Review of Gunbaru Inn, Ukulhas, Maldives
Gunbaru Inn on Ukulhas Island
This review follows from my page on saving money in the Maldives. In it, I talked about how you could possibly save thousands if you chose to spend some part of your stay in the local guesthouses instead of all your nights in the private resorts and using the local boats instead of the private speedboats or sea plane.I'm excited to write a review of Gunbaru Inn because it was one of the best parts of our Maldivian experience. By staying here, we saved a ton of money on accommodation and transfer costs, but more importantly, found a place in the world where we had the luxury of time for ourselves and be at great peace.
Why We Chose Ukulhas and Gunbaru
Well, I knew we didn't want to stay anywhere near Malé due to the rubbish island close by, Thilafushi. I read that all the rubbish in the Maldives gets dumped there, and it's overflowing into the sea because they can't keep up with it. There were some reports that the trash was being washed to other islands. Here is a shot of the toxic burning that I took from the sea plane back to the airport:
Yucks. Are the resorts doing anything about being responsible ecologically? After all, they charge so much.
So, not-near-Malé meant further north, south or west. I had a fairly detailed look at the various islands and accommodation options and Ukulhas seemed to be a clean island (some people commented on how dirty other islands were, like Maafushi) with nice guesthouses.
Waheed from Gunbaru was extremely quick to respond to my every question, very polite and helpful and most importantly, he gave me the best rate amongst all the local guesthouses - USD55 nett per night with breakfast. Still I was a bit hesitant because it was a new inn with only one Tripadvisor review and a 4-hour slow boat ride from Male city. But he was SO nice and able to help me arrange a cheap transfer to Nika Island that we decided to give it a chance.
This was a big consideration for us. Aside from their low room rate, their transfer to Nika cut our cost significantly. As I mentioned in my other post, Nika's one-way sea plane transfer costs USD212.50 per adult and USD106.25 per child. For the four of us, that would have worked out to USD637.50. Gunbaru's transfer via a 10 minute speedboat was USD65 nett. As a boon, Gunbaru Inn paid for our transfer from Malé to Ukulhas. Even if they hadn't, the public ferry isn't expensive - a couple of USD per person.
Aside from Nika, Ukulhas is close to many other private resorts, the closest one being Velidhu. Proximity matters because Maldives is so spread out, travelling between islands takes a while and adds to the cost. For a while we considered staying at Kuramathi, which is near the local island Rasdhoo. If we had stayed there, Gunbaru Inn would have paid for our transfer to Rasdhoo island, and from there, they were able to organise a roundtrip speedboat to Kuramathi for USD25!
Lastly, because of the way the MTCC ferry routes are organised, Ukulhas is the hub for many other local islands in the vicinity. I thought that maybe if we had time, we might visit some other islands on the public ferry route just out of curiosity. But we spent so much time bobbing around in the sea and participating in village life that we never got the chance to try it out. See the MTCC website for routes and schedule.
Before I go on though, I must caution that going with the right expectations and goals makes all the difference in your experience. We love off-the-beaten-track places and peeking into the lives of others especially if they're very different from our own. The local island is inhabited. You share the space with the people who actually live and make their living there. It is earthy, lived-in, broken down in some parts, and yes, there is trash on the beach sometimes.
We encountered a couple of small incidents, but I'm sure it's because we live in Gibson's Disneyland. One was an unfortunate meeting between a broken tree stump and the Little One's leg. Which he initiated while walking along the village dirt road one day, having an absorbed conversation with himself. I know, it's a tree stump! It doesn't get up and move itself! But somehow he managed not to see it, minding its own business, sitting right there in the middle. And got his poor leg badly gashed from the jagged edges.
It was on the same trek a little later however, after we had cleaned him up, that we met lovely Maalsha (I'm not sure how you spell it), who had gathered a bouquet of wild flowers and gave it to us shyly.
The other small incident was that we lost the hotel's snorkelling gear when I leant out of our kayak and we went overboard with all our things. They were very nice about it though we offered to pay. More about island activities in another post.
