Sure, but why don't slot machines get boring?

"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 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 stayed 4 years, miss the place intensely)

I know a guy whose dream was to retire to Maui. He would go on & on about how he just didn't want to come home when he was vacationing there.

A few years after moving there, he's back in the States.

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 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.

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. :(

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.