Essential Tourist Information on Maldives
Maldives Tour Packages Customized by Swan Tours , New Delhi ,India takes care of all your travel needs starting from Air Tickets , Hotel Accommodation , Transfers , Sightseeing and Local experiences , Before travelling to Maldives it is important to know some tourist information which is as below :
Environment
Along with Tuvalu, Bangladesh and parts of the Netherlands, the Maldives has the misfortune to be one of the lowest-lying countries in the world at a time in history when sea levels are rising. Its highest natural point – 2.4m – is the lowest in any country in the world. While the political will to get an international agreement on how best to combat climate change may finally be here, the Maldives has long been making contingency plans in the very likely event that whatever the international community does will be too little, too late.
These contingency plans range from an already well-established project to reclaim land on a reef near Male’ to create a new island 2m above sea level, to the recent announcement by President Nasheed that the Maldives will set aside a portion of its annual billion-dollar tourism revenue for a ‘sovereign wealth fund’ that will be used to purchase a new home-land for the Maldivians if rising sea levels do indeed engulf the country in decades to come. Both options are fairly bleak ones – the prospect of moving to the new residential island of Hulhumale’ is not one relished by most Maldivians, who are attached to their home islands and traditional way of life, but the prospect of the entire country moving to India, Sri Lanka or even Australia is an even more sobering one.
Perhaps because of its perilous situation, the Maldives has become one of the most environmentally progressive countries in the world. The new government has pledged that the country will be carbon neutral within a decade, has imposed the first total ban on shark hunting anywhere in the world and is making ecotourism a cornerstone of its tourism strategy.
THE LAND
Where is the Maldives? That’s almost always the first question people ask when you tell them about going on holiday here. This long group of 26 atolls is split up into approximately 1200 islands, spread out ‘like a string of pearls’ (copyright all guidebooks ever published) due south of India and west of Sri Lanka, deep in the Indian Ocean. Sometimes confused with Mauritius, Martinique or Madagascar, or simply an unknown quantity, the Maldives is a tiny country spread out over a large area – 99% of its 90,000 sq km is the Indian Ocean, dry land coming to a total area that is less than that of Andorra.
It’s actually hard to give a definitive number for the islands that make up the country Some ‘islands’ exist at low tide and disappear at high tide, while others are just sandbanks with no foliage, potentially washed away by the next big storm. Officially, it’s a matter of vegetation – an island means a vegetated land area, but even this is not definitive. Some sand-banks sprout a small patch of scrub while others feature a single coconut palm, like the desert island of the comic-strip castaway. The geological formation of the Maldives is fascinating and unique. The country is perched on the top of the enormous Laccadives-Chagos ridge, which cuts a swath across the Indian Ocean from India to Mada-gascar. The ridge, a meeting point of two giant tectonic plates, is where basalt magma spews up through the earth’s crust, creating new rock. These magma eruptions created the Deccan Plateau, on which the Maldives sits. Originally the magma production created huge volcanoes that towered above the sea. While these have subsequently sunk back into the water as the ocean floor settled, the coral formations that grew up around these vast volcanoes became the Maldives, and this explains their idiosyncratic formation into vast round atolls. Today then, the national territory officially comprises 1190 coral is-lands and innumerable reefs forming 26 atolls that are the natural geo-graphic regions of the country – the English word ‘atoll’ actually derives from the Maldivian word atolu.
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