The Scents of Adventure in the MALDIVES

Kuoni UK are currently running a competition which you, too, can enter here. They are asking of you what your signature scent of the Maldives might be. In their Bluewater shop they have mapped out the aromas of other fabulous locations, which they are show casing there on a map: coffee for Brazil, and apple pie for the USA. And the prize? You guessed it -  7 nights in the 5* Maafushivaru Resort, including return flights. 

Get yourselves over to the Kuoni/Maldives website to find out more about their great holidays (that's a good plug for them, I think!)

Thinking back to a brief visit we made to one of the islands in the late 1990s - the aroma that remained with us until this day, is the heady scent of sun-ripened fruit: sweet, intoxicating and enticing. The beautiful variety of colours adds to the full, multi-sensory experience - the rich orange of the mangoes, the green/yellow hues of the pineapples and the wonderfully contrasting flesh of the papaya, with its black seeds in the middle. Lush deliciousness for all the senses.

And of course we can't write a post without sugesting a couple of novels to take, to complete the full sensory experience. Through prose, experience the SMELLS, the heat, the feel of the islands, the clunk of the coconut as it thuds on the beach and savour the sand between your toes, long before you board to your plane to Male... see The Maldives through an author's eyes.

First up is Beach Babylon by Imogen Edwards-Jones. How does it feel to live and work in the world's most beautiful and luxurious tropical island resort, surrounded by white sandy beaches and aquamarine seas? Well, you can find out by reading this novel!

And second is On the Island by Tracey Garvis Graves. When 30 year old English teacher Anna Emerson is offered a summer job tutoring T J Callahan at his family's holiday in home in the Maldives, she accepts without hesitation. But on the way to their destination the plane crashes, leaving Anna and TJ to face their Robinson Crusoe challenge. 

And of course if you know of further books set in The Maldives, drop by TripFiction website and add them. Help us build this into a really great resource for both armchair and actual travellers.

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Tropical Island Life

If you can get to a tropical island any time soon, then reading fiction set in paradise is (more or less) the next best thing. It's hot, it's sunny and you can almost feel the sand beneath your feet, dive in and enjoy a good read "See a location through an author's eyes"

☼ ☼ The Maldives ☼ Tuin ☼ KoPhi Phi Island ☼ ☼

The TripFiction team conjectures from events in the book, that this book is set in The Maldives; however the book only acknowledges that it is set somewhere "exotic". It encapsulates island life through the eyes of a hotel manager in a 6* resort....
How does it feel to live and work in the world's most beautiful and luxurious tropical island resort, surrounded by white sandy beaches and aquamarine seas? How does it feel to be in the lap of luxury when you're thousands of miles from anywhere else? And when the guests are some of the richest and most demanding people in the world, where do you find the energy every day to smile, smile and smile again?



Another Maldives set novel: When thirty-year-old English teacher Anna Emerson is offered a summer job tutoring T.J. Callahan at his family's holiday home in the Maldives, she accepts without hesitation: a tropical island beats the library any day!
T.J. has no desire to leave town, not that anyone asked him. He's almost seventeen and has had cancer. Anna and T.J. are en route to join T.J.'s family in the Maldives when the pilot of their seaplane suffers a fatal heart attack and crash-lands in the Indian Ocean. Marooned on an uninhabited island, Anna and T.J. work together to obtain water, food, fire and shelter but, as the days turn to weeks then months and finally years, Anna begins to wonder if the biggest challenge of all might be living with a boy who is gradually becoming a man...


Now take yourselves back to the 1980s and 1990s and there are two outstanding books which delve into the vagaries of tropical island life, one read, the quintessential "The Beach" was turned into a film with Leonardo di Caprio and charts the demise of the good life on an island near Ko Phi Phi in Thailand; the other is "Castaway" a year on the island of Tuin, just off the coast of Papua New Guinea and Australia - Lucy Irvine responds to an advertisement " Writer seeks "wife" for a year on a tropical island" and this is an account of her time spent experiencing remote island life with a man she barely knows. Both books in their different ways capture the heat, the tropics, the isolation and how people face challenging situations....

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