Tips 👏
- They speak English in most of the places.
- There’s a pharmacy, supermarket, hotels, restaurants and a dive club.
- It’s a very tiny atoll, you can cross it in 10 mins walk, and bike around it in 30 mins. Only 600 people live there.
- There’s a nice white sand beach, which allows bikini at the north of the island, where you can nap, spot crabs and octupus, and snorkel like there’s no tomorrow.
🏠 Accommodation
We stayed at Blue World guesthouse. Clean and big room, daily included breakfast, dive center and only four rooms. Also good lunch and dinner options.
🚲 Getting there
Flight from Male with FlyMe of 40 minutes. Very comfy seats, delayed of one hour.
⏱ Duration
We stayed seven nights and that was perfect. Allow enough time if you want to spot the mantas since it’s pretty random.
Blue World 🏠
We spent a week in the same guesthouse that we recommend. Few rooms but very big, with private bathroom, free bikes, fins and snorkelling material, AC and breakfast. It was also possible to get lunch or dinner for 15$/person/meal. The hotel owner is Italian 🇮🇹, therefore most of the time we ate pastas. You really feel like at home.
The best part of this hotel was it was also a diving centre with diving instructor, so every evening you could discuss what and where you wanted to go. They get their own boat and staff so it’s very handy to get going.
Activities 🐠
We came to this place to see the manta rays of Hanifaru Bay (you can swim with more that 50 at the time if the timing is right). Our timing was wrong 😅. We saw only one manta, by chance, in the ocean. A week after we left the place, they told us the mantas were back. That was frustrating as you can imagine, but that’s part of the game. Sadly, this affected our stay there. Every day we were waiting the instructor with the news, to know whether mantas were spotted at the bay (20 minutes by boat), and the news were always negative. We’re writing this to inform you that this stuff happen, and you should be ready for it.
However, we didn’t just lost our time there, we still enjoyed it by going almost everyday on the boat for different tour:
- Scuba dive: Two dives in the search or manta, and saw plenty of cool fishes and turtles. Even if you don’t dive, they let you come on the dive boat where you can snorkel around while the divers are underwater.
- Snorkelling boat tour: One snorkelling tour on a bay nearby where you can swim with turtles.
- Sand Bank half day: The boat leave you on a little piece of sand in the middle of the sea, where you can enjoy be alone, snorkel around and tan for about 3 hours.
Overall, we really enjoyed our stay there, even with the mantas frustration. We managed to see plenty of fishes by snorkelling or scuba diving.
Note that you don’t have to sleep in this hotel to dive with them, you can also be in another guesthouse or hotel if you wish (there’s several other on the island, including high end). There was also possibility to go a spend a day on a resort nearby for 100$/person. It’s quite pricy, and in the end we had our days filled so we preferred to stay sober.
The third image is Hanifaru Bay in 2017 - Source Dive Into Life.
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