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SIGNATURE JOURNEYS
Signature trips
View of small islets from the seaplane.
There are places you don’t just go to—you esca-
pe to them. Places where a map isn’t enough to
explain the destination. Where the goal isn’t to
see new things, but to stop seeing the usual. You
don’t visit the Maldives. You dwell in them, you float, you
listen. You slowly become a lighter version of yourself.
On paper, the country is a cluster of thousands of islands
scattered across atolls, lost in the Indian Ocean, in the mi-
ddle of nowhere, southwest of Sri Lanka and near southern
India. A geographical point, yes. The archipelago looks like
a constellation spilled over the water. Blue, turquoise, whi-
te. Nothing more. Nothing less.
There are no mountains, no rivers, no trains, no highways.
The islands rise no higher than a sigh. And yet, the silence
has depth.
In a world measured by speed, the Maldives suggest a
different unit: stillness. There, disconnecting isn’t turning
off a device or stepping away from Wi-Fi—which they do
have, though you sometimes forget it exists—it’s redisco-
vering a different way of being. Looking without searching,
listening to the sound of the sea, spending hours admiring
the colours of the ocean—in short, floating, literally, in ano-
ther kind of time. That was the goal of this journey: not to
flee, but to disappear a little from the noise of the world. To
disappear, but in style.
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