Gili Lankanfushi

You know that you’ve reached a whole new level of hotel when you arrive to be greeted by a unicorn. That swims.

As we hop off the speedboat that whizzes Mr Smith and me from Malé to Gili Lankanfushi, our island home for the next few days, the jetty is a hive of activity. There is a fleet of buggies flanked by drivers, the hotel manager is bearing a tray of straw-spiked bottles of juice and behind him staff are offering up chilled towels and canvas bags emblazoned with ‘no news, no shoes’.                                                                                       

Our juices a-slurped and flip-flops popped into our bags (where they’ll remain), next – as if on cue – out glides a pure white, horned unicorn fish. By the time I’ve scrabbled around for my camera, our aquatic welcoming party is nowhere to be seen. The hotel manager consolingly tells me that there are plenty more fish in the sea and cajoles us that the sooner we check in, the sooner we can be off in search of them again.

Not needing to be told twice, Mr Smith and I bound off to our designated golf buggy. Our smiling, immaculately uniformed driver introduces herself as our Girl Friday – our own go-to girl for all we need throughout our stay – 24/7. A quick tour of the island takes us past tennis courts, a gym, infinity pool, a jungle cinema, two restaurants, a spa, and we arrive at the fork of two wooden jetties, each fringed with a handful of thatched wooden huts, just in time to see a stingray glide by and dart beneath the nearest hut.

As we pull up, a few huts along, Mr Smith and I practically trip over each other in our hurry to get the first look at our digs. We quickly twig that ‘hut’ really isn’t an appropriate word to describe the overwater palace awaiting us. A huge open living area spills out onto a deck kitted with daybeds, sunloungers and a couple of cushion-strewn rope nets. Up a spiral staircase is a terrace with a dining area, a curtained snug and another daybed which our Girl Friday informs us can be transformed into a real bed if we’d like to experience a night sleeping under the Maldivian stars. Downstairs we gleefully discover a bathroom that leads to an outdoor shower and stairs that end in the gin-clear, turquoise waters below and our own private section of coral garden. We skip through to the bedroom with its enormous, white-canopied bed bordered by floor-to-ceiling windows that gaze across endless glimmering Indian Ocean.

Just glimpsing that water has Mr Smith and I racing for our swimwear from the suitcase set handily right next to the Gili Lankanfushi dive bag containing masks, snorkels and flippers all in the right sizes. In a swoosh and a splash we’re submerged beneath aquamarine waves, honking through our snorkels at each other and waving wildly at pufferfish and reef sharks and school after school of monochrome-striped humbug damselfish. Slipping into mermaid mode, I happily fin around the coral outcrops eventually lured back to dry land when Mr Smith pops the cork on a bottle of Champagne he’s discovered chilling in an ice bucket on our deck. Glasses are soon being clinked and toasts to never leaving being made.

Hardcore sunbathing keeps us busy for the next couple of hours and we next decide our baked bodies deserve a little TLC. On the meander over to the spa I have a little grumble that time spent lying face down on a massage table is a wasted snorkeling opportunity. I eat my words as I settle onto my bed to discover a window below me that looks directly onto a star-shaped patch of coral teeming with the rainbow-bright cast of Finding Nemo. As my therapist expertly kneads every last knot from my back and a crab scuttles by, I wonder how our stay can get better.

I have the same thought at 7pm while lounging in the bar with a lemongrass mojito gazing at a spotlit pool of sea where two cuttlefish are playing an energetic game of tag. We may be floating in the middle of the Indian Ocean, but in the restaurant behind us, an army of chefs serves up handmade fresh pasta, piquillo-pepper-spiked Portuguese fish stew and a host of other Mediterranean delights via individual food stations. We decide it’s our duty to try everything, and eat until we both vow never to eat again.

This ridiculous vow is thrown out of the window when we stroll past the beach restaurant the next morning. When we’ve overcome the breakfast dilemma of choosing between 16 types of jam to spread on our freshly baked croissants, our waiter tips us into culinary nirvana when he shows us a wine cellar complete with cheese and chocolate anterooms.

Declaring myself plumper than the puffer fish encountered on our sunrise snorkel, I demand we swim it all off and drag Mr Smith into the sea and out to the Instagram-perfect hammock suspended offshore. A short snooze later and Mr Smith and I are in the dive centre for a sea life briefing from the resident marine biologist before that day’s real adventure – a snorkeling trip to a nearby reef. For the next couple of hours we intrepidly explore every last inch of reef proclaiming it the best snorkeling our long and esteemed careers have known when a pod of dolphins bobs up beside the boat.

As the sun slinks through a russet and gold tinged sky that evening Mr Smith and I declare Gili Lankanfushi an island paradise of mythic proportions. I guess we should have known that from the second a swimming unicorn made an appearance.