René Seifert – Entrepreneur & Global Citizen

The world is full of experiences and I feel grateful to have seen quite a few of them already. To the extent that usually I do realize that there is something new and different, sometimes incredibly beautiful. But what I've seen on the Maldives, it was my first visit there, goes beyond my wildest imagination. Especially, as the natural beauty and the entrepreneurial concepts around put me in an unprecedented awe. Thats one of these typical views like one believes they existed purely in a travel catalogue:

The entire picture-set on Flickr is here. Maldives are for the heroes of chilling as in the first place one might get afraid: 10 days, one island of 450 m x 50 m. What to do? But after arriving one realizes that this is the wrong question to ask as it's really about pacing down and going with the tide.

We were very well taken care of by Atoll Paradise, an agency located right on the Maldives which directed us to the Anantara Resort, just a 35 minutes ride by speedboat south of the airport. And I have never in my whole life seen a hospitality place which is run so well like Anantara and the opposite island/resort of Naladhu where we "upgraded" ourselves for the last days of our stay. They belong both to the same Thai company group, but are positioned as two different brands. I'll write a bit more on the experience in the next days, especially from the viewpoint of an entrepreneur there is heaps to discover and respect to make such a service-miracle happen in such a remote place.

So the most pressing decisions of the day were for instance in which of the four restaurants to eat, what to order, when to schedule the catamaran-trip and when not eat too much because a dive was coming up.

The underwater world alone deserves a prize, it feels like swimming in an aquarium with tunas, moreys and turtles around stunning coral reefs. Well, well, back at work now in Bangalore, but luckily in order not to fall back into bad habits of working too much, I am really looking for meeting Arnd Benninghoff from Holtzbrinck eLAB on Saturday in Bombay and spending two days in Goa together for "fun-related work" before heading back to Bangalore and then to Germany on early Wednesday morning.