food was good of course

Singapore airport had all the cool attractions shut down or inaccessible for transit passengers. I ended up spending multiple hours at the nice lounge, waiting for my flight to Male/Maldives:

they also took security seriously

I did not starve at the lounge :)

Finally, after may hours in planes, arrived over Maldives:

Boats would pick up people directly at the airport to go to other islands, although in my case I had 24H on land waiting for my diving boat the next day:

A lot of people also take small planes to farther away islands:

I'm told this is called a beach and that people sit on it, while collecting skin cancers and looking at the waves :)

In my case, despite my hotel dropping my reservation, I got on a local dive boat with Ocean Junkies as soon as I could after arriving, and did a couple of nice dives, and then two more the next morning. The dives at the top of the page linked were surprisingly good.

lots of friendly cats

although I was super jetlagged, I hung out with the crew afterwards

I only spent limited time in Malai, but my impression was that all the people I interacted with were very nice and helpful, but it is still very mush a shariah law country, where a strict version of islam is mandated for all citizens, although apparently some allowances are made for foreigners, probably only because of tourist money. Obviously, I'm not a fan of that:

Virtually all my time was spent on the carpe novo dive boat though, so I didn't have to worry about land/country issues too much.

Nice pictures from the flight out: