The Maldives are twenty-six rings of coral strung along the equator in the Indian Ocean, 1,192 islands of which no point rises more than a few metres above the sea, and the whole country is built on the water rather than beside it. Each ring is an atoll, a word the world took from the Maldivian language, and each is a reef enclosing a lagoon of shallow turquoise, with the islands sitting on its rim like beads. The resorts stand one to an island, and the famous villas stand over the water on stilts: you go down the wooden steps from your own deck straight into the lagoon and are floating over living coral minutes after waking, usually with nobody else in the water. Reef fish, turtles and small reef sharks live on the house reef a few strokes from the steps, and in the dry northeast monsoon, from about December to April, the sea flattens and clears to more than 30 metres.
The other Maldives is out past the resort. Seaplanes and boats reach sandbanks, islands of nothing but white sand in the middle of the ocean with a ring of shallow water around them and not a building on the horizon. In Baa Atoll, between May and November, the tide pushes plankton into tiny Hanifaru Bay faster than it can drain, and reef manta rays funnel in by the dozen to feed, somersaulting through the cloud just under the surface, sometimes more than two hundred at once and sometimes with whale sharks among them; it is the largest gathering of mantas known anywhere, and you swim in it with a mask and no tank. On some nights the water itself lights up: plankton washed in by the waves spark blue at every footstep along the waterline. More than four-fifths of these islands sit under a metre above the sea, and the country is already raising ground and building new islands to stay above it. The Maldives is the lowest country on Earth, and from a villa deck the sea is exactly at eye level.