I don't know what other local islands are like, but Ukulhas was surprisingly clean and rubbish-free. Some early mornings when we went to the beach we would see flotsam washed ashore, but there were always these women sweeping. They were so clean they were sweeping leaves from the sand! And the beaches were very lovely with powdery white sand:
Here's a video of the beach outside Gunbaru. The best stretch would be leftwards if you were to stand with your back to the hotel and face the sea. On your right is a ship repair facility but don't worry most of the time it was not in use and when it was, it was very quiet (they don't have large machinery).
Waheed told me that Gunbaru just won the rights to privatise the beach that you see in the video and that they would be cleaning it up, so I guess it would be even cleaner in the near future.
The Inn and the Room
As for the inn itself, it is as you see in their website. WYSIWYG, literally. Here are some of our own photos. I must admit that after being bitten by a new hotel in Vietnam whose actual rooms looked little like their photos (okay if you insist, it was Nam Long hotel in Ho Chi Minh), I was skeptical about the Gunbaru photos. And after staying in Skai Lodge, we all had extremely low expectations. Which is why I guess we were completely bowled over when we checked in to cold towels and apple juice and a lovely, neat, cozy, clean, new room! The entire inn is new! And I loved the little touches - torch lights, one of those personal reading lamps, 4 huge beach towels, an abundance of bath, hand towels, pillows and cushions (I must admit appreciating towels and pillows after being rationed at Skai Lodge), down to toothbrushes in the bathroom. You could tell the owners cared about their little inn and their guests and were prepared to be generous with them. The generosity and personal attention we were to feel throughout our stay and contributed so much to our time there.
For the benefit of more information, this is what we had in our room. It was small (they said it was actually meant as a couples room but had to accommodate us there since their family rooms were not ready). There was a double bed comprising 2 single beds pushed together, and a fold-out single bed. There was an LCD TV screen with satellite TV (English channels including Nick Jr), kettle, complimentary instant 3-in-1 coffee, tea, 2 500ml bottles of mineral water, stocked mini-bar (chargeable), cupboard, ample hangers, clothes rack, safe, bath and beach towels, personal LED reading light, torchlight. In the bathroom there was toothbrushes, toothpaste, shampoo and liquid body soap.
The room we had had no external windows. There was one which looked into an air well. However, we didn't feel claustrophobic. It wasn't musty and the bathroom dried easily because of the ventilation fan. The good thing about having no windows is it is perfectly dark at night and we slept extremely well!
I must admit being slightly disappointed with the bathroom. After all the effort put into the bedroom, I think they could have designed the bathroom a little better. It was new, very clean and huge, but was one of those wet bathrooms where the shower was not in a separate stall from the toilet and partitioned by a shower curtain. As the floor between shower and toilet was one contiguous space, the water went everywhere and I don't like wet toilets.
The other 2 things I should mention about the room are the beds and the mosque. The beds were very hard, just like in Skai Lodge and Nika. I guess they like them hard but I did miss my own soft, back support bed at home! The other is that there is the prayer broadcast in the mornings. We slept very well and I only heard it one morning but I think I should just mention it to prep you. However, I don't think you can avoid that if you choose to stay at a local island and in some private resorts near local islands, people have mentioned that they could also hear the broadcast. Anyway, 6 am may be a good time to wake up because over there, it's already bright and sunny.
Our Stay
We stayed at Gunbaru between November 4 - 9 2014. When we arrived, we were met by quiet, unassuming Aslam (he's cousin to the brothers who own the inn) who walked with us from the terminal to the hotel. Our bags went ahead of us. He asked if we would like to see the village school graduation party which was happening that afternoon at 4. So after checking in we went with him. His little son was graduating too and we were so glad he gave us a chance to be part of that special day. The kids were funny and shy and eager to make friends with us and we walked around and had a look at the school and had some homemade Maldivian snacks.
Our stay saw us in the water a lot. November is the in-between month for monsoons but unfortunately when we were there the weather wasn't that great and the sea was usually choppy. It didn't rain a whole lot and blessedly either in the night or early morning when we weren't swimming. The water was clear enough to see the marine life in the corals. Here's a shot of my feet. If you're wondering why I'm showing you my feet instead of beautiful corals, well, it's because you shouldn't be stepping on them and as the waves were pushing me around, I was contorting my body in impossible positions in desperate attempts to avoid kicking them! Yeah, they're that close to the water surface!
