Breakfast is complicated by the business of tipping. Our departure has been organised for 7pm -- with a different flight number to our ticket! -- so this is our final meal. We want to tip our waiter but it appears that this is his day off. We want to tip pancake boy -- "boy" sounds a bit demeaning but it appears to be the Maldivian way (or what they've grown up used to) as, for example, the diving school publicity refers to the instructors and Mohammed the "compressor boy" -- but then we decide that the rest of the kitchen staff have had something to do [with it] but how do you do it [the tipping] en masse? We plump for the guy who looks like the head honcho. Helen approaches and says "please distribute..." but he just looks at her funny. Hmm. We think it might be because we tipped in [Maldivian] Rufiya. There seems to be a problem in the non-Western world where nobody likes their own currency. Indeed we'd heard that some places in the Maldives actually refuse to take Rufiya -- of course, we heard that after we'd exchanged US$ 200. Paul's words came back to haunt us, In Africa, outside South Africa, the dollar is king.
A dull day, literally and figuratively. No splishy-splashy in the ocean as clothes don't dry (and there's a US$ 500 fine for nudity) and it's overcast and drizzling. The weather forecast for Auckland is a meagre 14C so at least we can loiter here in beach shorts in the rain...
The laundry situation is getting quite bad. We've declined the hotel laundry option (US$ 1 for shorts, US$ 2 for a T-shirt, etc.) and are spready the usage of our current clothes out as far as possible. Clothes don't dry, so we can't do it ourselves. Given the run of no laundry facilities we've had for the last couple of weeks I've taken to private nudity asap so as to keep the (healthy!, masculine?) smells out of my clothes. Some poor laundrette in Auckland is going to get a beating.
Male' airport has a surprisingly good set of duty-free shops -- maybe I'm biased towards electronic gadgets and now diving related paraphenalia. [We were offered Suunto Mosquito dive computers for US$ 230 which, now 22 November, seems like a particularly good buy.]
We settle down in front of ESPN "bringing you five live English Premiership games a week." Fed straight from Sky Sports. The idle patter is familiar from Messrs. Tyler and Gray. Half-time analysis is their [ESPN's] own. It looks like we've just missed the end of another hopeless Liverpool draw and now it's West Ham v. Man U.. ESPN do manage to flash up the score as Leeds get whupped by Bolton a minute or two before the Sky commentators mention it. Sadly we don't get to see the end of the match as we are ushered onto our 23.05 flight to Singapore.
Copyright 2002 Ian Fitchet. All rights reserved.