Baa

Hanifaru is not much to look at — a small bay closed at one end, no island, no beach worth the name. What matters is its shape. When the south-west monsoon drives current across the atoll, plankton is pushed into the bay and cannot escape past the closed end, and the concentration draws manta rays to feed in numbers that can run to the dozens and occasionally far beyond, sometimes joined by whale sharks. The Maldives diving guide explains why aggregations anywhere in this country are as predictable as they are; what belongs to Baa is the visiting. The bay is inside the protected core of the Biosphere Reserve and access is managed: rangers control how many boats and swimmers are in the water, there are time limits, and — the rule that surprises divers — scuba is not permitted. You snorkel. That restriction is not an inconvenience to be worked around, it is the reason the mantas still come; bubbles and depth disperse a surface-feeding aggregation quickly. Trips run from resorts and guesthouses across the atoll and depend on tide and current, so a booking is a booking for a window rather than a time, and a boat may turn around if the plankton has not arrived. Go early in your stay so there is room to try again.

Baa was known for craft long before it was known for mantas, and it still is. Thulhaadhoo has a lacquerwork tradition — wooden vessels and boxes turned on a lathe, layered in coloured lacquer and cut back to reveal pattern beneath — that is among the country's few surviving decorative crafts, and it is made and sold on the island rather than staged for visitors. Eydhafushi, the atoll capital, is a working island with the administrative functions and none of the tourism. Fulhadhoo, at the southern edge, has one of the finest beaches in the Maldives and very little else on it, which is the entire appeal. Away from Hanifaru the diving is good, uncrowded and less demanding than the channel sites further south — reef and thila dives where the interest is coral, turtles and reef fish rather than current and big animals. The atoll is also a fair place to see the country's ordinary marine life without an event attached to it, which after a week of chasing an aggregation is more of a relief than it sounds.

Baa has both tiers, which is unusual, and the choice matters more here than elsewhere because Hanifaru trips are booked through your accommodation. The resort islands are mostly high-end, several with in-house marine biologists and dedicated manta programmes, and they sit within short boat range of the bay. The inhabited islands — Dharavandhoo above all, which also has the atoll's domestic airport, along with Maalhos, Kihaadhoo, Kamadhoo, Fulhadhoo, Goidhoo and Thulhaadhoo — carry guesthouses running on the terms set out in the guesthouse islands guide, and Dharavandhoo in particular has built a real manta-season economy. The practical difference is not the room. It is that a resort will usually take you out repeatedly across a stay at no extra thought, while a guesthouse trip is booked and paid per excursion — which for a short stay in a good week is fine, and for a long stay chasing a slow season adds up.

Baa is beyond speedboat range from Malé. The two routes are a seaplane directly to a resort lagoon, or a scheduled domestic flight to the airport on Dharavandhoo followed by a short boat — the latter being how most guesthouse travellers arrive and generally the cheaper option. Both are subject to the constraints in the Maldives transport guide, and the seaplane's daylight-only rule is the one that shapes arrival and departure days. For timing, the manta season broadly follows the south-west monsoon from May to November, with the strongest and most consistent aggregations in the middle months; it is weather-dependent rather than calendar-dependent, and a good year and a poor one differ noticeably. Outside that window Hanifaru is a quiet bay and Baa is a pleasant, uncrowded atoll — worth visiting on its own terms, but not for the thing it is famous for.