Depending on your itinerary or the company you chose to arrange your vacation with, you will either be lodged at one of the beachside inns on the eastern edge of the island or taken directly to your safari vessel. If it’s the former, you’ll wait for your vessel to be ready while spending a couple of days acclimatizing to the Maldivian weather while hitting the white sandy beaches of Hulhumalé and visiting the capital island for some sightseeing and shopping for any essentials that you may have forgotten, like sunscreen, swimsuits or dive gear.

Hulhumalé has several cafés and department stores where you can look for munchies for your trip around the islands on the safari. The lagoon of Hulhumalé is on the western edge of the island, where you can see dozens of safari vessels moored. Dinghies drop and fetch visitors at the jetty, which is also a stone’s throw from the Hulhumalé ferry terminal from where ferries leave to Malé island.

There are a couple of dive schools on Hulhumalé, who take travelers on day trips to nearby dive spots, but as your safari of the Maldives involves extensive diving, these schools can be helpful if you’re new to the Maldives and can’t wait for the dive cruise to begin.

While there aren’t plans to develop the lagoon as a marina just yet – most probably because during rough weather, the lagoon gets a bit choppy – there definitely will be a marina at Gulhifalhu.

So what’s the deal about Hulhumalé?

Hulhumalé is in stark contrast with every other island of the Maldivian Archipelago. Nowhere else are the roads paved with asphalt, for one thing. The roads are quite regularly spaced, and are wide and well thought out with parking spaces at intervals: something that Malé island desperately needs.

The contrast becomes even more evident when you visit Malé. Pavements are so narrow that people walk single file, that is, until it suddenly vanishes! There’s neither rhyme nor reason to the urban sprawl of Malé, stopped only by the very edge of the house reef that was filled up in the 90’s. Learn more about the Maldives.