The Maldives: Amazing Vilamendhoo

When it comes to our amazing trip to the Maldives, it’s hard to know what not to include.

I posted about some incredible swimwear I wore there, shortly after we returned, but I wanted to put a post together about our stay on the island and this is best documented through our photos.

Paradise in Vilamendhoo

The island we chose to stay on was the Vilamendhoo Island Resort and Spa, which is part of the South Ari-Atoll group of islands.

We went in March and it was a trip that we booked up fairly recently last December. The aim was to go at the start or the end of the season – and after some deliberation, we decided that the end of season seemed to be the better choice weather wise. The added bonus of that decision was that we wouldn’t have to wait until the end of the year!

Vilamendhoo

As I mentioned in my previous post, we had always planned to make it to the Maldives one day, after wishing that we had made it our honeymoon destination nearly 11 years ago. We knew that it wouldn’t be a place that we would want to come to with the kids (at least not the first time) and it seemed like this year (being my upcoming 40th) would be the perfect year to make our dream become a reality.

We booked to stay in a beach villa at Vilamendhoo and this was the stretch of beach that we looked straight out onto.

We were also lucky enough to be situated on the right side of the island to see the sunset every evening, which was simply stunning.

Vilamendhoo

We were both so excited about just being able to do our own thing for the week, without having to keep kids entertained. One of those things was most definitely snorkelling.

I knew that I would want to spend a fair amount of time looking at the underwater world there and it didn’t disappoint. I would say that it was probably the most relaxed I’ve ever felt when snorkelling around, despite remaining fairly wary of the sea.

Alex thoroughly enjoyed being able to film lots of footage underwater and we saw so many types of fish, which was dependent on where you were on the island.

He’s much like me in the water as we can both be fairly jumpy, but with his GoPro in hand, he became much more confident. You could say that getting the footage and shots became more important than any dangers that might have been around him – which to be fair, there weren’t really any as the Maldives is generally pretty safe.

When it comes to filling up your time on the island, it’s really up to you how little or how much you do. Vilamendhoo offer lots of boat trips on offer and water sports to partake in, but we knew that we predominantly wanted to just enjoy the island at our leisure and not be under any time frame – apart from meals.

I did have a crazy idea one day that I wanted to go kayaking and regretted it as soon as we got into the kayak. It might look like fun but it was a lot of hard work and a bit scary for me – so kudos to Alex for putting up with me on that traumatic voyage!

If you follow my Instagram feed then you’ll know that we documented our time away on there. We really enjoy getting shots and we couldn’t have wished for a better location to achieve the images we had in mind.

One of those shots involved a coconut and although I’d previously seen men cutting down the coconuts and offering them out to people, on the one day we wanted one, there were no coconut men to be seen! As you can see, after scouring the island, we eventually found one.

Which then lead on to this coconut inspired shoot…

I’d seen this shot on social media, so I knew that we would just have to recreate our own version in the crystal clear waters.

Alex also managed to get some great shots using his GoPro dome and we had a laugh trying to get them to work!

I had seen a similar shot shared by someone else who had stayed in the water villas previously and it seemed like such a great idea until I realised that the bottom steps inhabited some rather nasty looking crabs.

This pose took some convincing to do (once the crabs has supposedly scarpered). I realised I’d had a lucky escape, as Alex was nipped by one the following day. But you know, we got the photo…

We just generally had a relaxed schedule around the island and just took photos of spots that we loved the most.

Alex also surprised me with a Tiffany necklace, as he wanted me to receive something for my birthday while we were away.

He presented me with the prettiest necklace that is so delicate around my neck and of course, extremely sentimental to me.

For our last couple of nights, we were upgraded to a water villa. Most evenings we used to stroll down to the very end of the villas to catch the sunset in all its glory. It was definitely our favourite spot and we were thrilled to be able to experience what it’s like to stay over the beautiful water while in this part of the world.

Although we loved our beach villa and were sad to leave it behind, it was wonderful to be able to stay in one of the villas, not least for the fact that we could step down into the water straight from our decking area.

We had a couple of stormy days and unfortunately our last afternoon was pretty much non stop rain! However, it didn’t spoil anything for us and it didn’t stop us taking a photo…

I miss this decking area for taking photos and I was very lucky to be able to take out some of the Boden pieces that I have been gifted over the last few months.

We’ve been back nearly a month now and can hardly believe how fast the time and passed since we were there. The Maldives was everything we imagined and more and we are so happy that our dream of visiting the islands became a reality and has left us with many memories (and photos) of our trip of a lifetime.