some beanbags to watch it from.
Then the sky has flushed orange and then pink, and it’s dinner time – as the butler has announced via WhatsApp, with the booking made for when you arrive.
Teppanyaki cooks in front of you. Taste of India is poolside. Bamboo is a beach terrace doing Thai salads, curries and wok-fried noodles. Iru Restaurant sits in the middle of the island and handles the buffet and the themed nights. And La Cremeria does more ice cream.
Then there’s Islander’s Grill, out on the hooked spit at the northern end, with tables set straight in the sand. It serves seafood, Maldivian style, whatever catch came in that day. It’s the only kitchen here not borrowing from somewhere else.
Flavours is a French restaurant overwater, serving onion soup and beef tartare with the lagoon moving under the floor. The Trio is Italian, up on stilts, where couples go for the candlelight and families go for pizza and risotto as crabs dance below on the sand.
Somehow, at Sun Siyam Iru Fushi, those worlds co-exist without ever intruding on each other, through careful design. The family pools and the sports areas are gathered in the center. The intimate things get pushed out over the water. So the island separates people by distance rather than by rule, and the paths sort them without anyone being told where to go.
It’s a lot for 52 acres. Dorothy’s math is that a week isn’t enough. “You can dine right across the island before you come back to the first one you started with,” she says.
“Every day is a completely different day,” Dorothy says again, and smiles that big beaming smile, as warm as the welcome across on the seaplane jetty.
