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The holiday is reaching that time-bending phase where a week of sitting by a pool, drinking beer and doing little else makes it hard to distinguish one day from another. Things that felt like they happened this morning were actually from two days ago. It feels both like we got her yesterday and that we have been here forever. And that we’re here in all future moments as well and that our brain might focus in on any of them at any point.
But it may be all the ganja I’ve been smoking.
That was a joke. It might be all the sugar I’ve been eating though. My diet is taking a holiday too. I drank a bottle of non-diet Sprite today. I don’t drink many fizzy drinks any more and if I do they are nearly always diet ones and this 500ml bottle did make me feel a bit strange and trippy. It was refreshing enough in the heat of the day, but I can’t imagine how I ever enjoyed anything like this and was amazed to see it contained 58% of my recommended intake of sugar. How come the whole Western world isn’t full of corpulent zombies - oh hold on, it pretty much is.
We did have a bit of variety to our routine today as the hotel offers a free boat trip to all its customers once a week. This is a nice touch. Most holiday businesses are determined to squeeze as much money out of tourists as possible, so it was cool that this hotel lays a few things on for free. Treating your guests as guests rather than Sprite drinking money dispensers is surely the best way to make them return.
We took a glass bottomed boat down the coast, stopping to look at various corals and then finally having the opportunity to swim with some turtles. I was a little bit tired and hungover (from a pathetically small amount of beer last night) and would probably have rather been back in bed, but I largely enjoyed it anyway. The boat came across a life jacket floating on the sea, which was a little bit ominous. Where was the person it belonged to? Was their body about to pop up under the glass bottom of the boat? Luckily not. It is still floating somewhere out in the water.
The turtles were fun, though I wasn’t in the mood to get in and swim with them. The captain tapped on the hull and threw in some food and a couple of swimming tortoises arrived, presumably aware of the whoring they were expected to do in return for an easy meal. I was more impressed with a strange fish that I could see on the bottom of the sea who seemed to have wings instead of fins and looked like a strange massive moth. I’ve never witnessed anything so bizarre (and I’d just seen a swimming tortoise) and I can only presume that I had discovered an unknown species of mothfish, here 35 metres from the shore in these uncharted shallow waters. The captain of the ship seemed blasé about it, almost like this was a normal occurrence, but I think he didn’t want to tip me off to what I had discovered so that he could take the credit.
We went ashore, waited for the bus in a bar run by a grumpy old woman who seemed to resent us buying Sprite from her or using her toilet. My wife and I and one of the other hotel guests sat on the table part of a picnic table. She shouted at us, which was the first time in three decades I’ve been in trouble for something like this. I quite enjoyed the thrill of being such a rebel. I suspected that whatever we’d done she would have shouted at us. That was just the kind of woman she was. If you used the toilet without asking you’d get chastised, but I suspected that if you asked she’d have said, “Why are you asking permission? It’s just there. You people are crazy.†It’s easy to make humanity your enemy if you just work from the default setting that nothing they do is right.
The rest of the day passed in a blur of tiredness and a protracted sugar rush. I think I have been here for twenty-five years now, or just arrived this second. Or am watching the sun implode. Who am I again?
