I have been doing so very little on this holiday, so am amazed about how exhausted I am. I have mainly been lying around in the sunshine, reading books (although I have gone to the gym for the last six days in a row - though rested today) and yet the longer the holiday goes on, the harder I am finding it to stay awake. Perhaps this shows that I am truly relaxed and maybe I deserve the rest. But it seems a shame to be in Mauritius and spending a good part of my afternoon in bed having more strange and vivid dreams (Today I dreamed I had cut my hair and had a short fringe and was wearing make up and looked, I thought, gorgeous - I fancied myself as much as Georgia fancies herself).
Today though I did at least do something else, which perhaps overloaded my senses and precipitated the later collapse. I went on a glass bottomed boat ride around the coral reef that surrounds the hotel beach.
No wonder my brain couldn't cope. It had got into a state of inertia and now I was confusing it by going to look at something strange to the point of alien, whilst being buffeted around by waves, having had no lunch as usual. It made me feel a bit nauseous and confused and I had to go to bed again afterwards, but it was worth the sensory overload.
Because the undersea world of the coral reef is a proper mind fuck. What is that stuff? It looks like a plant, but when it dies it turns into stuff that looks like bone. It eats fish (I expect). Is it some kind of undersea triffid? (
if you want to find out then click here, but surely more fun to be ignorant?
Whatever, there's some amazing crap down there, just metres from where I've been doing nothing, and with no one to explain any of it it became almost more fascinating. Were those big exploded pumpkins coral or just orangy rocks? Was that fish lying at the bottom of the sea dead as it seemed or was he just sleeping with the fishes? If life on our planet can look so odd and alien then what the fuck are we going to find out in the Universe if we ever get round to doing a proper Star Trek?
I saw a starfish and some massive anemones and one of those big shells that opens and closes like you get in cartoons. It was an undersea kingdom. And if I hadn't been feeling sick and exhausted I might have asked to go round again.
At least, for 45 minutes, I had got away from the hotel and though there were some kids on the trip, luckily for all concerned Georgia was not amongst them. Because only one of us would have come back from that boat trip alive. And looking at the steely resolve in her ambitious young eyes I am pretty sure it would be her.
The days are passing fast, mainly because I am sleeping through them all, and there's only five more days to go now. Which seems impossible to me. We really only just got here.
I am going to be annoyed if I find out that the whole thing has been a dream in a fortnight long sleep. But that might explain why I've been having such strange dreams. If they are dreams inside of dreams.
