Maldives in January: the month when they keep their promises

There is one month when the Maldives genuinely resemble their own photographs, and this is it. By January the northeast monsoon has settled in, rain becomes a memory, the sea flattens out like a well-pulled sheet and the light takes on that crystalline quality that makes even a photo shot on a wet phone look edited. If there is a moment when the archipelago keeps every promise in the catalogue, it is between January and early April. And January holds one extra advantage: after Epiphany, it contains the best-kept secret of the high season.

The flip side is written in the same lines: if the weather is at its peak, so are the prices and the demand. January is full high season, the best guesthouses fill up months ahead and the flights offer no mercy to latecomers. It is the month when the difference between an excellent trip and a mediocre one is not made by the sky, which is on your side regardless: it is made by when you booked.

In this guide you will find the month's real weather, numbers in hand, what happens underwater with the year's best visibility, the prices split into the three bands January actually contains (and they are far from equal), and the honest verdict on who should choose this month and who would do better to aim elsewhere.

Maldivians call it iruvai, the northeast monsoon: the dry season that governs the archipelago from December to April. By January it is fully installed, and you can feel it: the steady northeasterly breeze keeps the air dry and the nights pleasant, showers shrink to brief, rare episodes, often at night, and the days resemble one another in the best sense of the phrase. A zero-rain month does not exist in the Maldives: what exists is January, which together with February and March competes for the title of driest month of the year. For anyone arriving from the European winter the contrast is almost comical: you leave in a down jacket and twelve hours later your main problem is deciding which side of the island to watch the sunset from.

What January delivers underwater is transparency. The northeast monsoon pushes clean oceanic water into the atolls, and visibility hits its annual peak: walls that read tens of metres away, drop-off blue like glass, ideal conditions for photographers and for anyone approaching snorkelling for the first time and wanting to see everything at once. The fauna follows the current: plankton accumulates on the western sides of the atolls, and the mantas move with it, gathering in dry season mostly there, between cleaning stations and channels. The whale sharks of South Ari consult no calendar and patrol their route all year, and the calm sea makes boat outings kinder even to those who usually suffer aboard. If a first dive is on your list, this is the month that pleases everyone: manageable currents, full light, water that asks for no courage.

"I have a precise memory of one mid-January: the week before, the island had been full of New Year crowds, and now there were four of us on the drop-off at nine in the morning, with visibility that never seemed to end. The captain put it better than I ever could: «This is the sea from when I was a boy». Since then, when someone asks me for the perfect month, I don't answer with a month: I answer with a date, the seventh of January." Samuele, founder of Maldivando

January should be read as three different months compressed into one. Until Epiphany you are still inside the holiday peak, with the prices and crowds described in our December and New Year guide. From the 7th onwards the rates settle at «normal» high-season values and stay there for the rest of the month: never cheap, because global demand in this period is at its maximum, but honest for what you get in return, namely the best weather of the year. Flying from Europe, the worst fares sit in the very first days and the market turns more reasonable from the second week, especially if you book the flight a few months out.