Jah Cure’s ‘Longing For’ drifts across Sun Siyam Iru Fushi’s Waters 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 Malé – its box-metal cabin so tight the pilots 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.
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 center, 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 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 have 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 have all checked in and been whisked to their overwater villas – set along two more piers curving out from 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.”
Each guest gets a butler, who meets them at the jetty too. There’s no scanning TV menus for breakfast times and no fretting over departure details. The butler sends a message each morning with a cheat sheet for the day. “And that already calms them,” Dorothy says. “Someone is here to look after us, they think. We’re home.”
Dorothy has seen a lot of those days. She’s been here for 19 years, after all.
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 says. “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, “I’ve 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 build that into the island. It has an easily walkable perimeter and a single ring road through the interior, and it still finds ways to surprise you.
Mid-morning, the clues go out for the treasure hunt. “Three clues, three steps to the treasure, a different location every day,” Dorothy says. “Whoever finds the box unlocks it.”
Then a bell sounds on the ring road. It’s an ice cream cart called ‘Ice Block on the Go,’ which runs two rounds between 11am and 4pm and stops for an hour along the way.
In the early evening, the setting sun draws you to the beach on the west side of the island. A bar has appeared. Dorothy calls it the secret sundowner. “Nobody knows about it,” she says. “You just walk on the beach and there you go – you bump into a bar waiting for you.” Its two bartenders wave you over with a spritz as orange as the sky will be in 20 minutes or so, and some beanbags to watch it from.
By then the sky has flushed orange, then pink, and it’s dinnertime. The butler has already announced it on WhatsApp, with the booking made for when you arrive.
That might mean teppanyaki cooked right in front of you, or Indian in the tent that used to do Moroccan. Iru Restaurant is the buffet in the middle of the island, with themed nights. Bubble Lounge, out over the water, does nothing but champagne.
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, the French restaurant overwater, was closed temporarily for a spruce-up when we visited, and its best dishes had moved to The Trio so no one missed out.
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.
At Sun Siyam Iru Fushi, those worlds coexist 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. “Fifteen restaurants and bars,” Dorothy says. “If you’re here for seven nights, you can dine right across the island before you come back to the first one you started with.”
Tomorrow another seaplane will land and the drumming will start again. It’ll be a new day.
