Journey Home

We checked out of our room at midday (they charge you if you want to stay longer) and waited for a boat to take us to the jetty, and then a plane to take us to Male airport.

After passport control at Male there are a few shops selling food or duty frees, but there is nowhere to buy a book or a newspaper.

Male airport is very small - 3 gates i think - so there is no danger of getting lost.

You walk across the tarmac, occassionally stopping to let a 767 land, or a fuel truck hurtle past.  Up the steps and onto a MyTravel charter.  This is home for about the next 10 hours, so make yourself comfy.  Food is ok (if you have recently had a 4 course meal and fancy a light snack)  but all drinks need to be paid for, so take cash with you.  They show two films in the journey, but there are no seat back tvs.  After straining to see a 10 inch screen shared between 10 people, I gave up trying to watch Big Momma's House and turned my mp3 player on.

So..having read the safety card twice, checked my life jacket for holes, read the in flight magazine (twice) and eaten a bag of maltesers, I only had 9 hours 50 minutes left to kill...

For fun, i tried to make sure i could slip off the fake leather on my "extra legroom" chair at every possible angle.  You will be delighted to know, this is indeed perfectly possible, and becomes quite a competitive past time if you are travelling with another fidget.

I tried counting the number of piles in the carpet, but this soon lost its appeal.

Only 9 hours 30 minutes to go....

Its a long, boring flight.  I dont mind flying at all, but MyTravel must be the tightest airline in the world.  Perhaps the chairman comes from Yorkshire.

After an hour, I would have paid good money to watch a film on a seat back tv, to surf the internet, see what the wing cameras could see, or an interactive map of our flight, make a phone call, or play on a seat back playstation, but no, this is not possible.  I would have even considered crayons and a Colour by Numbers book, but these were mysteriously not available to a 29 year old like myself. Went back to my safety card, tried reading it backwards and then translating it into French just for fun.  Considered making various paper aeroplanes from the in flight magazine, but decided against this so as not to deprive the next traveller of this delightful publication, filled with juicy gossip and all that is "hot" in the world of MyTravel.

You would have thought someone, somewhere had the bright idea of sticking a few english newspapers in the plane, but no.

Take something to do on the flight, or covertly sneak your duty free gin to your seat.  You are not supposed to open it on the flight, but if you ask 6 times for a straw from the staff, you can hold them together with sellotape you smuggled in on the back of your watch strap and have a perfect pipe to reach inside the bottle whilst sat upright in the chair.   Apart from becoming known as the "straw lady" by the staff, no one will ever suspect a thing.