Wander Women Maldives Recap Part I: Welcome to Paradise

Flashback to late 2019, and I was walking the floor at DEMA, the big global show for dive pros, and thinking about how I was going to get my life back on track. It was about a month after my mom died and after taking a year of stepping back from my career to help care for her, I was feeling lost.

I walked by the booth for this dream boat in the Maldives and I felt something — a fire and excitement that I hadn’t felt in a long time. A spa. A yoga deck. Beautiful cabins. Incredible diving. I looked at the size and the pricing and it was so far outside of anything I’d ever done it didn’t even feel remotely attainable.

But yet something inside me said, very confidently, someday, I’m going to charter that boat for Wander Women Retreats. 

Soon after, the world turned upside down and it was the last conference I’d go to for a long time. Yet somewhere in the peak of the following two years’ uncertainty, I felt that voice calling me back to ScubaSpa Maldives.

I was able to negotiate an unheard of price for a future charter (sorry future guests, we’re never getting that rate again, ha) and holding my breath, made the largest wire transfer of my life, just trusting in the universe that I’d be able to fill this trip and that the entire travel industry wouldn’t collapse by then.

When it came time to release the trip, I had a moment of doubting my vision. Would women invest so much in a trip to a traditionally honeymoon destination, without a partner? A few comments got in my head and I considered releasing my first co-ed trip, out of fear.

But I heard that inner voice again — and it told me to trust. Within thirty minutes of launch, sales started to roll in. I cried when a room category was gone in an hour. The trip sold out in four days. 

And so we found ourselves, twenty five women on a honeymoon with ourselves, spending a barefoot week sailing the islands of this archipelago nation, stopping for sandbars, coral reefs, and sunsets along the way. If you’re curious what it’s like to spend a week onboard a Maldivian liveaboard, or looking for an in-depth review of the ScubaSpa Maldives, this post is for you!

While we met some incredible new women who are now beloved members of the Wander Women family on this trip, many too were alumni repeat visitors — which made welcoming everyone onboard feel like a true homecoming. 

The ScubaSpa is massive, and can technically fit around forty guests. As our usual retreats are twelve to fourteen, that sounded overwhelming, so we arranged the boats primarily with single cabins. Spread over two decks, we sold rooms as superior doubles or superior singles on the top deck, or snug singles, at a more accessible price, on the lower deck. With privacy being such a luxury on a ship like this, I don’t think there was a bad cabin on the boat.

If you’ve ever been on a liveaboard before, you’re probably thinking, dang — those rooms are huge! And they were!

My first liveaboard ever was basically camping at sea (it was so much fun!), and my Red Sea liveaboard more recently was also quite snug. So this felt like a floating Four Seasons.

I may be biased, but I also think our rooms were made all the more magical by our gift bags awaiting our guests inside of them! If you’ve been reading my retreat recaps for a while, you know gifting is my love language and I adore putting these together.

On this trip, we worked with some incredible small businesses. We created custom gift bags from Steam2Sea, featuring their leave-in conditioner, their sunscreen, their chapstick, their shampoo and their body-wash combo, all the most eco-friendly ocean-safe items on the market! Everyone also received a water bottle, which allowed the boat to go single-use plastic free, too.

We also gifted each of our guests a different ocean animal Fin Pin, a cute female-owned brand that gives back to ocean charities, and our custom omnipresent print and card from Green Blanky Studios — made even more special by the fact that the artist, Lauren, was on this retreat!

Finally, we rounded things out with some blue heart sunglasses that made for great group photos, a seaweed face mask for some extra spah-ing, custom retreat totes, and some Maldivian keepsakes, a keyring and a luggage tag, from local artists. Now that we’ve been, we have some great connections and will feature more in the future!

Um, and did I mention the largest floating spa in the world was onboard? Hello, gorgeous treatment rooms, peaceful spa deck, and menu full of epic awaiting treatments!

Typically, ScubaSpa boards in the afternoon, a bit inconvenient for all of those flying in on red-eyes, or those checking out of hotels after our very own Malé Cultural Extension.

We were able to sweet talk our way into early boarding, which meant our guests boarded and had lunch right away — such a treat!

After, we had a boat briefing and welcome circle, and of course, a toast to the good life!

Whether sipping on fresh-stamped coconuts or cocktails from the bar, we took some time to settle in to our cabins, unpack our dive gear, and get to know our new floating home.

As the sun set, we gathered on the top deck for a vinyasa yin massage workshop team-taught by myself and Wander Women Retreats Coordinator and Sparkle-Bringing Shannon.

Watching the sun dip under the watery horizon line while the stars blinked on above for that very first practice onboard is a memory I won’t soon forget.

The next morning, it was time to get in the water — finally!

On ScubaSpa you can choose between various packages, one with unlimited diving, one with daily spa treatments, and one with a mix of both. You know me, I couldn’t choose between my two loves, and settled on the scuba and spa package, knowing I could jump in and snorkel or freedive anytime, too. 

In most locations in the world, “checkout dives” might be ever-so-slightly underwhelming. In the Maldives? What an incredible underwater world we were treated to every time we went underwater! 

The Maldives is one of those dream diving and snorkeling destinations for a reason, and it’s this: the big stuff. Turtles, sharks — SO many sharks — octopus, dolphins! The first three even came to bless us on our little “check out dives” at Rasdoo Madivaru and Kuramathi. 

You’ll see so much more underwater magic in the rest of this series, but suffice it to say this first glimpse, mostly from our incredible onboard photographer Rayna of Ocean Rays Photography, was a pretty epic preview of all to come.

As always, we divided the divers into groups based on their experience levels, if they were diving with cameras, etc. I keep a close eye on how everyone’s doing together and if everyone is comfortable where they are, and I love seeing these little dive families develop throughout the week!