so i'm not sure how this happened but i am in the maldives. in this video i'm going to cover my first impressions of the country of maldives and tell you a bit more about how exactly i got here it's 5 a.m and we're in Dhaka at my family home right now and we're heading out for the airport so we're at the airport gate waiting for a flight half my family's asleep and it's still like 7 30 because most of us didn't sleep at all so they basically upgraded our seats to business class and brought us here with like a vip car probably because i am a youtuber so this is nice okay so the staff at the plane were so so so nice and we saw all these islands from the top and we just got off the plane and we got our luggage and immigration took like one minute total they just looked at our passports and gave us stamps and that was it they didn't ask for the you can kind of tell when your plane is landing but this airport is like literally on the indian ocean so you walk out of the airport and you're basically on this jetty with clear turquoise water with water taxis and speed boats and ferries the process of coming in here was very smooth it's not chaotic at all which is usually the case for me in most south asian airports that i arrived to including the one in my own country bangladesh i got down and the u.s bangla airlines airlines that we came with basically connected us to the representatives from the hotel the guy just walked us to the front and told us just okay meet us here in exactly one hour and then we take the speed boat to the hotel so the first thing you learn about the maldives is usually the only way to get somewhere is by water this country is actually technically massive it's like 800 kilometers from north to south and more than like 100 kilometers wide from east to west but only 0.1 percent of it is actually land 99.9 percent of it is water which means if you want to go from one island to the other unless you're taking like a seaplane or some other kind of plane you're probably gonna have to take a boat that can be a speed boat or a ferry or a cargo ship or whatever you can find depending on where you're going there's almost 1200 islands in the maldives and they're part of 26 atolls and for those of you don't know what an atoll is which might be a lot of you atolls are basically ring-like coral reef structures that are pretty huge and go up to over 100 kilometers wide that usually contain a lot of these islands now if you look at these islands on a map they look like a double chain of long thin islands it kind of in sanskrit is actually malodip which is where it's believed maldives got its name double chain of long skinny islands that passes right through the equator which explains why this place is so sunny and warm and humid in the middle of december these islands were also called mala divana in sinhalese which means necklace islands back in the day when the arab traders were visiting these which back in the day was used as an international currency of some sort out of the almost 1200 islands in the maldives only around 200 are inhabited and out of them over a hundred are resort islands which are like these fancy islands that you see on tv with rooms that can go up to like six seven thousand dollars fifteen thousand dollars is the highest i've ever heard but there's also all these other islands called the inhabited islands where people live which we're gonna stay starting from the 80s up until 2009 tourists were not allowed to visit any of the regular islands that were not one of the resort islands the sunni muslim government was afraid of the influence or the bad influence of tourists that were coming around and smoking funny things probably had a lot to do with the hippie trail back in the days but the inhabited islands opened up for tourists in 2009 and this opened up really a lot cheaper options for tourists to come to the islands be able to spend money in maldives and give money directly to the local people without paying it in these resorts that are often owned by foreigners so me and my family are staying in maafushi which is one of these inhabited islands that's like 27 kilometers from the airport we're taking a speedboat to get there which is going to take us 25 minutes that would normally cost 25 dollars per person you can also get a ferry to get there that would take like two hours and is a lot cheaper i think under four dollars so tourism is without a doubt the biggest drivers of maldives economy almost two million tourists come to the maldives every year so i was just talking to this guy who's of course from bangladesh and i just wanted to say hi and he was telling me that he works here for 10 years and apparently there were like a hundred thousand people from bangladesh that were working here before covid which is wild like i knew most of the hundred thousand is crazy because i think the whole population of everyone combined in maldives is about half a million it is time to get on the speedboat okay so this is actually my seat and instead of gucci we have gucci so this is definitely bumpier than i expected my sister usually gets nauseous and gets sick but she's so scared of falling that she might not be falling today i found another bangladeshi working on the various people we're on so we've finally arrived at the island of maafushi with the huge sign behind me and our hotel staff just greeted us so i'm on maafushi and i'm going for like a quick little walk before we check into our hotel because i want to see the town which is very small has like 3 000 people and i want to get some cash broke up fever is well on here okay so i went and just got some money from the