Breakfast was served in the beautiful little garden in the courtyard. The garden is 70% sand with little nooks of lush greenery. We sat there in its serene shade for many leisurely hours while the kids dug around in the sand. There was a resident bird, a species we were not acquainted with that Aslam called a Kowel (I'm not sure I spelt it right), that kept us company but never bothered us. It was lovely and original to have our meals with our bare feet in the white sand. I loved that they did not specify mealtimes and we could have our meals whenever we chose. That feeling of true freedom from deadlines whatsoever was plain luxury. We chose to eat breakfast at 6.30am and dinner at 5pm so the kids could be asleep by 8 as is our usual habit. In contrast, although we certainly did not expect it, we felt stressed out at Nika because they had very rigid mealtimes. Once, we got to the restaurant half an hour before breakfast closed and found that they did not replenish some dishes and the rest were cold. And Nika dinner time was 9 pm. Impossible for us because the kids were sleepy and cranky by then.
I think this freedom to eat whenever we chose, do whatever we chose, at whenever time we wanted, was exactly the elixir we needed, the antidote we travelled so far to find. Singapore is probably the one of the most stressed out places in the world. Here, we are constrained, confined, monitored, pressured, imposed upon. To be in a place where there were no deadlines, no expectations of us, no traffic, no CCTV cameras, no one to meet, no one to see, no one to press up against you in the over-crowded train. Just you and the wide open sea. And friendly, easy-going people. We were at rest and untroubled.
All-Important Food
The room rate includes breakfast. The selection is very limited but was plentiful enough for us. You have a choice of 2 types of Maldivian breakfasts, and western. For the Western breakfast, you get an egg sunny-side up, 2 sausages, 4 sliced sandwish-bread toasts, pineapple jam and butter. The Maldivian breakfasts consist of 4 pieces of roshi (a type of chapati), a sunny-side up egg, 2 sausages, and a choice of how you want your tuna. One style (an 'M' word, I forget the name) is fried tuna flakes with onions. I found that dry but palatable. The other is heavenly and my default choice because it was so flavourful. It's called Kulhimas and it is a type of tuna curry. It is spicy. If you can take spice, I'd recommend the Maldivian breakfast with Kulhimas any day. And definitely the roshi and not toasts. As I said in a previous post on Skai Lodge, western style bread is horrendous in the Maldives. Dry, hard and unimaginative. So we asked them if they could swap the toast with roshi with our Western breakfast which they did. If however, you need to eat sandwich bread, I'd say bring your own spreads from home, or else go to the shops in the village and buy some variety of spread (I saw basic jams and peanut butter). They give you pineapple jam every day. Or else you could try asking them for a change of spread. They are so lovely and accommodating.
With breakfast, you also get a choice of coffee, tea, juice or milo. Coffee is the usual nescafe brew. I found that breakfast was served really slowly because it had to be brought from a restaurant close by, and was seldom served at the time we requested (you have to put in your order the night before and forecast what time you would like it). Also, by the time it got to the table, it was lukewarm. Sweet accommodating Adol (I hope I got your name right!) is the server and also caretaker for the inn. He had to bring the food, and then go off and make our drink. That took another 15 minutes (for 2 coffees and 2 milos). Speed's definitely an area they need to work on but we weren't in a hurry and it didn't bother us a bit. We had our books and each other and most importantly time to spend it as a family so we were fine. However, if you do require breakfast to be served promptly you would need to highlight this to them. I'm not sure, though, that this would continue to be a problem, because Waheed told me that they were building their own restaurant in the inn itself.
Restaurants are limited to 2 on the island. It is not a gourmand's paradise. Other people reviewed the other - Black Y - which we did not try as reviews were fairly bad. The restaurant near Gunbaru is called Coral Garden I believe and also owned by the brothers. You can choose to take your meals at the restaurant or have it brought to you in the inn. The restaurant is very lovely and quaint but we preferred to have our meals in the delightful little sand courtyard at Gunbaru. Cost of a dish is about double what you pay at a local cafe in Malé. That is to say, instead of 2+ USD for a plate of fried rice, you pay 5. They gave us a half board dinner rate of USD35 for the 4 of us which includes anything on the menu but as we aren't big eaters, we opted out of. Instead, we shared 2 plates between the four of us and were plenty satisfied. In addition, they were so generous with us and were constantly bringing dishes for us to try in addition to what we ordered cooked personally by their family, complimentary of course. When ordering, I recommend you stick to the tuna dishes - tuna fried rice in particular. The tuna fried noodle is ok, but is fried instant noodle. The fried rice, however, is a wonderful layering of spices and curry leaves and is my personal favourite. Do NOT pick the beef. I don't know if it's because the beef is of the deep frozen variety or just overcooked but I have never come across beef as hard and dry as this except beef jerky.
