The Landlady finds things untropically tropical

During a moment of madness – no doubt helped along by several pints of Heineken – I mistakenly booked a flight to the Maldives, via Dubai, where I am stopping off to visit old friends. I say ‘mistakenly’, because I meant to book a flight to the Seychelles, which I have researched extensively and know I can get around easily. I have become so lackadaisical about booking flights that I assumed I was booking the correct onwards destination. It was only when I saw that I only possessed The Rough Guide To The Seychelles – not the Maldives, that I realised my mistake. It also has to be pointed out at this juncture that the honeymoon capital of the world is not the ideal place to visit when you’re abstaining from men for a year.

I always research far-flung places before I book because I do not wish to entertain the thought of missing my return flight, which would set a whole, nasty sequence of life dominoes tumbling into chaos. I also do not wish to spend my time stranded in an industrial wasteland due to lack of transport, which has happened on occasion. Alas, under further scrutiny, transportation issues in the Maldives are the very sort that appear to be deliberately engineered to either make me miss my flight or to suffer a great deal of stress and huge loss of money.

“I don’t want to spend my holiday stressing about getting back to the airport”

For starters, the airport is on its own island, which requires the use of a boat – a boat, I ask you, before you can even get to the main city. The Google aerial view of said city would indicate that there is not a single beach or palm tree in the vicinity. From there, one has to take yet another boat – no doubt rammed to the portals with snogging newly-weds – to the bits of the Maldives that you see in the travel brochures. This is all fine and I can even swallow the extortionate price of the boat transport, but I’m only there for three days and I don’t want to spend half of it stressing about getting back to the airport island in time for my flight.

To add further insult, accommodation in the Maldives is not exactly cheap. Some of the resorts cost about £700 per person per night. For that price, they’d have to not only fly me in by private jet, but also remove all other human life, apart from Harvey from So Solid, who would be helicoptered in of an evening, then removed every morning so that he wouldn’t get on my nerves…

I’m leaving in a week and thus far have not found suitable accommodation. At this rate, it will be the honeymooners telling me to get a room, not vice-versa.

Illustration: Jake McDonald www.shakeyillustrations.blogspot.com