Malé

I'm pretty happy with Brisbane.

The Maldives, the flight from Melbourne to Malé, which is the main city in the Maldives, was only 10 and a half hours to get back.

Mm.

But we left our room at 12 o'clock, like midday, and then our s- first flight wasn't until 1:30.

So that's 350 pounds, which you want to land with, and that can get you to most places.

Uh, the fuel that you get released from, from the capital city, Malé.

Most of the places have fuel at the resorts.

Right.

... on take off.

And then landing, right? Because, I mean, how do, how do you plan that as well? Let's say you get to a resort.

I mean, obviously at Mali, where your base is, right, uh, you've got runways on the water as well.

I wanna get to that just after this now.

Something like the resort experience makes remarkably easy to forget.

go to capital island Malé, and suddenly there are apartment blocks, traffic, mosques, motorbikes, shops, and hundreds of thousands of people getting on with ordinary life.

Outside the resort bubble, the country is socially and legally much more conservative, with very different rules for the fantasy being sold offshore.

Alcohol is tightly restricted, conservative dress is expected, same-sex relationships are criminalized, and women face documented problems around discrimination and gender-based violence.

Then there is Tila Fushi, the island notorious for receiving huge quantities of waste from Malé and the tourism industry.

Us! Which is a pretty perfect metaphor for the whole setup.

Paradise stays immaculate because somewhere else has to absorb the consequences.

I'm your host, Dani Kondasilva, and today I'm joined by someone who carries a rare and beautiful dual belonging.

Sophia Nassif is a British Maldivian photojournalist based in Mali, and her work lives at the meeting point of culture, environment, and visual anthropology, which is just another way of saying that she is paying attention to a world that the rest of us are only beginning to understand.

The Maldives sits at the front line of the climate crisis in a way that is impossible to overstate.

Safiya is there not as an outsider parachuting in with a camera, but as someone who belongs to these islands, who writes about them in her bi-weekly column Atoll Dispatch for Maldives Independent, and who has made it her life's work to document what is at stake when a culture, an ecosystem, and a way of life are all under threat at the same time.