I mean, its also an atoll in paradise. Theres definitely plenty to do there, the navy for some reason has decided to ban surfing and instead put in slot machines.
After getting a dream job on a paradise island, I can tell you how fast it takes to do everything there is to do on that island before the isolation sets in.
I was told the week I landed "there's two type of people: those who immediately fall in love and never leave. Then there's the ones who get island fever after 6 months and never come back... You won't find too many mainlanders who have lived here for very long"
Islands are expensive. It's hard to get stuff, and hard to get places. If I want to jump in a car and go 2 hours in any direction I can, and there is probably something for me to do there. Ain't so in the island. Ditto for job options.
You hit the beaches. Hang out. Get sunburned. Hit a few of the in-town stuff; they're played out after 3 months and you're bored. More folks rotate through so there is the novelty of banging the tourists and new-bloods, but either they (or you) are probably departing soon so it's hard to make any real connections, romantic or otherwise.
> I was told the week I landed "there's two type of people
Same when you live somewhere remote like the Yukon or smaller places in Alaska. People won't even really associate with you until you've been there a full 12 months because they don't want to invest time in someone that is likely to just leave anyway.
-48C (-55F) is a hell of a thing, but the lack of sunlight I personally found much, much harder.
The wonderful part though is that virtually nobody lives there that doesn't love it, because if you don't love it, you leave. That means the people that stay are passionate about it, and do every possible activity all the time - more so in the dead of winter!
I'm right now sat on a comparably remote island in the Alaska fishery, relatively new here. I've always romanticized the sea, landlubber as I am, and after a few months here, I went to Waikiki for vacation and - hated it. I couldn't leave soon enough. Too much happiness. The people here have mostly been here for many years, and will remember someone they worked on a boat with for a few weeks in the 80s or what-have-you. I have time to read, be left alone when I want to be, grab a beer off-site. I can see why healthy people would go insane, and why insane people would go healthy.
>I can see why healthy people would go insane, and why insane people would go healthy.
When I got to the Yukon a friend was introducing me around for the first 6 months or so. Every introduction would go "This is <Dave>, he's a bit crazy." "This is "Mary, she's a bit crazy".
It took me a while to catch on, and your quote captures it perfectly.
"Island fever" is a very real thing. I once strongly considering moving to a tiny island and after talking to a number of friendly locals I got the sense that _many_ people love the idea of moving there, but it's definitely a life that does not work for everyone. The number of stories they had about people moving there and being gone within a year was way more than I suspected.
I'm reminded of an anecdote I once heard, which I can't readily find atm, that in the days of yore when Chicago dominated the pinball industry, the same complex also dominated the slot machine industry. This business was later purchased by Bally's and moved to Las Vegas, where it appears the book picks up. Along with the business came the statistician whose job it was to make slot machines addictive. He later came out of retirement to work for Tinder. Don't really know if that last part is true, maybe someone here does.
Because slot machines are synthetic dopamine generators and humans have thousands of years of evolution tweaking us to favor dopamine-generating activities.
Military bases, especially in the austere / remote environments where some of them are, have a few differences from most civilian areas.
- Specialized personnel, who are required to fulfill the base's mission
- Substantial logistical costs for additional personnel or materiel
- Limited medical facilities, often lacking in higher standards of care, supplies, and with substantial evacuation distances
Since Diego Garcia is a major airbase, some of these are lessened, but they still all apply.
If someone is injured, they have to be rotated out and someone with the same specialized training rotated in. If something is needed (say, medical supplies), they have to be flown or shipped thousands of miles.
Each doctor/nurse/piece of medical equipment thus has a logistics footprint several times what a mainland one would. Which means a bare minimum medical presence.
Which means if something really bad happens (major trauma from a shark attack), someone is probably dying.
Weighed against that... a ban on surfing for recreational purposes seems fair.
At the end of the day, when you're deployed in a remote environment with the military, you're there to serve the mission. Fun comes secondary, or not at all. :(
> Which means if something really bad happens (major trauma from a shark attack), someone is probably dying.
> Weighed against that... a ban on surfing for recreational purposes seems fair.
> At the end of the day, when you're deployed in a remote environment with the military, you're there to serve the mission. Fun comes secondary, or not at all. :(
I wouldn't be surprised if the risk of shark attack to surfers there is lower than the risk of death due to basically every other activity on the base. There are maybe a dozen deaths (not just including surfers) due to sharks each year in the whole world. Banning surfing due to the risk of shark attack is totally illogical. Surfers are so much more likely to injure themselves or die in any number of other ways surfing. The risk of shark attacks just doesn't even enter the conversation.
I'd be interested to hear the reasoning on the ban. If it really is due to shark attacks, the military might consider getting someone more rational to make those decisions at the base.
I mean, even the article suggests that if the military reversed course and allowed surfing, there may not be as many people jumping at the opportunity as OP suggests. It says that military personnel have smuggled surfboards and failed to get many other folk interested in joining them over the course of a whole year:
>Somehow, he’d managed to smuggle his 8’6 pintail out there (we’d find this tricky to believe were it not for the images featured in the original article above) and he spent his year finding fun down the line tubes to jam it into. Unfortunately for Tom, he wasn’t able to coax many mates out into the lineup to join him, largely due to the abundance of hazards that lurk between the fast-breaking waves and the shallow coral reefs, including an array of hungry sharks, sting-rays, and stonefish. And of course, the the limited medical facilities on land should you come to blows with any of them.
And just because something's "in paradise" doesn't mean there's plenty to do, and simply suggesting a sport that not everyone's into doesn't really support that assertion. Paradise can be quite uneventful, even if it's still paradise.
Best case? Non-judicial punishment of some sort, e.g. "captain's mast" or the like. Forfeiture of pay, additional duty, minor imprisonment, changes to your rations, etc.
In a highly secured, remote base it's totally possible you get court-martialed, busted down in rank (aka losing out in monthly pay and bennies), or even catch a bad conduct discharge or something.
What percentage of Navy enlisted in the lower E-numbers have ever surfed, at all, in their whole lives? Reads like this would be a pretty shitty place to learn, so I can see why people'd balk at the notion, even without the risk of punishment.
I love swimming so I am sure I will have some fun but atoll in paradise sounds like a place with not much to do, at least not compared to a major city like where I live. And I can swim here too during the summers.
It may have just been his own spin on it but I used to read a lot of this world-traveller Russian blogger's low-commentary (mostly just strings of photos with short captions) posts, and was surprised at how seemingly every truly-remote, small, island "paradise" he visited came off as hellishly dull and absolutely covered in trash (every single one of them seemed to have a severe problem with trash disposal, to the point that there were small de-facto open landfills evidently around every corner and in every cranny when out in the wilder areas... which actually made a lot of sense when I started to think about it, but was just something I'd never considered before)
Dude completely broke me of my childhood desire to go to see every little middle-of-nowhere island I could find on the globe. But did make me way more interested in visiting Ethiopia, so, there's that.
You can play slot machines for more hours than you can surf - and not only that, but you can do it in more types of weather with a lower risk of injury.
Plenty to do there if you are there for a week. 6 months in, those things aren't nearly as neat and you will probably need some other entertainment. Slots wouldn't have been my first (or 10th) choice to offer folks, though.
I was told the week I landed "there's two type of people: those who immediately fall in love and never leave. Then there's the ones who get island fever after 6 months and never come back... You won't find too many mainlanders who have lived here for very long"