Please Mr. Postman

Some of the first pictures I ever saw of tropical islands were in TV adverts for this well known chocolate bar.

 

Imagine my surprise (and delight!) when I came to live on a tropical island and found a house to rent on Avenue Bounty. Sadly, my street isn't named after a chocolate bar  - it's in the 'famous ships' part of Albion, and is named after HMS Bounty. Our neighbours live in places like Astrolabe, Victory, and Côte d'Emeraude, and other parts of Albion are named after birds, fish, and trees. 

When our house was built, a letter box didn't feature in the architect's plans, and when we asked for the address of the house, the landlady realised the oversight and told us she would have one installed. This is what we ended up with:

Do you see it? That tiny slit in the wall to the right of the gate? Well our postman didn't for the first few weeks - he kept wedging our post in those holes in the middle of the gate. One day I saw him doing it and went out to politely point out that, small as it is, we do have a box to put our letters in. Maybe we should have painted it red and specified what the hole was for, like this house I saw the other day.

Anyway, the postman now delivers straight into the box, with the exception of my monthly magazine which he throws over the wall as it won't fit in the box. Fortunately it's well wrapped in plastic. However, the box is so small that anything bigger than a postcard ends up looking like this. Anything important which needs to arrive in an un-crumpled state has to be sent to Merv's Dad or to our friends with a normal sized letter box.

None of the houses in Albion have numbers. I'm not sure exactly why, but think it's to do with the way the land was divided up, and the fact that there are still a lot of vacant plots between constructions. It does mean though, that for your post to arrive safely, either you need to introduce yourself to the postman and make sure he remembers your name, or you give your house its own name. Since it's not our house to name, we rely on the postie and his memory and, so far, we seem to be doing okay, despite our intial fear that "Avenue Bounty, Albion, Mauritius" was a bit vague.

The people at the post office obviously had the same fear as us, and they've decided to 'modernise' their postal system by assigning postcodes. We were supposed to receive a card like this to tell us our postcode but it never arrived, making me wonder if we really are doing okay with our post!

For anyone who wants to know because they plan to write me a nice letter, our postcode is 91006. Remember though, no big envelopes. I also have a story about the parcel system, but I'll save that for another time.