Meedhupparu, Raa Atoll, December 2001
I booked the holiday back in April. I was somewhat amazed to not be able to get my first choice island, and settled on Meedhupparu instead. We arrived at Gatwick airport about two and a half hours before takeoff and there was absolutely no queue at all. Clearly the events of September 11th had mad a lot of people cancel their holidays. So we were quite surprised to find that the plane was quite full, though there were still some spare seats. The reason was that they had combined the Manchester and London flights. The next surprise was that we weren't stopping in Bahrain, as had been