Tourists

One of the jobs that I was least looking forward to before we came out, was dealing with tourists. I’d seen these poxi TV fly on the wall programmes about tour operators and facilitators in holiday resorts getting continual grief from thick drunk people who shouldn’t have been given a passport until they could prove they’d learnt some manners or knew when to shut up!. Well pleasant surprise, it’s quite the opposite.

The money we get from tourists funds the conservation work and it’s desperately important we improve on our visitor numbers. With that in mind, we have put a lot of effort into getting our operation much more professional.

We basically get three types of client, private hire; people from hotels who hire a boat to get to us, self sail; people who’ve hired dammed expensive yachts and sail aimlessly around trying to find something to do, and cruse ships. No matter how they get to us, all boats and ships have to moor off shore, we then go out to them and pick them up in our rib. We don’t allow any boat other than are own to land on the island, this is part of our invasives protocol, basically we are trying to stop rats and alien insects getting to the island. So we’ve got them off their boat and into ours, how do we get them ashore with no jetty and never less than 1m waves crashing onto the beach, simple, a very experienced boat driver drives the boat flat out at the beach, catches the wave just right and ploughs the boat up the beach, all very safe and very exciting for our guests, well, exciting anyway.

Different people deal with this adrenalin rush in different ways, most people love it and it’s a great start to their visit, puts them in a good mood which hopefully means they spend lots of money in the shop, but the odd person doesn’t deal with it at all well. The last cruse ship we had, by the way we’ve got cruse ships off to a tee, we can land 100 people and get the first tour going in less than 20mins, half the time it took before we came, anyway the last one we had went like clockwork. Our boat went out to pickup the last load of guests less than half an hour from the first, he picked them up and made a perfect landing, even with quite high waves, as the boat hits the shore, the beach crew gets to the boat as fast as possible just in case there ‘s a problem, no problem. I go to the boat and say in my cheeriest way “good morning welcome to Aride” this little white haired lady looked up at me and shouted, f--- off! The beach landing was just to far from her comfort zone. Me and the lads laughed so much we couldn’t off load the guests for a good few minutes, she latter apologised when I met her in the shop, I said “ no need to apologise, it’s one of those great moments I‘ll remember for the rest of my life. She was so embarrassed; she spent loads in the shop, good old girl.

We’ve met so many nice and interesting people in our short time here, from the doctor who works with the leperacy project in Africa, to head of finance of a top New York bank, whom by the way, I think, I convinced to give up his job and sail around the world?
The people are great, their fascinated by our primitive way of life, with some I can almost see sympathy in their eyes, but as I point out to them, we’re not leaving paradise of the Seychelles next week. I really do enjoy having guests, perhaps it’s because I know there gone in two hours and the sound of human noise fades away and we’re left with the birds and beach all to our selves.