I think if I had to pick what I felt was the bad thing about Ukulhas, it would be the food. It is limited and certain dishes were unpalatable. Coming from food paradise Singapore, we felt at times deprived. This feeling of deprivation was to last into Nika, which despite the sky-high prices, had terrible food. I will post a separate review of Nika another day.
The one saving grace food-wise are the Maldivian snacks. They're only available around 4 in the afternoon, but we found a little place called "Cooling Hotel" (in the Maldives hotel means restaurant) which opened only for tea and served wonderful snacks. The other place serving great snacks is the Coral Garden Restaurant, also around 4 pm. At the Cooling Hotel, we loved a sweet snack that's square and deep purple in colour. I don't know the name and didn't ask because the owner was rather brusque. I believe it was 2 or 3 Rufiyaa. At the Coral Garden, we loved the samosa (triangle) and Biskeemia. They're also around 2 or 3 Rufiyaa. You gotta be quick though, because people from the ferries hop off and sweep up all the snacks. By 5 pm we found most of the snacks were sold.
The Beach and Sea
Beautiful. We were there off season so sometimes visibility wasn't so good. But the water was still clear and just a little way out from the beach is lovely marine life. The hubs and Hannah who were snorkelling newbies spent all day with their heads underwater. I saw much more colourful life at the Great Barrier Reef, but I had to take a boat out 5 hours from land. Still I had a great time swimming among the fish at Ukulhas. Fish is so abundant that we saw fishing boats just a little way out from us hauling in their catch.
The inn has 2 sets of child-size and 2 sets of adult snorkelling gear which you can take out for free. (at Nika it was 20 Euros per hour). As I said earlier, we lost one, but they were very quick to replace it.
Most of the time we were at the beach or sea, we were by ourselves. Occasionally we would meet other tourists (usually families) who were friendly (unlike the obnoxious snobs at Nika) but the entire island is ringed by soft sandy beaches that you aren't forced to cramp into a small area with others. In addition, Ukulhas is not yet on the main tourist radar. It was an undiscovered gem shared amongst only the few of us. This is us on a lazy sunny day with nobody else as far as the eye could see and no noise at all, not from planes, traffic, machines, people. Just the sound of waves.
We felt absolutely relaxed, content and at peace. What made it special was the warmth and generosity of people at Gunbaru and Ukulhas.
Next up I will review the activities at Ukulhas and Gunbaru.
Waheed from Gunbaru was extremely quick to respond to my every question, very polite and helpful and most importantly, he gave me the best rate amongst all the local guesthouses - USD55 nett per night with breakfast. Still I was a bit hesitant because it was a new inn with only one Tripadvisor review and a 4-hour slow boat ride from Male city. But he was SO nice and able to help me arrange a cheap transfer to Nika Island that we decided to give it a chance.
This was a big consideration for us. Aside from their low room rate, their transfer to Nika cut our cost significantly. As I mentioned in my other post, Nika's one-way sea plane transfer costs USD212.50 per adult and USD106.25 per child. For the four of us, that would have worked out to USD637.50. Gunbaru's transfer via a 10 minute speedboat was USD65 nett. As a boon, Gunbaru Inn paid for our transfer from Malé to Ukulhas. Even if they hadn't, the public ferry isn't expensive - a couple of USD per person.
Aside from Nika, Ukulhas is close to many other private resorts, the closest one being Velidhu. Proximity matters because Maldives is so spread out, travelling between islands takes a while and adds to the cost. For a while we considered staying at Kuramathi, which is near the local island Rasdhoo. If we had stayed there, Gunbaru Inn would have paid for our transfer to Rasdhoo island, and from there, they were able to organise a roundtrip speedboat to Kuramathi for USD25!