bank of maldives before i even talk about the money i have to talk about their alphabet and the way they write things so i saw that on top of some signs which also have stuff written in english because you know english is very widely spoken in the country but i didn't even realize that was a language till that was the welcome message on the screen and i'm like oh damn this is what the language actually looks like i don't think i've ever seen anything like this you know sinalese in um sri lanka maybe looked a little bit similar but this is a lot more of um dots and stuff i think sinalese look more squiggly than this but anyways i got like 200 rupiahs although most places in the maldives especially the touristy places will definitely accept dollars so this is the 100 rupiah note which is the equivalent of like six us dollars and you can see like a lot of south asian art on it and you can also see the local language like right here under the hundred speaking of money if you're starting to send money from abroad back to bangladesh i recommend that you check out this really cool app called tap tap send tap tap send is a really simple app using which you can send money from the us the uk canada and europe back to bangladesh there's a lot of advantages for using tap tap send the first one is that there's like zero transaction fee no matter how big of an amount number two is that the transaction times are pretty fast and number three is that the exchange rates are also pretty good number four is that you can send your money from abroad to bangladesh directly to a bank account or to a bcash account if that is easier for you and number five i've been in talks with the guys from tap tap send and they've given a special promo code for my viewers that's otg and if you use that you get a 10 credit bonus on your first transaction so if you're sending money from the us you get ten dollars bonus if you're sending money from europe you get 10 euros bonus if you send money from canada you get 10 canadian dollars bonus and if you send money from the uk you get a 10 pound bonus so make sure you check out tap tap send if you need to send money from abroad to bangladesh now i'm gonna check out this town before i go to the hotel because it's on the way back it's like a 10 minute walk it's a very very short time looks like i'm next to one of the mosques of the island this country is like 100 sunni muslims so there's be mosques in every island that people live in and the mosques tend to be pretty colorful i think this is the main road that goes through mafushi definitely not a well-paved street there doesn't seem to be a lot of cars on this island but everyone seems to have a scooter i've seen both guys and women driving around on these okay so right in the middle of this tiny island of 3 000 people there's this really nice really big fancy looking football field i have no idea how the hell they pay for this must be some heavy government funding on football so we've arrived at our hotel khani palm beach hotel right now it's supposed to be the best hotel on this island or at least one of the best hotels and i can see why because right next to the hotel is the beach or the bikini beach as it's called supposed to have a lot of foreigners but also has this little cute cat so i just got to my hotel room and this is probably the nicest room i've ever stayed in my life let me show you so this is on the ninth or eighth floor i think that's the bathroom it's pretty big size so there's a huge shower there's this nice bed with flowers but this is the best you got side and there's a sunset view of the indian ocean and you can see the reef and the crystal clear water and people kayaking there in the distance i don't know if you can tell but this is so beautiful this is really really cool and i think it's a pretty good deal because we got it through this airlines us bangla airlines and we got a package for each person which cost essentially like a bit more than 500 dollars and with that we got our flights covered we got the speedboat transfer which would be like 25 dollars for a person each way and then we got to like stay at this nice-ass hotel apparently used to say welcome on this bed but my mom sat on it and ruined it and i was fixing it so she can take a picture so our hotel has an infinity pool and i've never been inside one so obviously i gotta get in here we've done this it's pretty cool oh okay so you don't actually like just fall over it's just like an you're not gonna fall and die there's like lots of crows just chilling above not every luxury vibe with the crows but whatever okay now we're gonna snorkel a bit thank you so we're gonna go for a little bit of snorkeling before it gets too dark it's like an hour till sunset but it's super dark because it's like really cloudy right now so the weird thing is i have come like a hundred meters away from the beach but i'm still almost at waist deep water and it looks like it doesn't really get deep for a while so i'm probably gonna head back for today because if you look behind me it's really black and it's gonna rain really hard so i don't want to be out there in the indian ocean in the middle of all that so i'm just gonna head back for today great weather okay so we didn't do much yesterday and it was supposed to be raining all day today i didn't really book anything like snorkeling trips wise which is like one of the main things to do when you're here but it is so sunny i regret not doing anything right now we're gonna go to the supermarket here which we didn't get to go to yesterday because it was raining so much basic toiletries this has to be in rufaiya because