TL; DR
Venue: Village Holidays Maldives
Cost: ~$700 per day, pay in advance via wire transfer
Benefits: Fishing whenever you want, room and full board, optional snorkeling
Recommendation: Try it out, it's pretty cool.
To get to our fishing adventure with Village Holidays Maldives, first we needed to get out of MLE. Our host, Mohamed Latheef, met us at the international arrivals exit and took us to the local departures area. We got on a tiny propeller plane to Maamigili's formerly-international airport (VAM). The trip was fairly short. We flew over a bunch of islands. I gawked despite my exhaustion. They were very pretty.
VAM was a dinky little thing. I could see why they were stripped of their international status after just a year: they weren't at all equipped for such a thing. We were ushered off the plane, across the tarmac, through the tiny building, and onto a small bus. It took us down to the harbor where, we were assured, our luggage would meet us shortly.
The flight and subsequently the harbor was full of Chinese tourists. I had to stop myself from laughing at their antics -- spreading SPF 110 sunblock so thinly across their pale skin that it would surely do nothing to protect them from the tropical sun, all the while loudly proclaiming how desperately they wanted to stay pale and untanned. I scoffed under my breath, wondering what the point of coming to a tropical island was in the first place, if they wanted so badly to hide from the sun.
I learned that Chinese tourism had picked up lately, that the Maldives was a favored destination. There was even a card in every seat pocket on the plane, explaining I-don't-know-what, specifically to Chinese tourists. Noting my interest in the other Chinese tourists, Latheef explained that they've been flocking to the resorts. They catch crabs, he told me. The Maldivians don't eat them, but the Chinese catch the crabs and boil them in the coffee pots in the resort rooms. The smell lingers for weeks and is impossible to remove. The resorts tried to put up signs and notices forbidding it, but had no success. Now, Latheef said, the resorts just remove the coffee pots whenever a Chinese tourist stays with them. I laughed, sighed, and cringed with embarrassment for my former countrymen.
Finally, our luggage arrived. Latheef called a taxi for us, and we and our luggage rumbled off to find some lunch. At the restaurant the taxi brought us to, there was only one small cabinet of fried things sitting more or less out in the open, a handful of flies leisurely buzzing on the foodstuffs. We fled back to the harbor -- it took a while for the taxi to return -- and loaded ourselves onto the fishing boat.
The crew made us tuna sandwiches with canned tuna, sliced onions, and white bread with the crusts cut off. They cut the sandwiches into perfect triangles, and stacked them onto plates. It was adorable. We devoured the lot. The wind stole a few pieces of bread and a plate with one sandwich left on it, but for the most part, the food went into our tummies. We also had hot, sweetened black tea to wash the sandwiches down. It was pretty tasty.
The boat ride out of Maamigili started off with fixing the engine. Something about a filter needing to be replaced, sea water getting into something it shouldn't because the chop was so bad. The crew busied themselves hopping down into the hole in the boat where the engine sat, plying it with tools and things. I tried not to get sea sick.
At last, we got going. The chop was pretty awful for me. Facing backwards, I quickly became rather ill -- not that I had been particularly hale nor healthy from our long travel beforehand! The ride seemed interminable. I oozed closer and closer to the bottom of the boat, eventually wedging myself onto the floor -- deck? -- between a chair and a ladder. The crew took pity and fixed me up an impromptu bed. I managed only a grunt of thanks before I collapsed upon it and blissfully let go of consciousness.
"Miss, miss, the action has started!" I startled awake to find the crew and our host buzzing with excitement. Rolling to my feet, I scrabbled for my camera, still half asleep. My husband has had a hit, and was now bedecked in a fighting belt, wrestling with some monster fish in the ocean. I started taking pictures, like ya do.
It was a giant trevally, a very popular sport fish. After a quick photo, we let it go so that some other fisherman could catch it. I learned that my husband had started casting, jigging and popping. I was still feeling sickly, so I just hung out, trying to hydrate and not immediately vomit it all back up.
Eventually, we got to Nilandhoo, the Faafu atoll capital. We were introduced to Mama, Latheef's mother-in-law, and handed a pair of freshly opened young coconuts. Latheef explained the origin of his fishing expedition business -- he's actually a mechanical engineer, and fishing was a hobby that grew organically into a successful business -- handed us our room keys, and told us to get cleaned up so that he could show us around.
We just barely missed the sunset, but it was still lovely out. Latheef walked us around the island, pointing out the mosque, the hospital, the atoll capital administrative building, the school.... We scared up hordes of crabs. In the dim twilight after sunset, they looked like giant skittering spiders, their feet hissing against the sand from the speed and numbers of their passing. I admit, the experience was pretty creepy.
Latheef had to get back to his engineering job, and told us our host would be one of the crew, Ali. Ali didn't have a lot of English, so communication was a bit tricky, but we were able to manage.
The second day, I begged off due to severe dehydration with a host of secondary issues, stayed in bed chugging water infused with hydration salts, and felt much more human by late afternoon. Once I recovered, my husband and I went out fishing in the early morning for sport fish, came back for lunch, rested a bit, and went out again in the late afternoon to catch dinner.
One of the days, we had to cut our fishing short due to some engine problems. That afternoon, Ali took us out snorkeling instead. Being that we were on a local island, I had to snorkel fully clothed (t-shirt, shorts), but it was still a pretty fun time. In the evening, we learned that the crew suspected a bad tank of gas, and had to ditch and refuel the entire tank. Yikes.
One of the evening fishing trips, the crew did some handline fishing while my husband and I fished off the bottom. They caught an enormous grouper, and everyone stopped to take photos with the fish. On the way back, the captain and one of the crew cleaned and filleted it as well as the other fish we caught.
The fishing was reasonable but not thrilling. On the last 2 days, we kind of got skunked, and didn't catch anything in the mornings, and nothing exciting in the evenings. I caught a good number of smaller eating fish, but nothing as cool as my 3-ft northern pike in the Boundary Waters.
The food that Mama made us was really tasty. There was a thin, bright yellow curry with fish and potatoes that was delicious. I also really enjoyed the thicker fish curry we had with breakfast sometimes. It went really well in the chapati. The fish had a wonderfully toothsome skin, which gave it an amazing texture. The typical Maldivian breakfast seems to consist of chapati stuffed with mashuni, which is a Maldivian tuna salad comprising canned tuna, sliced onions, grated coconut, and lemon or lime juice. There may be other ingredients but I don't know for sure. For lunches and dinners, we had a variety of dishes, including fried rice with fish, fried noodles (looked suspiciously like rehydrated ramen) with fish, grilled fish, and once or twice, chicken.
Our room at the guest house was very spacious. The bed was enormous, but quite firm. My back was pretty sore, but other than that, it was fine. The bathroom is a large, tiled room with at least one drain in a corner, and the entire room is basically the shower. The toilet was weird -- the seat was thinner than the width of the bowl, I had to kind of prop myself up so that my thighs didn't end up resting on the lip of the toilet bowl directly.
Overall, the fishing adventure was a lot of fun. At least one of us went out fishing everyday, and even when we didn't catch anything, being out on the ocean was beautiful and enjoyable, despite the glaring sun and my sea sickness.
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