Many people asked us where the Maldives is, so we feel like we should do a little explanation here before more photos!

The Maldives is located in the Indian Ocean, below India and Sri Lanka. You will need to expand your map to see the islands! We learned about this location a few years back when there was news about the island having a high risk of submerging due to climate change.

Traveling to the Maldives was a challenge as there were no direct flights from Los Angeles. If you do a simple search online, you will see the flights has at least one stop and take over 24 hours of travel time. The best to visit is between November and April. The Maldives is very close to the equator, so you don't really have to worry about cold weather. However, the months outside of the best season to visit have high chances of rain. So, we decided to go in early March.

The online tool we used to look for flights was Google Flights. It is so helpful if your schedule is somewhat flexible. We found the best way was to type in the starting location and the place you want to visit as a one-way ticket. This way, the google calendar it comes with will show you which date offers the best price. Then do the same thing for the rest of the legs within your travel plan to find the best price for the whole trip. We were able to find and book our flights for just around $1,000.00 each with stops at Shanghai and Tokyo but with lots and lots and lots of connecting flights!

Our journey to the Maldives took a total of 25 hours of flying, not including layovers. And that only brought us to Male, Maldives, where we spent a night before heading to the W the next day. Can you tell how committed we were? Haha. 

We had to stay in Male, the capital of Maldives, for a night is because it still takes a 30 minutes seaplane ride to get from Male to the W, and the seaplanes do not operate at night. We found the Somerset Inn on booking.com. The Inn looked very cute. The price was under $100 with tax, breakfast as well as airport shuttle service. The airport shuttle service was a lifesaver! We would have been really lost without them since the Male airport is a small island by itself. You will have to take a ferry to Male and then quite a drive before reaching the Inn. 

We knocked out right after arriving at the Inn, so we missed taking photos of the room, but it was very cozy and clean. We slept really well that night and woke up super refreshed. The Inn's staff was charming and friendly. Breakfast was excellent and straightforward. We were taken back to the airport soon after to meet with the hotel staff from W and really start our vacation!

We will talk more about our trip to W, show some photos of the resort and the island in our next blog!