Lastly, because of the way the MTCC ferry routes are organised, Ukulhas is the hub for many other local islands in the vicinity. I thought that maybe if we had time, we might visit some other islands on the public ferry route just out of curiosity. But we spent so much time bobbing around in the sea and participating in village life that we never got the chance to try it out. See the MTCC website for routes and schedule.
Before I go on though, I must caution that going with the right expectations and goals makes all the difference in your experience. We love off-the-beaten-track places and peeking into the lives of others especially if they're very different from our own. The local island is inhabited. You share the space with the people who actually live and make their living there. It is earthy, lived-in, broken down in some parts, and yes, there is trash on the beach sometimes.
 |
| Someone's house, strangely picturesque |
We encountered a couple of small incidents, but I'm sure it's because we live in Gibson's Disneyland. One was an unfortunate meeting between a broken tree stump and the Little One's leg. Which he initiated while walking along the village dirt road one day, having an absorbed conversation with himself. I know, it's a tree stump! It doesn't get up and move itself! But somehow he managed not to see it, minding its own business, sitting right there in the middle. And got his poor leg badly gashed from the jagged edges.
It was on the same trek a little later however, after we had cleaned him up, that we met lovely Maalsha (I'm not sure how you spell it), who had gathered a bouquet of wild flowers and gave it to us shyly.
 |
| Our friend, sweet Maalsha |
The other small incident was that we lost the hotel's snorkelling gear when I leant out of our kayak and we went overboard with all our things. They were very nice about it though we offered to pay. More about island activities in another post.
I don't know what other local islands are like, but Ukulhas was surprisingly clean and rubbish-free. Some early mornings when we went to the beach we would see flotsam washed ashore, but there were always these women sweeping. They were so clean they were sweeping leaves from the sand! And the beaches were very lovely with powdery white sand:
Here's a video of the beach outside Gunbaru. The best stretch would be leftwards if you were to stand with your back to the hotel and face the sea. On your right is a ship repair facility but don't worry most of the time it was not in use and when it was, it was very quiet (they don't have large machinery).
Waheed told me that Gunbaru just won the rights to privatise the beach that you see in the video and that they would be cleaning it up, so I guess it would be even cleaner in the near future.
The Inn and the Room
As for the inn itself, it is as you see in their website. WYSIWYG, literally. Here are some of our own photos. I must admit that after being bitten by a new hotel in Vietnam whose actual rooms looked little like their photos (okay if you insist, it was Nam Long hotel in Ho Chi Minh), I was skeptical about the Gunbaru photos. And after staying in Skai Lodge, we all had extremely low expectations. Which is why I guess we were completely bowled over when we checked in to cold towels and apple juice and a lovely, neat, cozy, clean, new room! The entire inn is new! And I loved the little touches - torch lights, one of those personal reading lamps, 4 huge beach towels, an abundance of bath, hand towels, pillows and cushions (I must admit appreciating towels and pillows after being rationed at Skai Lodge), down to toothbrushes in the bathroom. You could tell the owners cared about their little inn and their guests and were prepared to be generous with them. The generosity and personal attention we were to feel throughout our stay and contributed so much to our time there.
For the benefit of more information, this is what we had in our room. It was small (they said it was actually meant as a couples room but had to accommodate us there since their family rooms were not ready). There was a double bed comprising 2 single beds pushed together, and a fold-out single bed. There was an LCD TV screen with satellite TV (English channels including Nick Jr), kettle, complimentary instant 3-in-1 coffee, tea, 2 500ml bottles of mineral water, stocked mini-bar (chargeable), cupboard, ample hangers, clothes rack, safe, bath and beach towels, personal LED reading light, torchlight. In the bathroom there was toothbrushes, toothpaste, shampoo and liquid body soap.
The room we had had no external windows. There was one which looked into an air well. However, we didn't feel claustrophobic. It wasn't musty and the bathroom dried easily because of the ventilation fan. The good thing about having no windows is it is perfectly dark at night and we slept extremely well!
I must admit being slightly disappointed with the bathroom. After all the effort put into the bedroom, I think they could have designed the bathroom a little better. It was new, very clean and huge, but was one of those wet bathrooms where the shower was not in a separate stall from the toilet and partitioned by a shower curtain. As the floor between shower and toilet was one contiguous space, the water went everywhere and I don't like wet toilets.
