Category Archives: Travel

This summer we were looking for a break to just simply stop working and relax. As ever, lastminute.com came up trumps and we found ourselves heading to the Maldives and a tiny resort called Ranveli Village.

What a gem of a place! If you want two relaxing weeks doing nothing except sun bathing, snorkling and some very, very good diving you can do no better, IMO.

The staff were all exceptionally polite and friendly and whilst it was monsoon (and we did get a couple of big storms) the weather was excellent.

Food and drink were top quality as well (although I don’t usually have maple syrup on pancakes – the Shrove Tuesday kind – which was a new thing). Best of the bunch was Friday night which was ‘maldivian Night’ – all local foods served by waiters in local costume. It was excellent!
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If you have read this blog before you may well remember the entry about being stuck in a traffic jam on the M11… you may even have left a comment about it on here. I complained to the Highways agency about the appalling way we were treated, and I may make the complaint more formal yet.

It took a bit longer than the ten working days that they said it would take for me to get a reply, and I had to send in another email to get a response, and sadly, the response I got was as formulaic as you would expect. This is faceless bureacracy at its best… don’t get me wrong, it reads as if the Highways Agency do in fact accept responsibility for the muck-up, but you can’t get to a single person being held accountable. All I would like at this point is for one person to stand up and say “yes – it was my job to get thsi organised on the day and I didn’t manage it too well”. We all make mistakes, and we all struggle to get otehrs to do their jobs from time to time. Clearly there was a lot of struggling going on that day! I am assuming here that teh police didn’t think the weight of traffic on a Saturday was going to be sufficient to emrit closing a junction, or putting up some warning signs… or that the police had to await a direct order from the relveant officer in the Highways Agency. I don’t think the police can be absolved of all blame here, since they should have been able to see what was going on as well as we could.
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Were you on the M11 in Essex on 25th February 2006, travelling either north or south bound? Did you get on to the motorway easily enough, only to find a few miles later that it was gridlocked? Did you, like me, sit there for over five hours and wonder why Essex Police had allowed you on to the motorway in the first place? BBC news reported it as this, but it is a woefully inadequate description when you were part of it.

In the small hours of Saturday morning (25th Feb) there was a broken down lorry between junctions 7 and 6 (southbound). That’s between Harlow and the M25. A van came along to sort it out, but there was a fire (for whatever reason). The van happened to be carrying gas canisters and these are pretty dangerous when they get hot. As far as I can tell from radio reports, the breakdown happened at about 6am or so, and the fire was shortly after that. let’s say 7.30 for argument’s sake. Whatever the actual time, it was pretty early.
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