Back from holidays and, not unexpectedly, tired
October 20th 2005 -
We got back from Lindeman Island on Monday, and I’ve been more-or-less asleep the entire time since then. It was an action-filled holiday. Up every morning at 5:00am to play golf with Marco, which meant that I didn’t partake of any of the club med nightlife – unlike Anna and Kylie, who I could occasionally hear singing karaoke songs from the hotel room.
I tend to get very motivated by competition, which I mention with slight embarassment as there were several competitions going during our stay – I entered into two archery competitions and won a silver and a gold medal, and I entered into a table-tennis competition and got a silver. And I got a certificate for having done the knee-hang transfer on the flying trapeze, an activity that was at once scary and wonderful and a bit painful. Marco has video footage, which I shall post in due course.
The archery was particularly enjoyable, and I spent at least an hour a day defending the resort from motionless wooden targets. I’ve been interested in archery since I was in high-school, when I used to shoot at a target in the back yard (very badly), but I very rarely get to do it. I enjoy the combination of relaxation and tension necessary to shoot well. The target was about a metre diameter, with a bullseye with a twenty centimetre diameter, and ten metres away. I managed to get the bullseye with all three shots three times, over the course of the week.
The golf was fine and enjoyable, and we steadily improved over the course of the week, though we didn’t record any remarkable scores. As usual, Marco and I played ambrose (both hitting from the best previous result) and really didn’t play safe shots nearly as often as we should have had we been after a good score.
And Anna was particularly keen on the kayaking. On the first day, we went for a kayak and Anna thought she saw a shark. Happily, it was actually a dolphin – no, two dolphins – no, three. We followed them for a while, Anna beaming with pure delight, and then came across a giant sea turtle, shell at least a metre round, which blinked at us a few times as we goggled at it. We didn’t encounter any exciting sea-life on any of the other days (although we continued to kayak), but it doesn’t matter. We saw dolphins, and we saw a sea turtle. That’s just excellent.
We got stuck right into the food, which was prepaid and buffet (and predominately seafood, though no dolphin or turtles that we noticed), and rather good. Despite all the exercise over the week, I still put on about two kilos in weight, and am therefore not having sweet things. Again. Enormous quantities of food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And ‘free’ booze. Much beer. Many margaritas. A lot of lying down after lunch.
The trapeze was excellent. Marco had done this before, when he visited Lindeman Island seven years ago, and he was keen to continue. The trapeze was a high wire-and-pole-and-rope construction, which wobbled alarmingly as you climbed the ladder to the platform ten metres up. There was a safety net, and the guests wore harnesses, but it was still very, very scary, and after going up twice on the second day to do the basic preparations for a transfer (which were: swing down, bring legs up over bar, and hang from knees), I chickened out until the last possible day to do the full transfer (which had the extra step of coordinating with one of the instructors on another swing to have them grab you arm-to-arm and swing from their arms, before dropping to the net). Which I managed. Phew. Marco was keener. He did the basic knee-hang transfer on the first day, and spent the other days working up to more difficult transfers. Next time I go, I’ll try a bit more too. There were some people there who had come to club med and done the trapeze every year for ten years. They, unsurprisingly, were rather good.
Hm, what else. I performed on the “Gong Show” one night to an audience of about 200, swinging flurescent comet pois in UV darklight, and wearing black clothing. It went pretty well, considering how long it had been since I last did it, and people recognised me afterwards and commented on it throughout the rest of the holiday (though goodness knows how, as my face wasn’t visible). I had no idea how to conclude the routine, and half-way through got a bit panicky that I was repeating moves, but they seemed fairly happy with it, and I ended up concluding by gradually reducing the length of the pois until they were swinging very rapidly on very short strings, and then stopped them.
Marco and I performed the flying trapeze, on one of the other nights, to an audience of about 150 people. Actually, this was a more organised event – they asked everyone who had successfully done a transfer on the trapeze that day (six of us) to participate in the show that evening. So we did our transfers again (successfully) while wearing tight lycra outfits, and then our instructors did some more advanced transfers. Very exciting and nerve-wracking – the trapeze was hard enough without an audience!
Anyway. I’ll write more as I think of it. That’s enough for now.
winstoninabox Says:
October 23rd, 2005 at 11:29 am
Trapeze. Wow!
Marco Says:
October 23rd, 2005 at 6:29 pm
Re: “A lot of lying down after lunch” – That’s not what I heard you were doing after lunch.