Q: staying six or seven days on one island — won’t you tire of it by the third?
A: there will come a certain moment, usually on the afternoon of the third day. And — please stay inside that moment; do not rush to flee it.
An honest word first. An island’s bill of entertainments is indeed finite: snorkelling, sailing, sunset cruises, the spa; play them in earnest and you can get through the round in three days. On the third afternoon many people will fish out their phones, that familiar line rising in the mind: what next?
This ‘what next’ is precisely the programme that city life has installed in you. It assumes that time must be filled with projects, that a blank equals a fault. Yet the true project of an island holiday is to uninstall that very programme.
And so our itineraries are built like this: the first three days are given a programme, everything worth doing done thoroughly; from the fourth day, broad stretches of blank begin to appear on the schedule, printed with a single small line — ‘nothing is arranged today; this is deliberate’.
The fourth day, typically: a morning in the hammock finishing the book you had not finished in three years; an afternoon spent watching a hermit crab move house for twenty minutes; by evening, finding that you have begun to tell the sound of the flood tide from the ebb. Once the strait of boredom is passed, an openness lies beyond it: you have shifted from ‘consuming an island’ to ‘living on one’.
To answer the first question: will you tire of it? Yes. And then, tiring and tiring, you come out the other side. True rest begins exactly where there is ‘nothing to do’ — that is the deep water of a holiday, and it is worth swimming out to.