How I found an apartment (or three) in Maldives

Not even one and a half month have passed since I’ve arrived in Maldives and I’m ready to pack my bags and go back home! Wait a minute; I don’t even need to pack, because that’s already done as I’m constantly on move!

It’s been 1 month and 11 days to be exact and we are on our third accommodation. Not hotels, guest houses or Airbnbs… but actual rental apartments, with lease and exorbitant amounts of security deposits. You are probably thinking that either we are terrible tenants or the Maldivian house owners are horrible people! None of those are true.

I’ve mentioned here that my employer provided us a fully furnished apartment in Hulhumale, but it takes one hour and fifteen minutes to commute from there to our workplace. So it’s a two and a half hour journey every day. Hence, we were looking for an apartment close to our office. Our workplace is situated at the west end of the city, we were searching for an apartment that is within 10 minutes’ walk from our workplace.

Like any other dense capital city in the world, it is difficult to find good, affordable apartments in Male. All the good shops and markets are situated there and a huge number of people come to the city every day for work. So everybody wants a place here….but space is the one thing that this city doesn’t have! I’ve heard that the same space is rented by multiple parties at different times of the day, morning shift for office, evening for dance class and finally night shift for sleeping. Lots of people live here by sharing or subletting apartments (our Hulhumale apartment was also a shared one). So, studio apartments or one bedroom apartments are really scarce here. As those are the ones we were searching for (that too in a specific area near our office), our options became very limited.

As lots of expatriates live here, fully furnished apartments with all modern amenities are not that uncommon, though one has to pay sky-high rents and three to four months’ rent as security deposits. Although even after you fulfill all these requirements, your living space is not confirmed yet! House owners don’t hold the apartments for anyone; you have to see the place, decide then and there and shift immediately. Doesn’t matter whether the work is finished there or not or the amenities they agreed to provide will be in working condition.

ibay.com is a site where you’ll find ads for rental apartments (also from job listings to used furnitures, in short… everything). We called multiple landlords (within half an hour the places were sold out) and viewed some places.  The first place we liked was a studio apartment, very close to our hospital. It was just a single, large room separated with half a wall in the middle with bedroom set and toilet in one side and kitchen and living space in another side. There was no balcony or terrace, no corridor and the renovations were not finished yet. We told the owner that we liked the place; we’ll see it again after the work is finished and finalize the deal. However, not hearing anything from him for a week we called to see the progress. He didn’t receive our call and after thorough investigation, we found out that it was already rented to somebody else.

After this incident we got a bit panicked and started looking for apartments desperately. Some of our friends and colleagues suggested to search in a nearby island, Villingili (or Vilimale, the official name). To be honest, I didn’t like the island initially because it was less urban, more natural (however ridiculous that may sound, I’ll explain it later.). But desperate times call for desperate actions. Though medium of transport from Villingili to Male was ferry, the ferry journey takes only 7 minutes (contrary to 25 minutes of Hulhumale ferry). Besides, Villingili ferry terminal is situated just beside our workplace, so only a 2 minutes’ walk would do. 

Villingili, Maldives

Anyway, you can hold your horses for now as we found something suitable in Male, just in the range of our designated area. The rent was way out of our budget, the flat was in 6th floor, with a very narrow staircase (though the stairs were clean at least, which is also kind of rare in Male) and no elevator, but we still decided to view it in the hope that we may be able to negotiate the rent or security deposit a bit. We succeeded in that matter, the rent was lessened 2 % in exchange of installing an elevator.

We spent the next week waiting. As our previous experience depicted, we ourselves had to knock the landlords for preparing the lease or agreement paper, asking for their bank account number so that we can deposit the cash there, checking whether every utility was working or not etc. However, none of these things were possible as we were living in Hulhumale at that time and most of the time it was difficult to communicate with them (owner herself lived abroad). We wanted to check the apartment for a second time before moving in but nobody was available there to let us in or show us around. We still decided to shift there and complete the unfinished work by ourselves.

There are pickups available in all these islands…Male, Hulhumale and Vilingili. Taxi cabs carry maximum two luggages; more than that, one has to hire pickups (large ones up to 450 kg and small ones up to 350 kg). In Hulhumale, there are certain numbers you have to call to get these vehicles (taxi company numbers may be? I don’t know for sure). In Male city, these cabs or pickups usually wait at the ferry terminal, though if there is none available, you have again call for them (at a different number).

Although the same ferry allows luggage, furniture may have to be shifted through another ferry (there is specific time schedule for those also). We didn't have any furniture, so the regular human ferry sufficed for us.

After the pickup took us to our destination, we had to lug the huge bags through the narrow alleyway (which could not accommodate any cars or pickups, and the road was also used as a parking lot for motorcycles) and up in the sixth floor.

Well, the journey does not end here! Our apartment was a two storey duplex one with bedroom and bathroom upstairs, living space downstairs with an open terrace and a Jacuzzi. Sounds inviting? Not so fast.

 

Stairway to bedroom!

This may seem like a stairway to heaven, but of course it’s not. I’m not an architect, so I can’t explain the technical problem with it, but it was too steep and almost vertical. The only toilet was upstairs, so every time we had to use the restroom (or go to our bedroom), we had to climb this one. However, the upstairs was decorated beautifully, especially the bathroom fittings were very modern.

Downstairs was also quite nice with multiple kitchen cabinets, sofa and a separate laundry room; except there was no Air-conditioning, also no kitchen hood or exhaust fan near the stove. So, while I cooked, I had to close all the doors (so that our bed and clothes don’t smell like curry), all the windows (the wind and the flames, not a good combination) and switch off the ceiling fan for the same reason.

The interior was so pretty!

As ours was on the top floor, the heat was almost unbearable. Though the bedroom had air-conditioning, we liked to hang around in the living space. But the whole apartment used to heat up like a greenhouse during daytime as the sunrays kept hitting it for 13 hours in a stretch.

The only beautiful thing about the apartment was the terrace which we were able to enjoy only around the evening when the sun went down. Otherwise it was just too hot. And the Jacuzzi that we were promised? It was simply broken, the jets didn’t work and water remained clogged in it all the time.

Better half hanging out in the terrace in front of the Jacuzzi. I loved this view of concrete jungle. 

There was no active TV cable line, internet connection or gas connection (those were supposed to be there as part of our agreement). We had to search for it ourselves, go to every single place and spend tons of money to at least develop a cooking system and set up an internet connection.

After around two weeks we came back from the office, my husband went to the toilet and flushed it. All the dirt from sewerage line came back from the bathroom drain and flooded the bathroom floor. The owner's family was extremely kind, they tried to find a plumber instantly and offered us their own toilet for using. After two days, the repairman came and fixed it. Our bathroom, bedroom and terrace were literally filled with faeces. We cleaned them until midnight, spread Dettol as much as we could and went to bed. The next morning, the same incident repeated. This time we told the landlord that we would leave the apartment if similar problem happened again. And it did happen. Immediately after we were done cleaning the faeces for the second time.

We found an apartment in just one hour which was situated in Villingili. Though out apartment was totally gross and had lots of problems, we did not want to leave Male. I did not have any energy left in me to move again, I was completely drained....both physicall and emotionally.

But we did move. And you know what? Though we suffered a lot, we survived all of our problems. And we are still alive, strong and healthy enough to write this two thousand word blogpost. What else should one need?