"The problem with Minivan editors is that they do not value their paper. They seem to be blissfully unaware that the whole English-speaking world makes up its mind on the Maldives after reading their news."
– Anonymous comment on Minivan News, 23 June 2013
My worldly possessions sat on the baggage belt at the check-in counter in Gatwick airport. I'd accepted the job in the Maldives a week earlier, given notice to the magazine in London I'd spent two years working for, then embarked on a week of heavily lubricated goodbye parties.
London had certainly proved a different life to my previous job as cub reporter for a family-owned newspaper in the Australian outback town of Narrabri. Three years of covering droughts, bushfires, road accidents, cotton farming and the annual (horse) races of a small population a long way from anywhere was good preparation for reporting from a speck in the Indian Ocean. Eventually, I got itchy feet, and after a brief, accidental and commercially unsuccessful stint as a freelance correspondent during the 2007 Saffron uprising in Burma, found myself broke and in London.