The other 2 things I should mention about the room are the beds and the mosque. The beds were very hard, just like in Skai Lodge and Nika. I guess they like them hard but I did miss my own soft, back support bed at home! The other is that there is the prayer broadcast in the mornings. We slept very well and I only heard it one morning but I think I should just mention it to prep you. However, I don't think you can avoid that if you choose to stay at a local island and in some private resorts near local islands, people have mentioned that they could also hear the broadcast. Anyway, 6 am may be a good time to wake up because over there, it's already bright and sunny.
Our Stay
We stayed at Gunbaru between November 4 - 9 2014. When we arrived, we were met by quiet, unassuming Aslam (he's cousin to the brothers who own the inn) who walked with us from the terminal to the hotel. Our bags went ahead of us. He asked if we would like to see the village school graduation party which was happening that afternoon at 4. So after checking in we went with him. His little son was graduating too and we were so glad he gave us a chance to be part of that special day. The kids were funny and shy and eager to make friends with us and we walked around and had a look at the school and had some homemade Maldivian snacks.
Our stay saw us in the water a lot. November is the in-between month for monsoons but unfortunately when we were there the weather wasn't that great and the sea was usually choppy. It didn't rain a whole lot and blessedly either in the night or early morning when we weren't swimming. The water was clear enough to see the marine life in the corals. Here's a shot of my feet. If you're wondering why I'm showing you my feet instead of beautiful corals, well, it's because you shouldn't be stepping on them and as the waves were pushing me around, I was contorting my body in impossible positions in desperate attempts to avoid kicking them! Yeah, they're that close to the water surface!
Breakfast was served in the beautiful little garden in the courtyard. The garden is 70% sand with little nooks of lush greenery. We sat there in its serene shade for many leisurely hours while the kids dug around in the sand. There was a resident bird, a species we were not acquainted with that Aslam called a Kowel (I'm not sure I spelt it right), that kept us company but never bothered us. It was lovely and original to have our meals with our bare feet in the white sand. I loved that they did not specify mealtimes and we could have our meals whenever we chose. That feeling of true freedom from deadlines whatsoever was plain luxury. We chose to eat breakfast at 6.30am and dinner at 5pm so the kids could be asleep by 8 as is our usual habit. In contrast, although we certainly did not expect it, we felt stressed out at Nika because they had very rigid mealtimes. Once, we got to the restaurant half an hour before breakfast closed and found that they did not replenish some dishes and the rest were cold. And Nika dinner time was 9 pm. Impossible for us because the kids were sleepy and cranky by then.
 |
| Courtyard |
All-Important Food
The room rate includes breakfast. The selection is very limited but was plentiful enough for us. You have a choice of 2 types of Maldivian breakfasts, and western. For the Western breakfast, you get an egg sunny-side up, 2 sausages, 4 sliced sandwish-bread toasts, pineapple jam and butter. The Maldivian breakfasts consist of 4 pieces of roshi (a type of chapati), a sunny-side up egg, 2 sausages, and a choice of how you want your tuna. One style (an 'M' word, I forget the name) is fried tuna flakes with onions. I found that dry but palatable. The other is heavenly and my default choice because it was so flavourful. It's called Kulhimas and it is a type of tuna curry. It is spicy. If you can take spice, I'd recommend the Maldivian breakfast with Kulhimas any day. And definitely the roshi and not toasts. As I said in a previous post on Skai Lodge, western style bread is horrendous in the Maldives. Dry, hard and unimaginative. So we asked them if they could swap the toast with roshi with our Western breakfast which they did. If however, you need to eat sandwich bread, I'd say bring your own spreads from home, or else go to the shops in the village and buy some variety of spread (I saw basic jams and peanut butter). They give you pineapple jam every day. Or else you could try asking them for a change of spread. They are so lovely and accommodating.
With breakfast, you also get a choice of coffee, tea, juice or milo. Coffee is the usual nescafe brew. I found that breakfast was served really slowly because it had to be brought from a restaurant close by, and was seldom served at the time we requested (you have to put in your order the night before and forecast what time you would like it). Also, by the time it got to the table, it was lukewarm. Sweet accommodating Adol (I hope I got your name right!) is the server and also caretaker for the inn. He had to bring the food, and then go off and make our drink. That took another 15 minutes (for 2 coffees and 2 milos). Speed's definitely an area they need to work on but we weren't in a hurry and it didn't bother us a bit. We had our books and each other and most importantly time to spend it as a family so we were fine. However, if you do require breakfast to be served promptly you would need to highlight this to them. I'm not sure, though, that this would continue to be a problem, because Waheed told me that they were building their own restaurant in the inn itself.
