Havelock Haze

Along with the natural beauty, astounding varieties and quantities of insects, airborn and earth-bound, flourished in great abundance. Owing to my questionable navigation abilities on the tree house’s staircase, I made a point of leaving the bathroom light on at night. Venturing there in the wee hours brought me straight into a National Geographic documentary on Startling Insects: the Humungous and Microscopic.

I am lucky that mosquitoes generally favor the people beside me over my own person. Not too long after dark, there was a pressing logic to just getting under the bed’s mosquito net. Early nights were offset by waking at daybreak to witness the spectacular sunrise over the water. For a week, life decelerated down to the metronome’s slowest possible tempo, set in fabulous beauty at every turn. I finished Mao’s biography and moved on to the novel Shantaram, more about which later.

Havelock has a rather large population of the mangiest looking dogs you’ve ever laid eyes on. There was another guest house down the way, which I frequented as much for their DVD player and library as for their mediocre weed. There was a Polish tourist there who took it upon herself to care for a mother mutt and her litter of nine. They were irresistibly cute. One day I fed and played with all of them, only to suffer from no small number of flea bites.

The most exciting thing that happened during our stay was one day spotting one, then two, then several soldiers in full combat gear. They were staking out the grounds on the beach. I asked one of the waiters at the guest house what was up. He answered that they were looking for escaped convicts.

Now I’m from Israel, so my immediate conclusion was that they would only send a company like this if they were after some pretty high-value security prisoners. So I assumed that this was an exercise. Walking later through the market to the guest house with the DVDs and weak weed, the sheer numbers and casual stance of the many more soldiers I saw there only confirmed my first hunch.

The daily routine on Havelock always started watching the sunrise under the influence of weed that, to our chagrin, only produced the mildest of effects, which grew milder over the endless days. In the hours upon hours of introspection that this afforded, I was able to reach the following conclusions:

1. Rest is good; but being busy ultimately becomes necessary.
2. A home in a beautiful place is an excellent goal to strive for, but not at the price of other types of life fulfillment.
3. The more I travel and the more interesting people I meet, the more I realize how easy it is to live and work in so many of the world’s most intriguing places. Wages are usually just enough, even in developing countries. The question becomes, how much more is necessary to create a basic modicum or sense of security.