This article is part of Traveller’s Holiday Guide to family-friendly holidays. See all stories . On the day Collingwood snatches a crucial win from GWS at Melbourne’s MCG, I, too, am among a sea of black and white supporters.
Far from my hometown, in the archipelagic nation of the Maldives, where football is not AFL, I’m flanked by schools of pyramid butterfly fish in the colours of the Pies, swimming in mesmerising formation. The snorkelling excursion, which in truth is more of a gentle float with the occasional kick of our fins, is thanks to gentle currents around the house reef of the newly open Avani+ Fares resort. Avani+ Fares sits on a naturally occurring island 40 minutes by seaplane from Male.
Mere steps from our beach villa, one minute we’re wrestling with snorkels and goggles on the water’s edge, the next, we’re in the blue, 25 metres at its deepest, with a dreamy purple-green but still glum-looking Napoleon wrasse swimming among schools of the pyramid butterfly fish, along with yellow flashes of banner fish. Fares, translated in local Dhivehi to “land on the reef”, is the only resort to sit on the western tip of the Baa Atoll, one of 75 in the group of coral islands. While the Avani+ demographic in its hotels across the globe might skew towards the millennial, I am clearly not one of those.
Still, it’s a little different on the island of Fares. In keeping with the Maldivian spirit of “haharu” or overabundant love, arms are wide open to every g.