We are back in Bristol now. Despite it being June and summertime it’s cold, only 11 to 18 degrees C, and we are feeling chilly in our summer clothes brought from the Seychelles. But its really great to be back, to catch up with family and friends and Hugh’s four grandchildren who have all grown in the seven months since we left, with my first grandchild due any day now.
Many thanks to Chris and Julia who have kindly let us stay in their home whilst we’re back and who are themselves away sailing in Scotland for the summer.

I’ve got quite a bit of catching up to do on the blog!

Thursday 7th to Sunday 17th April

From Thulusdhoo (Coca-Cola island) we motored 12 miles south to Hulhumale. As the population of Malé increased and it became one of the most densely populated cities in the world, Hulhumale has been built on ‘reclaimed‘ land 8 km north of the capital to take the overflow. 25 years ago there was a coral reef here but millions of tons of sand from the sea bed have been pumped into the area by massive dredgers to create this artificial island. Now there are high rise apartment blocks, shops, parks, hospitals, a large harbour, beaches and hotels, all designed to relieve the pressure for housing in overcrowded Malé. The population of the Maldives has increased from just over 100k in 1970 to over 500k now, of whom about half live on Malé.

Hulhumale in 1997 and 2018:

With global warming and rising sea levels Hulhumale has been built at a height of 2.5 metre above sea level. The Maldives is the world’s lowest lying country with 80% of its 1,192 islands less than 1 metre above mean sea level. With a predicted rise in sea levels of 1.5 meters by 2100, most of them will have disappeared below the waves well before then. We saw areas of ‘land reclamation’ taking place on some of the other islands too, to allow for population growth and sea level rises, and there are concerns voiced about this destruction of reefs and marine habitats.

Between Malé and Hulhumale is the island of Hulhulé, site of Velana International Airport which was opened by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 1972. Practically all tourists enter the Maldives through here, stopping only briefly before being whisked off to their resort or guest house by plane, ferry, sea plane or speedboat, or crossing to Malé by ferry or across the long causeway that connects the three islands.

Endorphin and Hecla were also leaving Thulusdhoo that morning, heading to another artificial island, Thilafushi, that we’d nicknamed ‘Stinky Island’ but is more commonly known as Trash or Rubbish Island. It was once a small sandbank only 4 miles west of Malé but has since been ‘reclaimed’ as a municipal rubbish dump, where much of the waste from Malé, tourist resorts and other nearby islands is disposed of (that which doesn’t end up in the ocean). Barges bring rubbish into the lagoon which is then offloaded onto pickup trucks and dumped in huge stinking piles. Inevitably a lot of the trash spills into the lagoon and then out to sea.  The workers here who sift through the rubbish looking for useable materials are mainly Bangladeshi or from Sri Lanka, and live in blocks of concrete high-rise dormitories. Some of the plastic and metal may be separated for recycling but the majority is used for landfill or burnt, hence the stink, the flies and the clouds of dense, toxic smoke. On areas of earlier landfill there are now industrial works and boatyards where Endorphin hoped to get their fuel tank cleaned out. Thilafushi was described as apocalyptic in the BBC documentary ‘Indian Ocean with Simon Reeve’ which you might find on iPlayer. This YouTube programme is also interesting on the challenges of dealing with waste in the Maldives:

As we approached Hulhumale we could see the many tower blocks, so unexpected after cruising the islands here and, at anchor outside the harbour, large cargo ships, safari boats and super-yachts… quite possibly belonging to Russian oligarchs. Aside from its natural draw as a tropical paradise in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the Maldives also has no extradition treaty with the United States.

Foreign yachts are not permitted in the small harbours in Malé, which are mainly for inter-island ferries and speedboats. Packing into the harbour at Hulhumale were boats of all types and sizes, live aboard boats, dive boats, fishing and commercial boats and numerous other vessels. It took us several attempts to find a large enough space to drop anchor where we were reasonably happy we wouldn’t collide with another boat in the night. The water here was filthy and full of plastic and other rubbish.

Also anchored in the harbour were Canadian friends Ben and Ashley on Nahoa, who had recently arrived from Phuket in Thailand and were waiting for their cruising permit before being permitted to move on. Since we last saw them in Vanuatu in 2018 they have had two adorable children, Willa aged 2 and Bodhi who is only six months. They do regular YouTube videos of their life as a sailing family, ‘Sailing Nahoa’, and have over 300k subscribers. It was good to see them again although they were feeling quite despondent about the long wait to get their permit and the difficulty in going ashore together. One of the problems with Hulhumale is the lack of a suitable dinghy dock to leave your dinghy. There are two short jetties to drop off at, but with a strong swell they were not suitable to leave a dinghy tied up to without the risk of it being damaged. Hugh needed to go ashore to collect our new boat part so, having dropped off the Nahoa family so they could take their children to the park, I took Hugh ashore and undertook the precarious trip back to Vega in the choppy waters, with fast speedboats zipping past and almost overturning our little dinghy in their wake. 

Hugh met our Malé agent ashore who whisked him off on a terrifying journey, riding pillion on his motorbike along the causeway between Hulhumale and Malé, on a fruitless mission to the DHL office to try to collect our new exhaust manifold, which had at last arrived from the U.K. It hadn’t yet been cleared by customs and this would take several more days. 

