Male, Maldives - Tropical Paradise – words that always crop up when describing the Maldives. I had never been, but I’d seen pictures. Tiny islands shaded by gently waving coconut palms, fringed with sand of palest gold, speckled with thatched wooden villas perched on stilts above the limpid turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean.
And that was exactly the sight that greeted me as the speedboat from the airport neared the jetty of Baros Resort.
I have a friend who works for a specialist tour operator. One of her benchmarks in deciding whether or not a hotel is suitably luxurious for her clients is cotton wool balls and cotton buds in the bathroom. For that, Baros would get a large tick. Not only do the bathrooms have jars filled with cotton wool balls and buds, there are acres of white fluffy towels, the tissues are folded into fans, there are complimentary flip-flops – and a pillow menu.
Tourism is the biggest industry on this thousand-island nation. The population is tiny, just 300 000 people, and a third live on the capital island of Malé, a traffic-jammed hotchpotch of high-rise buildings and narrow, rubbish-strewn streets. It’s a far cry from the hibiscus-lined paths and sun loungers of the resort islands. There are about 130 resorts, each occupying its own island.
Baros Island is just 300m by 100m, and employs 300 people not including all the suppliers and importers. Because that is the great conundrum that faces the Maldives and the people who visit it. The previous president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, who resigned following protests earlier this year, held an underwater cabinet meeting in 2009 to demand a global reduction in carbon emissions and declare that the Maldives would be carbon neutral by 2020. It was a fanciful idea, made even more ridiculous when tourism forms such a fundamental part of life here.
The Maldivian owner of Baros could be credited for helping to initiate tourism in the Maldives when he invited some Italian friends to stay on an uninhabited island in the early 1980s, when there was just a simple shelter made from coconut palms. The friends fished from the beach and cooked their catch on a barbecue – simple, no-impact, carbon-neutral paradise. But the Maldives has gone way beyond that now and so have the demands of the people who come here. They have to fly to visit this paradise, and they want their holiday air-conditioned, bug-free, with hot showers at any time of day and wi-fi on the sun deck.
Is there anything modern-day travellers to the Maldives can do to give something back to this fragile environment they are putting under so much pressure? Sepp, the German man who runs the dive centre at Baros, came to the Maldives more than 30 years ago. He and his Dutch business partner, Ronny, think so.
The Maldives is high on any diver’s wish list, justifiably so. It is famed for almost guaranteed encounters with manta rays; the reefs are spectacular and it would be an unusual dive not to see a shark or a turtle. Baros Island is surrounded by a glorious bank of coral, a short snorkel across the lagoon from the steps that lead straight into the sea from our villa. There is a strict “no feed, no touch” policy here, and the result is a marine world unfazed by the presence of pale, human-shaped forms hovering in its midst.
On my first evening we went out just before sunset. Coral reefs are among the most biodiverse habitats on our planet, second only to rainforests. They are often referred to as the rainforests of the sea. Snorkelling on the Baros home reef, it was easy to see why. Hard and soft corals of every shape and size sheltered skulking groupers, elaborate lion fish and malign-looking moray eels. Table corals and staghorns played host to thousands of tiny, brightly coloured fish darting among their branches like shy birds. Butterflyfish, as delicately patterned as their insect namesakes, flitted about the reef. Three eagle rays soared past us, and a blacktip reef shark slunk by, lithe and silent as a cat.
It was astonishing to think that just over a decade ago all this coral was dead and the fish that depend on it had disappeared. Coral grows in sea water between 23ºC and 29ºC. In 1998, an El Niño year, the sea temperature in the Maldives rose to 35ºC in a matter of days and stayed around that temperature for six weeks. It only took that long for 90 percent of the coral to die.
Coral is not a plant but a colony of animals, and it has a much more important function than just being beautiful to look at. Coral reefs act a bit like a protective seawall for small, low-lying islands such as the Maldives. They act as breeding and feeding grounds for species of fish, which provide food, but alsogive us vital information about the state and health of the sea. Rising sea temperatures, pollution and acidification have a detrimental effect on coral.
The challenge is monitoring it and making sure the early-warning signs don’t go unnoticed. Reef Watch has devised a way for amateur divers to contribute to the scientific data needed to keep an eye on the state of our tropical seas. The dive centre at Baros was the first place in the Maldives to offer the Reef Watch course, and I eagerly signed up.
Learning how to identify invertebrates and fish deemed important “indicator species” may not be everyone’s idea of holiday reading, but as a diver I found it fascinating. In a very small way my time in the Maldives had helped to contribute to the science that may help to ensure that the coral reefs and island nations such as the Maldives have a future.
If more resorts and divers take it up, the contribution will be more significant. The dream to be carbon neutral and provide more opportunities for high-end tourism at the same time might have been unrealistic, but his goal to preserve the Maldives shouldn’t be. People have lived here for thousands of years. They caught fish, collected rainwater, planted gardens, tended their coconut trees. Their boats were powered by wind; they navigated using the stars. Yet in a matter of decades this place has been transformed into the paradise of brochures: one-dimensional and temporary as a theatre set. If we don’t change our expectations it will take a lot more than cotton wool balls to make this seem like paradise.
See visitmaldives.com – The Independent