Male Metaphor

The Chinese are building 1,000 flats over on Hulhumale, the land created by filling the lagoon of Hulhule, the airport island. It’s the first time I’ve seen a skyline of cranes on the hard, flat, empty spaces of the satellite that was once touted as the new model metropolis to overtake Male.

The building site stands out because there is little around it. Even if it’s another piecemeal development, it’s a big one. Yet 1,000 flats is a drop of water in the well when set against Male’s 150,000 population. Actually no one knows the number of people here at any one time but it’s not less than 120,000 and could be 180,000. Rough calculations that include the floating population of Maldivians registered on other islands and all the ex-patriots, put Male up there with the densest places on earth.

The building on Male continues apace. The construction companies have probably gained rare expertise in demolishing and building in tight spaces. There is remarkably little disruption, though temporary new routes have to be learnt when cranes, cement mixers and Bangladeshi workmen suddenly block off your regular road.

Old buildings and any two storey, even three storey, buildings look like they are in the way of progress, just hanging in there with some grace period until the pressure for space and money force the wider family to come to some agreement and bring in the builder.

Just about every new building now starts with a retail space on the ground floor. A friend has been overseeing the building of a 6 storey set of flats for his family. There was no plan to have a shop, but before the concrete had set in the first columns, he had had enough requests and promises of rent to force the family’s hand. A funky young clothes shop is there now, with rock music playing out to the street and, in the window, dummies of a dancing young thing in a short black dress and a slim, jeans-clad dude with dreadlocks. The building continues on all the floors above.

Clothes shops, shoe shops and general stores make up the vast majority of the new and established retail spaces. In smaller rooms you find phone shops, video stores, tailors, barbers and tea shops. Cafes tend to be larger, fancier places. A city of this many people is going to have most things you could readily need. And the odd thing no one is going to need.

Last night I came across a shop called ‘Grower’. In the window was a dummy in full protective gear including a head mask and filtered breathing. Near him was a sprayer and canisters; on the back shelf were packets of white powder. Along another shelf were rows of packets of plant seeds with Chinese or Korean writing on, and on the floor were plant pots of many sizes. In the other window was what I really loved, a shiny new wheelbarrow. Brightly lit in a dark, damp corner of this concrete maze it startled and puzzled me like the public stunt by a surrealist.

Across the road from ‘Grower’ was a pet shop. A small pet shop with tiny fish in compact tanks and small birds close together in small cages. After the pathos came the realisation that I was looking at a metaphor for Male.

Everyone I know in Male has a strong urge to get out. For just a day, for a break, and then they can go back and live it again. Resorts are usually full, mostly don’t take day or overnighters, and are of course expensive. There is always Villingili, the very small satellite island that is not as overcrowded as Male, and the aforementioned Hulhumale. Not great escapes. And the city’s ‘picnic island’ Kuda Bandos is being grasped away from them to be turned into another tourists resort.

Chatting the other evening, a friend said he was going to Colombo. Just for the day, he hastened to add. His friend said she was going for a week, to work, she hastened to add. But there was already a sucking in of breath from a few at the table: “What would I do with a week in Sri Lanka” was the yearning left to drift into the Male night. 

Call this a Beach Villa?

A chat with a Maldivian scientist recently has me looking at the problem of beach erosion with different eyes.

Almost every resort management frets about some part of their coastline. There is an expensive beach villa at every point on the circumference of their island and reasonably enough each guest expects to have beach outside their front door. This is impossible to deliver, except for a few small, round resorts in the middle of atolls. You might take Ihuru in North Male Atoll, Fesdu now W in Ari Atoll and Hadhahaa, once Alila now Park Hyatt, in Gaaf Alifu.

Unrestricted, the southwest monsoon will suck and push sand around an island, the northeast monsoon will more or less put it back in its place. When you have a round island with a big beach in the middle of an atoll, where the monsoon action is diminished, bulges happen but you still keep some beach all around. The other islands, with different shapes and positions, are a headaches in this respect, as the monsoon takes the sand away from 2, 10 or 20 villas and deposits it in front of others (or sometimes uselessly behind the waterbungalows or into the jetty and harbour area).

Restricted, the monsoons will mock you. When you put in a groyne you quickly require another and another. When you build a section of wall in the lagoon, you find the problem pops up in new place. Now you have to build a wall at the edge of the island where once there was a beach. If you ring the island with a high wall in the lagoon and stud the circumference with groynes — think Ellaidhoo and Kurumba — you might have what seems like a permanent solution but you have lost a good part of your product.

With observation, planning and minimal, often temporary interventions using stuffed (ideally sand coloured) bags, an acceptable solution can be found, usually combined with judicious pumping of sand from the lagoon.

But sometimes a solution cannot be found and this is the point I am finally coming to. Sometimes, in fact often, the sand cannot be kept in place and it refuses to come back. The situation becomes a little more marked each year. What is happening is not so much beach erosion as island movement.

Dr. Shaig, the scientist mentioned at the top, has inspected the photographs that the British took in 1969 of every island in the country. He was part of the ministry of planning that went out to survey all the islands some 40 years later. His personal tally is 800. He told me he had seen islands that had moved 100 metres in those 40 years.

Now, I know that islands move over time and I know that resort owners and managers worry about beach erosion but somehow I never put the two together. All the time I spoke to people on the resorts the conversation was about where the erosion was happening and what they were doing about it. No one said ‘we’re buggered, this whole island is shifting in that direction’.

So what do you know, just a couple of days after the conversation I am on Makunudu to photograph and review it for this site. I hadn’t been on the island for 8 years, as I was temporarily barred from Sunland resorts for a luke-warm review of Coco Palm when it opened (the GM became vice-president but has now moved on). Before that, I visited for the first edition of ‘Resorts of Maldives’ back in 1993. At that time, by the way, it was one of the smartest resorts in the country — begging a story for another day.

One side of the island has a fine curving beach, the other side is in real trouble. I have my own photographic evidence that it used to be different, that it used to have a good beach all around the island. Those photographs are back in Ireland and I’ll dig them out but here are pictures of the two sides of Makunudu today. I follow it with a picture to show that you don’t need much beach to be happy. You might note in that fourth picture the embanking that is happening as the island adapts to its circumstances.

Dr. Shaig said that the largest island movements are observed on small islands in the far north and the far south of the archipelago, where the South Indian Swell, the winds and the storms are most in evidence. Makunudu is small but in the middle of the country. Yet if a small island in the north or south can move 100 metres in 40 years, a small island in the middle can certainly move 10 or 15 metres in 15 years.

There was a big pile of sand that had been dredged out of the harbour area around the jetty. The dredging is a regular practice as the sand keeps moving in there from the other side of the island. Similarly, at the other end of the island, the beach is being enlarged as sand is delivered from the other side. It seems clear that the island wants to move and so attempts to deal with the erosion is like rearranging the deckchairs on the titanic.

There are things that can be done, with both careful intervention in nature and the design and placement of rooms. As most resorts get a major overhaul every ten years or so, a bad situation can be rectified. It is possible to accurately predict the movement of any island over the following 20 years, so a plan can be made to keep the customer satisfied.
 

Going Under Water

Maldives is going underwater. Before the water comes over the Maldives. Underwater is the new Overwater. If the sea will one day be the end of the country, it is for now the gift that keeps on giving.

The very first tourists were a group of Italians with a penchant for spear-fishing. There followed the period of German and British divers who reigned for a couple of decades until they were squeezed out as a majority by increasingly expensive rooms.

Waterbungalows were the new thing, a perfect fit for the ‘luxury in paradise’ holiday-makers. These grew in size and marketing speak to become Overwater Villas and now every resort with a patch of lagoon big enough to take a jetty, has an additional string of rooms to sell, at premium prices. Like spas when they arrived, it was a hit-your-forehead-with-the-palm-of-your-hand moment: “Of course, why didn’t we think of that before!”

If Maldives took the established idea of over-water rooms to another level, what happened next was truly innovative and pointed the way to the future use of the water. The Conrad built and opened the world’s first underwater restaurant. I was wary of all the hype but was as giddily impressed as anyone when I got to look around it. The number of fish, their size and proximity gives you a very unusual sensation. The concept’s continuing success can be marked by the fact that the restaurant has two sittings a day and every table is booked well in advance.

After the underwater restaurant came the underwater spa on Huvafen Fushi. This doesn’t work so well because after the initial fun of going down stairs and emerging in an underwater room, you have to lie face down and then you could be pretty much anywhere. The views into the lagoon are simply windows at head height.

It has been a few years since those landmark facilities were opened and perhaps because of the sheer expense of building them, nothing else has been attempted. But that may soon change. I was chatting with my friend Shark in Male, a while ago, and he gave me a little inside information on what’s coming.

Shark, who goes by that nickname alone as many in the Maldives do, is a surveyor now specialising in all things marine. He worked on both the Conrad and the Huvafen Fushi projects and now he is working on something big himself. He has plans for a thila near Bandos where he hopes to build underwater rooms. These will be from 2 metres to 10 metres below the sea-level at high tide. Each room will have a garden, a coral garden, which he will plant.

He also mentioned that the Universal resorts have a few ideas up their sleeves which may well see the light of day in time. These could include an underwater bar and underwater disco.

Seventy percent of the earth’s surface is water. And we will have 7 billion people on the remaining 30% before long. Perhaps the Maldives is pioneering something momentous. Perhaps the gift that keeps giving to the Maldives will develop into something of great value to the whole world.

 

Make Hay While The Sun Shines

The first Hay Festival Maldives has just finished. It was a great success. The literary events were sparsely attended, the program was environment heavy and the key-note Carbon-Neutral-By-2020 Plan was shown to be so much solar hot air right now. But what a success.

The organisers - those in the President's Office and Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture - confided in me, and I confide in you, that what they wanted to achieve most of all was a secular space. A space where radical Islam had no censorial oversight.

It has come to the point now where some are calling for separation of men and women in public places. This radical position is an example, an example of the positions that draw the middle ground out. People look over their shoulders in Male, they self-censor. Radical Islam has the momentum. The Maldives Hay Festival was a bulwark to hold this back; a bund around a quiet lake.

 The venue was Aarah, the President's island, fifteen minutes and a million miles from Male. A beach, palm trees and open ground in the middle that used to be the former president's cricket pitch. The organisation was all very First Year - venues, food and drink, schedule changes - but nobody minded in the least because this was the first year, the first time. The atmosphere was easy, uncertain, careless in a carefree way.

When DJ Ravin started up at 8.30 the atmosphere changed. A few young ones got up close but otherwise it was sitting or twitching in chairs. Two women of standing stopped themselves dancing behind the stage, went to the broadcaster and asked them to quit filming and turn off the main light. Five minutes later this happened and the floor in front of the stage sparked with people jumping in from the sidelines. With the apprehension of live tv and facebook exposure gone, we danced and danced. DJ Ravin was obviously taken aback by the enthusiasm, his face breaking out with frequent smiles. This was no 'just another weekend' crowd. It was urgent, bordering delirious for some. It was release.

The Other CO2 Problem

Here's a sad story for you. One to leave you depressed, angry and feeling helpless. But anyone who loves the Maldives ought to read it. (Actually anyone who, anyone that, well, everyone actually).

I bought the August edition of Scientific American to read on the long journey, with stops, from Ireland to the Maldives. An article promised to give me more information on ocean acidification but the more I read, the lower I sank down in my seat. Yes, airplanes are one of the worst culprits of the great CO2 spike.

Ocean acidification is a result of too much carbon dioxide reacting with seawater to form carbonic acid. It has been dubbed "the other CO2 problem". As water becomes more acidic, corals and shelled animals have trouble building their skeletons and shells. Furthermore, the acidity interferes with basic bodily functions for all marine animals. By disrupting processes as fundamental as growth and reproduction, ocean acidification threatens the animals' health and even the survival of species.

The ocean interaction with CO2 mitigates some climate effects of the gas. The world's seas have absorbed roughly one third of all CO2 released by human activities. This 'sink' reduces global warming - but at the expense of acidifying the sea. Across the planet, there has been a 30% increase in acidification since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Marine life has not experienced such a rapid shift in millions of years. And paleontology studies show that comparable changes in the past were linked to widespread loss of sea life. It appears that massive volcanic eruptions and methane releases around 250 million years ago may have as much as doubled atmospheric CO2, leading to the largest mass extinction ever. More than 90% of all marine species vanished.

If we continue to emit greenhouse gases at current rates, scientists estimate that atmospheric CO2 will reach 500 parts per million (ppm) by 2050 and 800 ppm by 2100. That latter figure would constitute a 150% increase in acidity compared with pre-industrial times. In laboratory experiments just small changes in water pH has shown a range of effects at each stage of an animal's life, from sperm to adult, and across species from microbe to large fish.

Looking at the Maldives, tuna (and other fish we like to eat such as salmon and bass) is seriously threatened by the weak resistance to pH increases by copepod species, which support the prey that supports the tuna. A small increase in the water pH saw half the copepods in an experiment die within a week.

As for corals, increased CO2 levels narrow the temperature range in which colonies can survive. They become heat-stressed at lower temperatures than normal if exposed to higher CO2. This, with a general warming of the globe, would mean frequent bleaching events and widespread collapse.

Even if we manage to stabilise CO2 at 450 ppm by 2100, as some have suggested, it would spell doom for coral reefs and shell building animals. 350ppm seems like a rational target, I read. Ultimately, the solution to ocean acidification lies in a new energy economy. Only a dramatic reduction in fossil fuel use can prevent further CO2 emissions from contaminating the seas. An explicit plan to shift from finite, dangerous energy sources to renewable, clean energy sources offers us a more secure path forward. And it offers the planet, especially the oceans, a chance for a healthy future. So please get working on that solar-powered plane, guys, I feel baad.