this can't be 65 dollars so it's like four dollars for lotion okay so a can of coke is 12 rufaiya which is like 80 cents this is not that bad okay and they have all of this beer which is like non-alcoholic 0.00 beer so we just went and got some water for eight rupiahs which is like 50 cents for one and a half liters and we also got some sandals for a hundred rupiahs which is i think like five six dollars which is kind of steep for south asia not gonna lie but this is the maldives so right next to the football field from yesterday is the school of the village i guess i didn't see it yesterday on the bus station there's all these like inspirational quotes they're written in english anger begins with madness and ends with remorse silence itself is an answer to foolish ignorance okay so we're the maafushi health center this is pretty strange there's an ambulance there but the writing is like the mirror image of what it should be look at my family i just walked like a couple of hundred meters from that coffee shop and i'm back on the ocean again which if you're at maafushi or almost anywhere in the maldives you're never too far from the ocean and right in front of me next to the port that we're at yesterday is this memorial for the 2004 tsunami that devastated the whole country because this is a very low-lying country the highest hill is like seven foot ten inches and on average the whole country is like a bit above one meter above the ocean level so people really suffered because of that tsunami that happened 20 years ago i was recently reading this book called gate crashing paradise where this english guy came here and interviewed a lot of people in the remote places and a lot of people were saying that their entire islands were submerged in the water during the tsunami like everything like sign of any land was gone for a few hours or like it's crazy it's hard to even fathom that your whole country almost going underwater i can't imagine how terrifying that must be but that's like a reality that the people of maldives have to live with all the time and global warming is a much bigger threat for them than it is for most countries let's say especially the rising ocean levels part so because this whole country is lying on such a low level it's projected by most experts that this entire country is going to be underwater by the end of the century in order to prepare for that they have started building artificial islands that are like higher above sea level some things that are like more than two meters but even then that might not be enough so there's a city of hulu male which is right next to the airport there was nothing here 25 years ago so on one hand they built this because mali was getting really really overcrowded and they needed more space but also as last resort in case of an emergency and the ocean waters went too high and they started calling that emergency island as like a backup place for everyone to go to if like the rest of the maldives goes underwater which is pretty wild and now it's like one of the more developed parts of maldives i don't know if i misunderstood them but i think that is a about maldives so far to me is their culture and how it is so so different from anything else i've ever seen so this is 100 sunni muslim country a lot of other places are like sunni muslim where i'm from bangladesh is i think like more than 90 sunni muslim but the laws here are like on another level you're not allowed to drink anywhere on the country except for like certain resorts where they can serve tourist alcohol so this island that i'm on you're not allowed to like alcohol anywhere so there's like this floating bar it's like right over there and if anyone does want to drink basically the resorts or the hotels or whatever take people from the hotels to that bar where they can drink like beers for five dollars because it's on the water and technically not part of the island where the locals live when we're coming in they make you put all your bags through an x-ray machine to make sure that you're not bringing like any alcohol but i mean that part happens in a lot of places technically like a lot of places even in bangladesh there's like very heavy restrictions on drinking but realistically there are people that manage to find alcohol if you want to but from what i hear in maldives there's only one way to drink without going to jail which is like go to a resort or go to one of those floating boats and it's not just you know the alcohol thing dogs are apparently banned from the entire country i read somewhere that you're really putting your dog at risk if you show up on a boat with your dog you will not find a single dog on the islands there are a lot of cats though like the ones i saw yesterday they're obviously i'm not allowed to have pork and other stuff they actually like ban you from practicing or like i guess publicly celebrating other religions from what i understand and apparently if you show up with too many crosses or like symbols of other religion or like if it looks like you're gonna try to like you know preach some other religion you might get in legal trouble for that and you know like all this happens because this country is so isolated from everything else like there's other countries that are religious but they're like next to other countries with other religions and there's like a lot of intermingling going on so the laws aren't that strict the maldives is like 750 kilometers away from the asian mainland it's like one of the most isolated places on earth that is why it's the smallest country in asia and is still able to like survive as its own country it's a crab right?