Today will be our final everything for this trip, final dive, final sunset, final shoestring meal out and final mountain climb. Our last dive site has been Ave Maria, a lovely easy dive, about 20 minutes off the coast of Praslin and averaging 18m deep. It was just us and a Swiss German national, and his wife who came along for a snorkel. We must first retrieve the Baby Shampoo from the other boat, because in my haste the morning before I forgot it it was hidden from prying diving eyes under the seat. Baby shampoo is like liquid gold in the diving world as you clean your mask with it and if any remains there are "no tears". I have coveted this little bottle since having it passed to me in Borneo, so it had to be found.
All diving done and log books complete, we just have to find some wifi to book some flights in a little propeller plane back to Mahe to join our international flight back to London. As luck would have it the dive shop has wifi which you can log onto for free and so we book our tickets for $60 each. One last-minute thought is luggage allowance, as carrying fins, wetsuits, boots, masks and an inevitable amount of sand means we are never light. We seem to generally be carrying about 25kg each plus hand luggage, and this holiday is no exception. It is never a problem internationally as you have sports kit allowance if you flash your PADI dive card, but it turns out we only get 15kg on Seychelles Air domestic flights. Unless we can cancel them and return by ferry it looks like we shall be wearing our kit on the plane, which may result in some interesting looks and the ministry of silly walks will be reignited like a rerun of the Monty Python on Freeview channel Dave. So the dive shop let us use the phone, and after trying 3 different numbers (it is 12pm, and therefore lunchtime, nobody works at lunchtime) we ascertain we can have a further 15kg each for sports kit.
With everything laid out in the sun to be baked into crispy dryness for packing, there is nothing else for it but to get out the factor 2 and find the last remaining bit if sun. The problem with staying on the East Coast behind a mountain is that by 5pm the shadows appear and you can't squeeze every last remaining drop of equatorial burning out of the day. Instead we must look like a strange re-run of a Bulmers TV commercial with towels moving further and further up the beach until there is simply no more, our work here is done.
As it is our last evening in Praslin we decide to visit "Beach Restaurant", an innovative name, and treat ourselves for all the frugality of the past two weeks. Little did we know this would end up being the best value meal to date. Unfortunately, this place has the service level of a MacDonald's training centre for those being released from anger management rehabilitation. Both nearly wearing our drinks by the very fact they are thrown down on the table, and left with a fish knife for the steak (definitely a challenge) and a fork to eat ice cream (an even greater challenge) I finally felt the need to impart some customer feed back. Neither of us are the sort to demand silver service but, at £25 per person for a main and expected to get through dinner like some sort of Krypton Factor challenge, we were not entirely impressed and so fed back our views succinctly to the loitering owner. Now we had not expected much, maybe just the removal of the compulsory 10% service charge but, as a final bonus to the shoestring tour, we were given our meal entirely free with just the drinks to pay for. There was only one downside, not wishing to push our luck, we thought better of asking for the free ride home and nearly gave ourselves a coronary with our last attempt "up the mountain".
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