We spent one nightmarish night in Hulhumale, our sleep interrupted as, throughout the night, vessels motored past. We were near to a construction site where diggers and cranes were working under bright spotlights until well after midnight. During Ramadan it is too hot to work throughout the day without eating or drinking, so the workers, mostly Bangladeshi, return to work after sunset having broken their fast. One of the nearby live-aboard boats was brightly illuminated all night, with several men on board. At around 1am the water around us was full of plastic bottles – they had just emptied their rubbish overboard under the cover of darkness. A fishing boat noisily motored close to us at 3am and rafted up alongside two other boats on a buoy within a few metres of us. We were plagued by flies which crawled over us all night long.

The harbour at Hulhumale, above.

It was a relief to leave Hulhumale the next morning, motoring past Malé and across to the next atoll south, to anchor in Velassaru Farhu, a large lagoon with a resort at one end. We snorkelled on the reef and cleaned the hull, filthy after less than 24 hours in Hulhumale. Even though it was peaceful and secluded there were strong winds forecast for the next week and, with the reef offering little shelter from the wind and waves, we decided to move on to nearby Crossroads Marina.

I’d been looking forward to a restful time in Crossroads, one of only two marinas in the Maldives. It is built to accommodate superyachts and we tied up on a pontoon near to MySky belonging to a Russian billionaire. The owner was not on board but it was maintained in spotless condition by the crew (at least on the outside – we weren’t invited on board). 

From the architecture, ‘tropical with nods to a colonial aesthetic’, we could have been in the Caribbean or anywhere else in the tropics, although large murals illustrated the position of the Maldives as ‘the principle crossroads of the world, a location where traders, explorers and settlers from every corner of the globe have historically come together’. The general ambience was relaxed with piped musak from loudspeakers hidden in bushes around the complex. There are two upmarket resorts here, a number of restaurants and a swimming pool, which was unfortunately closed until the day before we left. Jon on Hecla had arrived earlier that day and Colin and Izzi on Endorphin turned up the next day. John, the Marina Manager, and Jen, the Guest Relations Officer there, were helpful in arranging laundry, provisions, diesel and, importantly, some extra trays of Tiger lager (we’d completely under-provisioned this vital commodity when leaving Thailand and alcohol is not on sale in Maldivian supermarkets. I forgot to mention earlier that Ben & Ashley had also brought us a bottle of gin and some lager from Thailand, thank you, so we won’t be short). 

At last the exhaust manifold was cleared by customs and ready to be collected and fitted. Kanburu, the engineer who’d already worked on the engine, was in Malé. He’d flown down a week earlier from Kulhuduffushi with his daughter Zaina who had been in hospital with tonsillitis. Having tried but failed to get Kanburu to come to us in the marina (the ferry times never worked out) in the end it was easier just to sail Vega back over to Hulhumale and for Kanburu to come on board there to fit it. This only took him a matter of a few hours and gave me time to do some shopping in Hulhumale. I was surprised at what a pleasant place it was ashore. It felt clean, spacious, green and leafy with lots of large trees providing shade, with parks, large apartment blocks and a good variety of shops. There was building work still going on as more high rise buildings are constructed. There are plans for housing for eventually 240,000 people to live here.

Determined not to spend another night in Hulhumale harbour we headed back to Crossroads Marina as soon as the work was done and we’d dropped Kanburu off, and got there just before dark. Such a relief to have the new part fitted and to put all that stress behind us. 

The following day we were on our way back to Malé. Hugh needed to get another lump checked by a dermatologist at a hospital in Hulhumale and we wanted to provision at the wider range of shops there and to have a look around the capital. The easiest way was to take the visitors’ ferry over from Crossroads to Malé and to spend a night in a hotel there. We ate out in the Seagull restaurant and enjoyed the buzz in the streets at night after the people had broken their fasts and were out enjoying themselves. The narrow streets were heaving with pedestrians, scooters and motorbikes. 

Treetops hospital & mosque in Hulhumale:

Having been to the Treetops hospital in Hulhumale the next morning and had Hugh’s lump removed to be sent for histology (it was benign), we were keen to visit the National Museum. It had closed at 1pm as, during Ramadan, offices are only open in the morning to allow people to rest for much of the day. Cafes and restaurants were closed all day so we took drinks and snacks to a small park, otherwise empty, and sat on a bench completely out of view, or so we thought. We were unfortunately spotted by a gentleman who peered over the hedge behind us and reprimanded us for eating outside (we had nowhere else to go). Malé was an intriguing place with its mosques, markets and maze of small streets.

Back at Crossroads marina the Nahoas had arrived having finally got their cruising permit, plus two catamarans, Joint Venture and Windwalker (Aussies and Kiwis). We had some sociable evenings out, draught beers at the Hard Rock Cafe and eating at the restaurants around the marina. Resort prices are all in US dollars and are not cheap. The beach was lovely for a swim and just before we were about to leave the swimming pool finally opened, the water temperature like a bath.

After 9 days in Crossroads it was time to leave, heading south, on our own again.