Maldives from a bird's eye view

“The Maldives is a paradise on earth – it is a chain of 20 large atolls, consisting of 1200 islands. The highest "mountain" in the country rises only two and a half meters above the Indian Ocean. Those who follow my instagram know that I marked my birthday there and saw all the most “delicious” photos. We lived on two islands, one next to Male (the capital), and the second in the very south of the archipelago. It took an hour to fly to it on a local plane, which I spent with a camera in my hands,” says Sergey Dolya.

1. The atolls are too big to be fully photographed from a height of 6,000 meters. Here is the definition of an atoll from Wikipedia:

“An atoll is a coral island that looks like a solid or broken ring that surrounds a lagoon. More precisely, the atoll is an elevation on the ocean floor, crowned with a coral superstructure that forms a reef with a group of islands separated by straits. The rise at the bottom of the ocean usually has the shape of a cone formed by an extinct volcano.

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3. In fact, this is a huge ring of coral reefs, with a diameter of about 40 km. You can best understand what this looks like by looking at Google Maps satellite imagery.

4. And from the plane you can photograph only a piece of this atoll. All these islands are not visible from the water level, as they themselves are under water. Only some of them "grow" above the level of the ocean and form the islands familiar to us.

5. Wikipedia has a couple of very illustrative pictures of how these atolls were formed.

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7. Those reefs that are on the outer circle take on waves and break them, so the Maldives always has calm water with small ripples. There are no big waves here.

8. Some land areas appear only during the day, at low tide, and at night, at high tide, they again sink under water. The difference in water level during low tide / high tide is 1 meter.

9. On the "big" islands, which do not go under water at night, life appears - trees and people. Many of them are used as hotels - one island - one hotel.

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11. Most of the hotel islands are built on the same principle. All staff live in buildings in the center of the island, and villas are being built around the perimeter. Each with access to the ocean and its own beach. Most hotels, in addition to this, are also building “villas on the water”.

12. In good hotels, such a villa will have its own small pool and a descent into the ocean. These are the water villas of the first hotel we stayed in, Jumeirah Devanafushi. I will tell you more about the hotels themselves in the following posts.

13. Water villas of our second hotel Jumeirah Vittavelli. There are two types of villas here: some are connected to the “mainland” by bridges, and the second are separate, and they are delivered there by boat.

14. One of the main features of the Maldives is the underwater world. There are some of the most beautiful corals in the world and a huge variety of fish. Moreover, the corals begin ten meters from the shore, so you can get up from your sunbed in your villa at any time, put on a mask and fins and dive into the fantastic underwater world.

15. In aerial photographs, corals are clearly visible - these are dark spots under water.

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38. The capital and largest island of the Maldives is the city of Male. By the way, this is the only city in the country, even though it has about 400 thousand inhabitants.

Well, for a sweet video of a flight over our island: