26 April 2011

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.

Comments

Adrian says
Liz and John. It's a wonderful truth that almost everyone has a great holiday wherever they end up in the Maldives. It kind of makes my insights and guides redundant but happily it's also true that people don't believe this and anyway enjoy reading it all up and working out what will be the very best place for them.

Hope you enjoyed Vakarufalhi. You will have noticed that it's not all all Italian these days. Nowhere is anymore. Shame really, I used to love dropping in on their life away from Italy. It was such a delightful, fun-filled illusion.

14 September 2011, 6:05 AM

LizandJon says
Hi Adrian, Hope you are well.

Ah, it's a shame, isn't it?

We wrote to you in January 2010 and you mentioned that you hadn't been there for a while and asked me to drop you a line. Wish I had.

We eventually went to Makunudu in July/August 2010. We'd only been to the Maldives five times before and never at that time of year previously, so I didn't really feel qualified to venture a comment. We were really lucky with the weather. I think we had arrived and brought the sun with us. When we arrived the island really looked quite unkempt, but I suppose it would after two months of downpour. However, the garden staff worked really hard and by the time we left everything was beginning to look pretty again.

Except the beach. They did put a work party out one or two days, but the underwater was really corally. Don't go without your beach shoes! We looked in the case and we had one pair. Well, no. It wasn't a pair - it was two rights!! "Oh *@x$!!!!!!!" Anyway we got new ones from the quite well stocked shop - only $50. (Only to find the lefts later on in the other case, together with my brain).

I think Managements need to think really seriously about reef walls (none at Makunudu) - they do detract from the view a bit, but I think it is worth it for the lagoon effect.

It was rather curious. I see your first photo above and there was a copy of it pinned up there. We kept wondering where on the island it was. Of course, we now realise that the question should have been "WHEN was it?" Sadly your second and third photos are all too true.

Having said that, the service and the food at the island were absolutely fantastic. Liz suffers from an allergy to cheese. We didn't have to mention it twice - they really looked after her.

And guess what? We had a lovely time.

Three of our five previous visits were to Vakarufalhi, the last one just before it closed in 2007. We're off there again with Thomson in four weeks time. Do you think that's enough time to learn Italian? Mama mia!

Kind regards,

Liz and Jon Oliver

20 June 2011, 3:32 PM

Adrian says
Cheers Francisco, it's true what you say. Fact is, the truth is far too inconvenient. But the best of the new owners and developers are taking it on, by employing good consultants to work out what is going to happen and then planning the room strategy around that. Stuff like building endangered rooms on stilts so they become water bungalows after a few years!

27 April 2011, 6:58 PM