They took a seaplane to a five-star resort on the remote atoll of Noonu in the nation’s northwest corner. Earlier this year, the Duke and the Duchess of Cambridge spent a holiday in the country just before their royal tour of Australia and New Zealand. Its reputation is both hedonistic and decidedly high-end. The Maldives, a natural necklace of more than 1,000 coral islands off the western coast of India in the Laccadive Sea, is mostly known as a glamorous vacation destination, the sort of spot where supermodels and their soon-to-be-ex-boyfriends go for beach-and-bungalow retreats. I knew what it was, but had not expected to find it here, a strange accompaniment to the pad Thai I’d picked up: From a gold-domed mosque, a muezzin was offering the evening call to prayer. It was a high-pitched keening: plaintive, Middle Eastern and seemingly out of place among the silhouetted palm trees swaying near the beach.

But that first night, as I went to get our dinner, incongruous music was drifting through the streets. The day before, as we rode in, jet-lagged, from the airport, Malé had shown itself as a city with the raffish charms of the Caribbean: brightly painted buildings huddled on its shoreline, small boats graced the harbor and men on motor scooters, either unaware of - or uninterested in - traffic laws, zipped down the boulevard that ran along the sea. But Google Maps proposed a takeout place a couple of blocks away. We’d slept through our chance to eat there: The kitchen downstairs was already closed. It was dark in Malé, the capital of the Maldives, where we had woken up at our hotel, hungry after traveling for more than 40 hours.

At least that’s what the Internet had said. The restaurant was somewhere near the presidential palace.

Two worlds 2 hidden islands