Articles > Male Order

Blood washes across the floor, splattering the tiled walls and columns as it is mixed with water and washed down a drain. As night falls upon this isolated island in the Indian Ocean, a man hunches over a flayed corpse, peeling meaty hunks from the carcass’s spine then holding them up for inspection to a thinning crowd.

No-one ever said the fish market in Male, the capital of the Maldives, was pretty, which is ironic, given that the country banks on its beauty to reel in the world’s orbitally high flyers for seriously luxe downtime.

The Maldives comprises a necklace of 26 atolls that are home to 1190 islands (give or take a few), most of quintessentially heart-breaking islander beauty. This is home to the tropical idyll – you know, the one with the palm trees, hammocks, lagoons and sandy beaches so white, they’re an eyesore for the office-bound.

About 200 islands are peopled with tiny villages, home to the Maldives’ population of 300,000, another 85 islands are mostly single-island resorts, where the uber-fab flounce around in sparkly kaftans and white linen.

You’ll get a sense of this life in miniature the minute you land at the airport on Hulhule Island – the only thing on the island save the sea-plane terminal that’s the glue of this island nation, and a new airport hotel clinging to the very edge of the land…there’s no room for anything else.

That makes tiny Male, population 90,000, the most heavily concentration of humanity in the world. Yes, out here in the middle of buggery, so remote the bright pinpricks of light from the little capital’s mosques aren’t enough to dim the stars in the velvety night sky above.

Hands up all those who have met a Maldivian before? Exactly. So a quick visit to Male while waiting for flight connections is one way to see how the islanders live, as the Maldives government discourages foreigners staying in villages, instead steering them to the resorts.

In the balmy evening I caught a dhoni, the traditional Maldives fishing boat, from the airport to Male. During the 10 minute trip, I was chased around the deck by a cockroach the size of a small pony, the onlooking all-male passengers smiling indulgently at my horrified squeaks every time the gargantuan beast made a lunge at my feet. Note to self: Maldivian cockroaches are the same as Australian ones. Only possibly larger. And blacker.

The dhonis land you a few minutes’ walk from the fish markets where the Maldives flogs its staple export, fish (surprise!). There’s not a whole lot of industry, save tuna and tourism, driving the economy.

Tuna curry, tuna salad, tuna sushi, steamed tuna, dried tuna, roast tuna…you get the picture. “We have a saying in the kitchen, ‘No tuna, no life’,” says the Conrad Rangali resort’s executive sous chef, Keith Christie. He’s got a point.

With the omnipresent tuna is also the omnipresent chilli. A local breakfast might be a rich tuna curry made with coconut cream and enough chilli to start a fire, or a tuna salad (spicy, of course), wrapped in flat, fried paratha bread. Judging from the size of the tuna on the floor of Male’s fish market, there’s no shortage of meat. At around a meter long, these beasties were passed over by shoppers early in the day, and now, at the close of business, their stock has fallen from R20 (about $2) to a basement-bargain R14 ($1.40).

Beside the fish market is the fruit market, where hands of graded bananas hang from rafters in various stages of ripeness, from black and sticky to hard and bright green. You can also snap up packets of spice mix for the traditional breakfast chicken curry of this part of the world, sweet little mangos and racks of breath-catchingly pungent dried fish.

For all the cash we drop on the country’s resorts, the city’s streets are rough and narrow, and the sidewalks are slender affairs, which is fitting, as the people are also slender affairs. Not one plump Maldivian to be seen. And they’re short. “Like the Japanese,” Male local Abdul jokes with me on the way to his favourite café on Ameer Ahmed Amgu: a compact race of tuna-munching islanders who have landed the global jackpot when it comes to exclusivity and all things deeply luxurious.

The world’s most expensive yachts frequently trawl these warm waters. The evening I am reluctantly leaving, I strike up a conversation with a tall, tanned Brit waiting at the arrivals gate.

Turns out he’s a yachtie for hire.
“Ooh, is it a big one?” I ask of his yacht.
He jerks his head toward what I’ve mistaken as the country’s chief warship. That’s not a boat, that’s a township. With every light in the joint on, it glistens like a high-rise apartment block, and reeks of champagne and on-deck jacuzzis. He won’t cough on the name or rate, but my friend Google tells me the Queen K, No. 48 in the world’s 100 largest yachts at 72m long and allegedly owned by a Russian billionaire, won’t budge for less than $100,000 a day.

In comparison, the streets are full of buzzy 250cc motorbikes and the occasional dinged-up car, all on the left-hand side of the road, a legacy of the Brits sticking their oar in the region until they were sent packing in 1965. Souvenir shops hawk the usual gamut of tropical souvenirs – shell necklaces, clown-fish fridge magnets, shark fangs and jewellery drawn from the deep sea; black, white and delicate pink pearls, red coral and of course, cowrie shells, which were once currency in this remote utopia.

The price on the tag is, of course, negotiable, Didi of Glamour Souveniers [sic] is quick to assure me. “You can go for 30 percent, 40 percent lower,” his colleague murmurs into my ear in passing. And sure enough, my clutch of postcards and dust collectors is a third of the shelf price, and I haven’t even had to haggle.

The tsunami that washed over the low-lying islands on Boxing Day 2004 hasn’t seemed to stymie the island nation’s popularity, with the bronzed jet set pouring in from across the globe. You can hear their way of thinking: you’re going to go out one way or another: why not with a glass of Cristal? And a tuna curry.

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