Maldives + Sri Lanka

Maldives Hanifaru Bay ⌖ Baa Atoll – UNESCO Biosphere Reserve The current traps plankton in a lagoon with no way out, and the mantas come — up to 200 of them, somersaulting an arm's length beneath you. You get 45 minutes. Nobody wants to leave. Maldives Whale Sharks ⌖ South Ari Atoll – Maamigili They don't pass through here. They live here. Researchers recognise the same individuals year after year, so the eight metres of quiet shark under your fins already has a history. Maldives The Sea of Stars ⌖ Vaadhoo and dark atoll shorelines Disturb the water on a moonless night and the plankton answer in blue — every footprint lit for a second. The photographs are long exposures. What you'll see is quieter, and better. Sri Lanka Seaplane Over the Atolls ⌖ From Velana International Airport Three hundred departures a day, doors open, pilots flying barefoot. Twenty-five minutes later the ocean has produced every shade of blue there is, and the map finally makes sense Maldives Cokes & Chickens ⌖ Thulusdhoo – North Malé Atoll A fast left off a local island where you can rent a room for the week. Cokes forgives nothing; Chickens lets you find your feet. The southwest monsoon does the rest, April to October. Maldives A Private Sandbank ⌖ Various atolls – by arrangement A crescent of sand that exists between tides, with nothing else in any direction. Someone sets a table on it, leaves, and returns hours later. The emptiest place you will ever eat. Maldives Malé & the Old Friday Mosque ⌖ Capital island Coral cut from the reef in 1658 and carved like ivory, still standing. Come first for the dawn tuna auction — the capital gives up far more in half a day than anyone expects. Maldives Local Island Life ⌖ Any local Island No gate, no wristband. Nine hundred guesthouses on islands where the football pitch fills at dusk and dinner is whatever the boats brought in. The Maldives most visitors fly over. Maldives Undersea Dining ⌖ Rangali and Hurawalhi Five metres down, the reef carries on with its evening while yours is served. Ithaa was the first, in 2005; Hurawalhi's 5.8 the largest ever built. Both make conversation difficult Maldives Liveaboard Diving ⌖ Central and southern atolls Wake somewhere new, dive before breakfast, then twice more before dark. A week reaches channels no day boat can. Give it ten and the deep south gives you tiger sharks Sri Lanka Sigiriya Rock Fortress ⌖ Central Province – UNESCO A king built his palace on top of a rock 180 metres tall. Halfway up, a wall polished to a mirror still carries the graffiti of visitors who climbed it a thousand years ago Sri Lanka Pidurangala Rock ⌖ Beside Sigiriya – Central Province Forty minutes and a scramble at the top, for a tenth of the ticket price — and the one view Sigiriya can't give you: Sigiriya itself, going gold, with the plain running away behind. Sri Lanka Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic ⌖ Kandy – UNESCO A single tooth decided who ruled this island for a thousand years. Each August it leaves the temple after dark behind tusker elephants and fire, and the whole city comes out. Sri Lanka Dambulla Cave Temple ⌖ Cultural Triangle – UNESCO Five caves, 157 Buddhas, and 2,100 square metres of ceiling painted straight onto the rock. People have been climbing these steps to sit here for twenty-two centuries. Sri Lanka Anuradhapura ⌖ North Central Province – UNESCO The tree in the courtyard was planted in 288 BC and tended every day since. Beside it a brick stupa once rose 120 metres — in its century, only the pyramids stood taller. Sri Lanka Polonnaruwa ⌖ North Central Province – UNESCO Rent a bicycle. The twelfth-century capital is flat, green and mostly yours before nine, and at Gal Vihara four colossal Buddhas lie carved from one unbroken face of granite. Sri Lanka The Kandy to Ella Train ⌖ Hill Country – Demodara Loop Six hours of tea terraces, tunnels and cloud, windows down, tea passed through the carriage in paper cups. Book thirty days ahead to the minute. Then do nothing but look out. Sri Lanka Nine Arches Bridge ⌖ Demodara, Ella Ninety-one metres of brick and stone laid a century ago without a beam of structural steel. No timetable tells you when a train will cross. You wait in the tea, and then you hear it. Sri Lanka Adam's Peak ⌖ Sri Pada – Central Highlands You start at two in the morning with thousands of pilgrims and five thousand steps ahead. At sunrise the mountain throws a triangle of shadow across the cloud, then folds it away. Sri Lanka Horton Plains & World's End ⌖ Central Highlands – UNESCO Nine kilometres of grassland that feels nothing like the tropics, ending at a cliff with 800 metres of nothing beneath it. Be at the gate at six. By ten it is all cloud. Sri Lanka Tea Country ⌖ Nuwara Eliya and Haputale Blight emptied these hills of coffee in the 1870s; tea filled them and never left. Climb to Lipton's Seat before dawn and you stand where the man came to look at what he built. Sri Lanka Yala National Park ⌖ Southeast – Blocks 1 and 5 Leopards here are as densely packed as anywhere on record, and unusually unbothered by being watched. Go at first light, ask for Block 5, and let the queue form somewhere else. Sri Lanka The Gathering ⌖ Minneriya and Kaudulla As the reservoir shrinks, grass appears — and the elephants come for it. A hundred and fifty, sometimes three hundred, arriving from every direction. Nobody arranges this. Sri Lanka Galle Fort ⌖ South Coast – UNESCO Portuguese walls, Dutch ramparts, and a town still living inside them four centuries on. Walk the sea wall at six, when the cricket starts and the light turns the colour of the stone. Sri Lanka Udawalawe National Park ⌖ Sabaragamuwa and Uva Open country, a wide lake, and elephants almost every time — no season, no closure, no luck required. Next door, orphaned calves are raised to be released, and you watch from a distance. Sri Lanka Arugam Bay ⌖ East Coast – Main Point When the south coast is blown out, the swell arrives here instead. Main Point runs long and clean from May to September, and the whole town moves at the speed of the surf report Sri Lanka Rekawa Turtle Watch ⌖ South Coast, near Tangalle No lights, no flash, no photographs. You sit in the dark until a green turtle hauls out, digs for an hour and goes back — and you see what the hatcheries down the coast are missing. Sri Lanka Sinharaja Forest Reserve ⌖ Sabaragamuwa – UNESCO The last true tract of lowland rainforest, and the only place to find most of what lives nowhere else. Your guide will stop, point at apparently nothing, and wait. Then you'll hear it. Maldives Tiger Sharks of Fuvahmulah ⌖ Gnaviyani Atoll 239 tiger sharks have been individually identified here and around 43 are present on any given day — the largest known aggregation on earth. Advanced divers only, and rightly so. Maldives Maaya Thila ⌖ North Ari Atoll Protected since 1999. Drop in after dark and the reef turns predatory — whitetip sharks hunting in packs through your torch beam, again and again, until your air runs out. Maldives Fotteyo Kandu ⌖ Vaavu Atoll A vertical wall dressed in soft coral and sea fans, with grey reef sharks stacked in the current at the channel mouth. Divers who have been everywhere still name this one first. Maldives Fish Head ⌖ Mushimasmingili Thila, North Ari Protected for its sharks decades before the Maldives banned shark fishing outright in 2010. Ten to twenty grey reefs on an ordinary dive, and over 300 fish species logged. Maldives Manta Point ⌖ Lankanfinolhu, North Malé Atoll Two cleaning stations, fifteen and twenty-five metres down. Mantas queue like aircraft while wrasse pick them clean, and you kneel in the sand and simply watch. Maldives Rasdhoo Madivaru ⌖ Rasdhoo Atoll A blue-water descent before sunrise — no reef, no reference, hoping the hammerheads come. Nobody guarantees it. Which is exactly why those who see them never stop talking about it. Maldives Dhigurah Long Beach ⌖ South Ari Atoll Two kilometres of bare sandbank running off the end of the island, walkable at low tide, with whale sharks feeding somewhere off the reef behind you. Maldives Thoddoo ⌖ North Ari Atoll Two hundred farms on one small island, and every watermelon that reaches Malé comes from here. Papaya, chilli, banana — the Maldives you would never guess existed. Maldives Maafushi ⌖ South Malé Atoll The island that changed Maldivian tourism. A 2009 rule let ordinary islands host visitors, and a fishing village of two thousand now has fifty guesthouses and a bikini beach. Maldives Hulhumalé ⌖ Beside the airport An island built up from the lagoon floor since 1997, because the sea is rising and Malé has nowhere left to go. Home to 65,000 people, reached by a 1.4km bridge. Maldives Utheemu Ganduvaru ⌖ Utheemu, Haa Alifu Atoll The wooden house where Muhammad Thakurufaanu grew up, and from which he ran the fifteen-year campaign that drove the Portuguese out in 1573. National Day exists because of this room. Maldives Kuruhinna Tharaagandu ⌖ Kaashidhoo, Kaafu Atoll A Buddhist monastery from the seventh century — sixty-four coral-stone structures excavated in the 1990s and only partly uncovered. The Maldives before Islam, lying in the open. Maldives Thulhaadhoo Lacquerwork ⌖ Thulhaadhoo, Baa Atoll Wood turned on a hand lathe, layered with lacquer, then cut back through the colours. It was made for sultans. It is still made here, by people you can watch working. Maldives Thundu Kunaa Mats ⌖ Gaddhoo, Gaafu Dhaalu Atoll Screwpine reed, hand-dyed and woven so tightly the pattern reads on both sides. Once sent as tribute to the sultan; still woven by the women of one southern island. Maldives Dhoni Building ⌖ Raa Atoll No plans and no drawings — a master carpenter shapes the hull by eye, as it has always been done. Most dhonis are fibreglass now. This is where the wooden ones still come from. Maldives Bodu Beru ⌖ Local islands, especially at Eid Big drums, a lead singer, and a rhythm that starts slow and ends with the whole island dancing. At Eid on a local island it isn't a performance. It's just what happens. Maldives Maldivian Food ⌖ Local islands and guesthouses Mas huni and roshi at breakfast, garudhiya and rice at midday, rihaakuru on everything. Tuna in every form a coral island could devise, because for centuries there was nothing else.