Maldives

There's a specific moment when you transfer from the Maldives' Velana International Airport to your resort that the world recalibrates. You step off a 10-hour flight from London on British Airways, clear immigration in what feels like three minutes, walk out into air that smells of salt and flowers, and then either board a seaplane or a speedboat depending on which atoll your resort is in. Mine — Six Senses Laamu, in the Laamu Atoll about 45 minutes south by Twin Otter seaplane — involved a transfer on a small floatplane that skimmed the ocean, flew low over reefs I could see changing colour from turquoise to navy with depth, and deposited me on a wooden jetty where a man with a cold towel and fresh coconut water was waiting.

The overwater villa had a glass floor panel in the living room directly over the reef. I lay on my stomach watching parrotfish and triggerfish and a small reef shark moving below me, eating room service crab curry, and thought: this is it, this is the best place I've ever stayed, I'm never leaving.

I spent the first week barely leaving the resort. This sounds lazy but is actually the correct approach to the Maldives — you're there for the ocean, and the ocean there is genuinely different from any other ocean. The house reef at Six Senses Laamu is a ten-minute snorkel from the jetty and hosts green sea turtles who come to feed on the coral heads every morning between 8 and 10am. I snorkelled with the same turtle three mornings running, close enough to see the barnacles on its shell, and it was entirely indifferent to my presence.

I got my open water diving certification on day three — four dives over two days with the in-house PADI instructor, a Maldivian man named Ahmed who had been diving these reefs since he was twelve and knew every coral head by memory. The descent below the thermocline on the first dive, the reef falling away beneath me, the schooling fish parting around me — there's nothing like it. By day four I was diving independently, following Ahmed to sites he'd chosen for conditions and wildlife. We dived a night dive on day six — torches in the dark, the bioluminescent plankton lighting up with every movement, a nurse shark resting on the sand that didn't move when we passed a metre overhead.

Week two I island-hopped. A speedboat to the local inhabited island of Fonadhoo — the real Maldives, not the resort version, with its coral stone houses and fishing boats and the Friday mosque — where I walked the perimeter in twenty minutes and drank tea with a fisherman who showed me photographs of his children on his phone and asked about my country with genuine curiosity. Another day trip to a sandbank that appeared at low tide — a strip of white sand in the middle of the ocean, nothing else in any direction, the resort packing us a picnic and dropping us for three hours.

I also went on a dolphin cruise one evening — a traditional dhoni (wooden Maldivian boat) that motored out to the deep water channel at sunset, where spinner dolphins were feeding. Forty or fifty of them, spinning and leaping, the light going orange and pink behind them, the boat rocking gently in their wake.

The food. The Six Senses food philosophy is hyperlocal and organic — fish from the lagoon, vegetables from the resort's garden, honey from their rooftop beehives. I had a tasting menu one evening at Longitude, their fine dining restaurant on the water's edge: eight courses of Maldivian ingredients in European preparations, wine pairing, stars above, the sound of the ocean the only sound. Then three nights later I ate a plate of tuna curry from the breakfast buffet at 7am on the beach because the tuna curry was extraordinary and I was very hungry.

The seaplane home was at 10am. The Maldives from 200 metres up — the reef patterns, the colour gradations, the perfect circles of each atoll — looks like something geological, something ancient and preoccupied with its own processes, utterly indifferent to the hotels and snorkels and carbon footprints balanced on top of it. I pressed my face against the window until it became a blue smudge in the distance.