Holiday amid clear waters, Maldives is the ultimate warm-weather holiday

I can pinpoint the very moment when the idea for this holiday came to me: it was July 2021, and I was surfing in Cornwall with my friend, the novelist William Fiennes. The weather was brisk and squally, but that hadn’t kept the crowds from heading to Polzeath. There were perhaps 100 surfers and boogie-boarders attempting to catch the occasional wave that rose lazily from the Atlantic swell. But while the company was good and the crab afterwards excellent, the trip was nothing like the visions I had gleaned of surfing from films and books: heat, solitude, dangerous beauty. There was something terribly English about the whole experience, a sense that this was a smaller, more restrained version of a pursuit that was elsewhere enjoyed with wild abandon.

We weren’t the only ones to try Cornish surfing during the pandemic years. Many found themselves paddling on those crowded and unpromising beaches, resorting by necessity to activities they might otherwise eschew. As Will and I walked up the hill to our cars afterwards, having not disgraced ourselves on our boards, we spoke about previous adventures, about how, given more time and fewer obligations, we might have embraced a life of wave-chasing. We discussed the great surfing memoir we’d both read: William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days, and how this sport, more even than cricket (which we both loved), was an existence, a mode of being.

That night, I got in touch with Mark Winson at Tropicsurf, who, to my surprise, suggested a trip to the Maldives—somewhere I had always imagined as a place of still, shallow waters and inactivity. I confess I am slightly baffled by those for whom a holiday entails travelling huge distances, only to spend their time sleeping off the morning mimosa. Travel, for me, has always been about adventure and exploration, and those elements seemed particularly vital after two years of confinement and reduced horizons. Mark was insistent, though—and so we set off, on a blustery February day.

Six Senses Laamu is situated on one of the southernmost atolls of the Maldives. Each is the above-water evidence of a vast and complex network of underwater volcanoes and the reefs that sit atop them. The lagoon—effectively within the caldera of the submerged volcano—is warmer and shallower than the water outside. Add to this white sand and you have the archetypical tropical vision: perfect beaches, lush vegetation, turquoise water. The resort is on an island of particular beauty, ideally placed above a thriving reef and looking out towards a clutch of pristine islands, some inhabited, others the preserve of turtles and the enormous, pterodactyl-like bats that beat the air each evening. It’s a vision of paradise, with the resort’s water villas and over water restaurants—palm-thatched appendages of the main island—all seeming to blend into the surrounding greenery.

My family and I arrived at Six Senses Laamu at night. The nearest airport is several islands away, so we took a speedboat across the pond-flat waters of the atoll’s inner lagoon, curving round a headland to be greeted with a magical sight of the stilted eminences of the hotel jutting out, the reflections of the warm lights twinkling beneath. We ate a  sublime meal of Sri Lankan and Thai food before being taken to our water villas—one for us, one for the kids—where we fell asleep to the sound of gentle lapping all about us. The rooms were thatched and cool, with glass panels in the floor through which we could watch the marine life. The next day, we were roused by the calling of birds, the ever-present murmuring of the waves, and a turtle surfacing in the turquoise water just outside our villa.

The resort isn’t showy or gaudy: rather, it seems to recognise that travellers want something more from their holidays than a few decent Instagram pictures (although, to give it its due, the island is absurdly photogenic). From the bicycles you ride along the sandy trails on your way to breakfast, to the owners’ genuine commitment to preserving the marine ecosystem; from the exceptional warmth of the staff—including our personal fixer, Asleh, who conjured up everything we needed almost before we’d asked him—to the extraordinary quality of the food, this is a hotel where everything has been thought through to the tiniest detail. I would, I confess, have quite happily spent months there merely snorkelling along the house reef, or through the seagrass meadows where enormous turtles and graceful eagle rays graze.

But I was here to surf, and so on the first evening, I went out on one of the resort’s boats—a beautiful covered dhoni with its prow carved like a sickle—to a spot some 20 minutes away, in the centre of the atoll. Hamish, my Tropicsurf guide, explained that there was a channel that ran through the atoll and, when the swell and the wind was just right, a break—the term for the place where waves crest and steepen, and where for a brief time they are surfable—formed above a reef, here in the middle of the ocean. I saw it then, rising in the distance, a beautiful wave that seemed to come from nowhere. It was initially strange, surfing like this, with no markers on a beach to aim for, but it was magical, too, and soon (with copious encouragement and advice from Hamish) I was riding a magnificent right-hander over fields of bright coral beneath.

Hamish and his partner Holly are at the heart of Tropicsurf’s Maldivian operations, charming everyone with their characteristic Australian cheerfulness and athletic prowess. After that first heavenly evening, my 13-year-old son joined me on further expeditions to the many breaks around the island—several of them only minutes away by boat. We tried to spend time on our boards every day to learn the quirks and joys of each location. With Hamish’s help—and that of another guide, a dashing Maldivian called Omar—we found ourselves improving in exponential leaps, executing ever-sharper turns and riding more difficult waves. On one occasion, after conquering a particularly steep crest, my son spontaneously punched the air and let out a shout of elation. Hamish turned to me. ‘That’s why I do this,’ he said.

We woke early on the last Friday morning of our stay. After a typically sumptuous breakfast, we stepped aboard one of the resort’s motor yachts. Bean bags had been arranged for us on deck and we were soon surging across the water, islands passing by like dreams to our left. We were headed for a quasi-mythical spot called Inside Farms on an island in the Thaa Atoll, the next archipelago to the north. As we crossed out of Laamu Atoll, the swell became apparent, a great, living, powerful thing: the heartbeat of the ocean.

After a couple of hours of glorious cruising, a necklace of islands appeared in the distance. Discovered more than two decades ago by Ross Phillips, the founder of Tropicsurf, Inside Farms looks out onto a now-uninhabited island that was once a chicken farm and is now covered in swaying palms and beach hibiscus in furious bloom. The sand was blindingly white as we pulled into the bay that lies between this island and the next. That the waters are not always so inviting was clear from the sight of a freighter’s rusted hulk on the neighbouring island, split into two pieces on the reef. It handily provided a signal that a large wave was coming as each one let out a boom in its echoing hull.

Inside Farms produces the perfect break—fast but not too steep, blissfully long, barrelling slightly when it gets big, but never choppy or tricky. I rode one all the way into the beach and it genuinely felt as though I was on it for 10 minutes. At one point, after a glorious, endless, heart-stoppingly lovely wave, I looked down and saw, in the clear water beneath me, a thousand brightly coloured fish that seemed to be celebrating my success with me. I think of that day now and my memory is of my face aching from smiling so much, the sense of being knitted into the pattern of the ocean, dancing to its rhythms. As we roared home in the boat, with spinner dolphins leaping acrobatically about us, I felt profoundly happy.

We were visiting Six Senses Laamu outside of the surf season—the best waves (at least if you’re a pro) are from April to November, including the notorious Yin Yang break that is visible from the hotel and often reaches 15 or even 20 feet. But for beginners like us, the conditions were just right, and we left with the sense of having embarked on a new journey that would take us on further adventures. I was wrong about the Maldives, but it took surfing to show me the error of my ways.

This piece originally appeared in the print version of Harper's Bazaar UK