#HTE

Backstage Paradise: What They Don’t Show You in Travel Brochures

In the last video you saw me at a five-star resort in the middle of the Maldives, one of the most beautiful places on earth. 99.9% of the time when you go to a place like that, you are a total outsider, the tourist. You’re there for a week or so, enjoying the beaches, the sun, and plenty of cocktails and food before flying back home with a face that’s about three shades darker. You can undoubtedly say you’ve been there, but that doesn’t change the fact that you have no clue about what is really happening beyond the postcard-ready scenery… 

So, yeah. We enjoyed our trip, like kings. But there is only so much beauty I can take in before I start to wonder about where the dirt is. I always want to know: What problems is this community facing? 

Well, we didn’t have to go too far to find out. At Thilafushi Island (aka Garbage Island) we saw the other, completely unglamorous side of living in the Maldives. Pretty much all the waste from all 1,190 islands in the Maldives goes to this one, relatively tiny island. 

It’s a giant landscape of trash, with a constant new supply coming in everyday on boats. In order to get rid of it all, they typically burn it or dump it straight into the ocean. During our visit we walked through the trash mounds, cut open a fish and found out that they basically live on a diet of micro-plastics, and talked with locals about how they can better handle the huge surplus of plastic waste they live around: 

This story originally appeared on Story Hopper, a collection of design stories worth sharing squeezed into short videos.