Restaurants are limited to 2 on the island. It is not a gourmand's paradise. Other people reviewed the other - Black Y - which we did not try as reviews were fairly bad. The restaurant near Gunbaru is called Coral Garden I believe and also owned by the brothers. You can choose to take your meals at the restaurant or have it brought to you in the inn. The restaurant is very lovely and quaint but we preferred to have our meals in the delightful little sand courtyard at Gunbaru. Cost of a dish is about double what you pay at a local cafe in Malé. That is to say, instead of 2+ USD for a plate of fried rice, you pay 5. They gave us a half board dinner rate of USD35 for the 4 of us which includes anything on the menu but as we aren't big eaters, we opted out of. Instead, we shared 2 plates between the four of us and were plenty satisfied. In addition, they were so generous with us and were constantly bringing dishes for us to try in addition to what we ordered cooked personally by their family, complimentary of course. When ordering, I recommend you stick to the tuna dishes - tuna fried rice in particular. The tuna fried noodle is ok, but is fried instant noodle. The fried rice, however, is a wonderful layering of spices and curry leaves and is my personal favourite. Do NOT pick the beef. I don't know if it's because the beef is of the deep frozen variety or just overcooked but I have never come across beef as hard and dry as this except beef jerky.
 |
| Coral Garden Restaurant. No signage, but it's on the main road |
I think if I had to pick what I felt was the bad thing about Ukulhas, it would be the food. It is limited and certain dishes were unpalatable. Coming from food paradise Singapore, we felt at times deprived. This feeling of deprivation was to last into Nika, which despite the sky-high prices, had terrible food. I will post a separate review of Nika another day.
The one saving grace food-wise are the Maldivian snacks. They're only available around 4 in the afternoon, but we found a little place called "Cooling Hotel" (in the Maldives hotel means restaurant) which opened only for tea and served wonderful snacks. The other place serving great snacks is the Coral Garden Restaurant, also around 4 pm. At the Cooling Hotel, we loved a sweet snack that's square and deep purple in colour. I don't know the name and didn't ask because the owner was rather brusque. I believe it was 2 or 3 Rufiyaa. At the Coral Garden, we loved the samosa (triangle) and Biskeemia. They're also around 2 or 3 Rufiyaa. You gotta be quick though, because people from the ferries hop off and sweep up all the snacks. By 5 pm we found most of the snacks were sold.
 |
| Cooling Hotel |
 |
| Samosa from Coral Garden |
 |
| Biskeemia |
The Beach and Sea
Beautiful. We were there off season so sometimes visibility wasn't so good. But the water was still clear and just a little way out from the beach is lovely marine life. The hubs and Hannah who were snorkelling newbies spent all day with their heads underwater. I saw much more colourful life at the Great Barrier Reef, but I had to take a boat out 5 hours from land. Still I had a great time swimming among the fish at Ukulhas. Fish is so abundant that we saw fishing boats just a little way out from us hauling in their catch.
The inn has 2 sets of child-size and 2 sets of adult snorkelling gear which you can take out for free. (at Nika it was 20 Euros per hour). As I said earlier, we lost one, but they were very quick to replace it.
Most of the time we were at the beach or sea, we were by ourselves. Occasionally we would meet other tourists (usually families) who were friendly (unlike the obnoxious snobs at Nika) but the entire island is ringed by soft sandy beaches that you aren't forced to cramp into a small area with others. In addition, Ukulhas is not yet on the main tourist radar. It was an undiscovered gem shared amongst only the few of us. This is us on a lazy sunny day with nobody else as far as the eye could see and no noise at all, not from planes, traffic, machines, people. Just the sound of waves.
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| Just us with the sun and sea |
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| Close of the day |
We felt absolutely relaxed, content and at peace. What made it special was the warmth and generosity of people at Gunbaru and Ukulhas.
Next up I will review the activities at Ukulhas and Gunbaru.
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