A Day at the Beach - Part 2
One of the details I’d failed to take care of promptly when we missed the original flight from Newark to Dubai was notifying our hostess that we would be arriving 24 hours later than originally scheduled (I did eventually send an email when I remembered, but to no effect). That oversight and the fact that the apartment we were going to had no street number resulted in a chaotic phone conversation between our cab driver and the hostess. Not knowing that we were arriving that morning, she had locked the place up and gone out for the day, and there was no way she could let us in until that afternoon. The cab driver eventually put me on the phone with her, and after a scolding about not notifying her of the changes to our itinerary, we reached an accord to meet at 3:30.
We asked the cab driver if he knew of a place that we could spend the next six hours, preferably somewhere that we could safely leave our luggage. He said he knew of a place and drove up and over the hills on a narrow winding road to Beau Vallon, a huge curving beach on the west side of the island. He dropped us and our luggage at a tiny commercial district where the road met the beach and turned north. It was still early by island standards so there were very few people out, and none of the shops or restaurants were open yet. We sat for several minutes looking out at the ocean that was almost perfectly flat, slowly summoning the energy to figure out what to do next.
Colleen set off on a walk and returned a few minutes later saying that she’d found some reclining beach chairs nearby where she thought we might be able to sit more comfortably. We picked up our gear and trudged across the sand to the chairs sitting in front of a low sea wall in the shade of a large tree with glossy dark green oval-shaped leaves. When I set down my backpack and sat down on the chair, exhaustion washed over me, and I couldn’t help but lay my head back and close my eyes. Colleen somehow still had the energy to get changed and go for a swim, and I drifted in and out of sleep while she floated up and down on the tiny swells.
A local man, bare-chested and wearing old jeans cut off just below the knee, began unstacking several more of the lounge chairs and arranging them in the sand under the trees that grew along the sea wall. We asked if it was OK that we had set up camp on two of the chairs, and he replied that it was fine as long as we paid him a rental fee. It was a relief to hear that we didn’t have to move, and I was happy to hand over some rupees. He introduced himself as Rodney, saying that he worked at the sushi restaurant nearby, and that we were welcome to leave our luggage there if we liked. We thanked him for his hospitality, then he set off on his business of getting ready for the day.
Even though I could barely hold my head up, some part of me felt anxious that we were “wasting time” just sitting there on the beach. While it would indeed have been nice to get into our apartment and offload our stuff, I had to remind myself that looking out at the ocean while doing nothing was one of the primary reasons we’d taken this trip, so we were in fact doing exactly what we were supposed to be.
A few hours of lounging put enough gas in the tank for us to get up and cross the road to The Boat House, a rambling, ramshackle building set amongst thick tree trunks. The maître d’ showed us a place to leave our bags without us even asking, then seated us at a table near the front looking back across the road toward the beach, with Praslin Island visible to the northeast. I ordered chicken curry and Colleen got spicy shrimp and pineapple followed by coconut nougat. I ate slowly as we still had another hour to kill before we could go to our apartment, and as I looked around the place I started to notice little details that indicated that the place wasn’t ramshackle at all, it had just very cleverly been made to look that way. Someone had put a great deal of thought and effort into giving the place a vibe like it had been pieced together organically from random materials over the course of a few decades, and had succeeded brilliantly.
In the course of exchanging some U.S. dollars for the local currency, Colleen was able to learn the name of a guy in the neighborhood who ran an “unofficial” taxi that would be able to take us to our apartment. We gathered up our belongings from The Boat House and met him at the side of the road in the exact same spot we’d been dropped off six hours earlier. The driver called our hostess from the road, confirming that she was home and getting directions to the place. We pulled off at the bottom of a steep driveway and waved to our hostess looking down from a balcony overlooking the main road.
Pina was very fit and full of energy, saying she’d just come from a long hike high in the hills and that that was the reason she couldn’t let us in earlier in the day. She gave us a tour, and not realizing that we were brother and sister, had left the bed unmade in one of the bedrooms. She ran back to her house nearby to fetch some sheets, and when I tried to help her make the bed, she waved me off and told me I should go take a shower. She showed us the Wi-Fi information, left us a bus pass that we could use to get to Victoria in the morning, entered her phone number into WhatsApp on my phone in case we needed anything, then darted off. I took the prescribed shower, arranged the mosquito net that hung in a loose knot over the bed, then crashed headlong into the pillow.
A panaromic view from our apartment balcony, taken at dawn