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Shanghai’ed once more

On board We took off late as a last-minute illness stopped one passenger from travelling and his/her luggage had to be offloaded. Seated near the front, the 787 wasn’t as quiet as my Scoot flight last month where I had been seated overwing. This felt on the quiet side of normal. After the supper service, […]

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Family time again

Above:  Kuching is a bit hazy this visit with the slash-and-burn of forests in preparation for agriculture in Indonesia.  The transit “hassles” in Colombo made the 2h10 transit go really quickly. We boarded the Malaysia Airlines B737-800 for the 3h40 flight to Kuala Lumpur departing at 0055 and arriving at 0705 due to the time […]

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Beginning of the end

Today is the beginning of the end when I finish the adventures and relaxation and proceed to Kuching for time with family before flying back to reality in Auckland in less than two weeks.  We had set the alarm for 0600 to catch breakfast at the hotel before getting on the 0730 dhoni to Male. […]

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Dive day

We did two dives during our stay at Maafushi. Most people would probably consider the dives we experienced to be quite good, but I am fortunate that I can access top-class sites like Sipadan relatively easily.  So, the dives we had here were OK.  Diving does depend on luck and exactly which dive site you […]

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Maafushi

Introduction We did two dives at Maafushi (a handy but beautiful island only about 90 minutes from Male). There were three dive operators on the island. Shark Diving & Watersports (which we dived with because they were straight up and no-nonsense). They gave us a discounted price of USD35 per dive including all equipment (without discussing […]

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An affordable and accessible paradise

We were pleased to see our noisy mainland neighbours move out today. Little did we know till the evening that a bigger group of mainlanders were moving in. After breakfast, Kim spent a bit of time catching up with friends on the internet till mid-morning when we walked to the beaches. We walked east past […]

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Our island escape

Despite the 2h time difference, I woke up surprisingly early at 0745. We both wanted a sluggish start and didn’t take breakfast till 0845. In view of our 1500 departure to Maafushi, we opted to stay in till check-out at 1200. I edited photos while Kim read his book. We had lunch at a waterfront […]

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Hong Kong of the Indian Ocean

We got our boarding passes an hour prior to departure; we were seated in the same noisy area as our two previous Emirates Boeing 777-300ER flights. We were fortunate again to have a spare seat to be shared between us. Due to a different configuration, there was a wall immediately behind us which blocked off […]

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More about male prostitution

Above: Lobster and squil for dinner. I woke at 0400 and had trouble getting back to sleep; so I slept in till around 0830 and had breakfast. The offering wasn’t the most generous; perhaps it was Italian or continental style light breakfast. We went for a walk on the beach before it got too hot […]

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Beach time

After breakfast, we checked out. Kim went down the road to search for a taxi at the right price. The hotel here had quoted USD40 to get to Kiwengwa and the hotel at the destination had quoted a similar price of EUR35. We had been offered TZS50000 (USD25) by a random driver yesterday and this […]

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