My wife and I chose to stay at the Westin Miriandhoo Maldives resort for our first visit to the Maldives. We arrived from London around 9,30am local time after a relatively easy ten hour flight from London, a welcome post-Christmas start to our one month tour of Indo-Asia. The arrival went smoothly without excessive delay for passport control etc and we were greeted by Westin Staff at the arrivals hall. I guess an aircraft door greet would have been preferred and I discovered during my stay that a ”CIP” service is available from the airport for a modest fee, which I would have chosen had I been aware. Westin handed us over to the seaplane company for the short 40 minute flight north from Male. The TMA seaplane operation, the biggest in the world with 90 floatplanes is an impressive operation. Being a pilot myself I was unphased by the small aircraft environment or the ”exhilarating” landing at The Westin Resort. The welcome and check in was a smooth experience, although our room was not ready. We anticipated this in advance and had a massage already booked in the Heavenly Spa, which was fabulous, peronalised flower petal greeting and super professional Balinese therapists . A relaxed hour or so later we arrived in our overwater suite around 2pm local time, which is one hour ahead of Male. There was one slight hickup in that one of our bags failed to get delivered to the hotel on the seaplane. This required some degree of chasing to ascertain it was being delivered on a later flight, which it was,, but caused a degree of uncertainty. The staff at the Westin are always ”super positive” but perhaps a little imprecise at times, answering providing the guest with the answer they want to hear, rather than the real situation. Following a short unpack, we were snorkelling right outside our room on the magnificent coral reef and vertical wall which was teaming with so many species of tropical fish. Resembling swimming in an aquarium, we then enjoyed a late lunch on our terrace, and as the sun went down a display of Dolphins just 100 meters from our terrace. The fine dining a la carte restaurant at the resort is the Japanese ”Pearl”, which I was hoping would provide me with a solution to my distaste of Indian spices, and it did! This was a comfortable ambience with a high level of attention to service detail. We enjoyed several of our seven evenings here, as we did find the buffet environment noisy and busy by comparison. Breakfast served buffet style is excellent spanning a wide range of all world cuisines. Our stay included a gala carnival themed New Years Eve party. The ”round the world food marathon” included Caviar, Foie Gras, French Oysters, and every kind of meat or vegetable one could imagine. Live entertainment and a sky illuminated by fireworks brought our 2025 New Year into magnificent swing. Little did we know that the following three days would be constant tropical storm conditions, seas too rough to enter the water. tiles blown from our ro
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