The festive season is back, and everyone is now off on the customary vacation trips to exotic far-flung locales before returning for the traditional Christmas and New Year gatherings with friends and family.
As another sign of my family's insistence on doing things the unorthodox way, we had planned to have our December holiday trip in January, a nice 8-day trip to New Zealand's South Island before the brother got conscripted. Unfortunately the agent couldnt get the requisite number of people to sign up and so the whole thing got cancelled. I sure was disappointed, because that meant missing out on the ownage scenary (there's no comparing it with Singapore: white-capped mountains and vast plains vs a potty brown hill called Bukit Timah and the grass patch next to the longkang), satiating my craving for juicy baked salmon, and viewing the epic battle-sites of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy.
But the whole sorry episode got me thinking about what I really wanted in an overseas vacation. I came up with a few fantasy scenarios:
1. A trip to the Carribean and the Bahamas, or one of those coral atolls in the Pacific or Indian Oceans, where you can swim all day in the crystal-clear waters of the coral reefs, with all the myriad varieties of sea creatures and trying not to get stung by the venomous cones and stingrays and lion-fish, taking in the fantastic colours of the coral formations and their wierd denizens, and when you're done with the swimming you can tan on the white sands or have a seafood BBQ grill just outside the chalet by the very friendly native housekeeper called Eamon Cudjoe, who is also incidentally a former Michelin-rated master chef. This will be capped off with a bottle of Chardonnay. And then you can watch the Champions League final in Milan between Arsenal and Chelsea, which Arsenal will win 3-1, in the air-conditioned chalet on the giant plasma screen with cable TV.
2. A tour to the major cities of Europe, ie London, Paris, Oslo, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Berlin, Madrid, Lyon, Bordueax, Marseille, Turin, Milan, Rome, Venice, Parlemo, Warsaw, Budapest, Athens, Malta, Istanbul, Moscow, and St Petersburg in that order. Shopping for designer suits, photos of castles, visits to the great art and culture centers of Western civilisation, touring the center of Papal power in the Vatican, gorging myself on lots of German suasage and beer and Piedmontese beef and Sicilian seafood and French foie gras and Spanish tapas and Russian borsch and Greek and Turkish kebabs, being in the thick of the nightlife in London and Berlin, paying homage to King Thierry "Va-va-voom" Henry and Master Wenger at Ashburton Grove, admiring the fantastic architecture everwhere (including the Emirates Stadium), and soaking in the living history (even though Lenin's mummified and the Acropolis is in ruins, they still ooze living history, which I would gladly soak up). And in Milan you can watch the Champions League final between Arsenal and Chelsea, which Arsenal will win 2-0, and Mourinho tries to punch Wenger but gets thrown into jail instead.
3. A nice, laid-back trip to the American and Canadian nature reserves. Camping out in the Rockies, taking in the sights of the awesome Grand Canyon at dawn and dusk, catching the sheer majesty of the natural rock formations and endless American plains under the inifinite stars. Having hot cocoa in a Canadian log cabin while outside its snowing, and the fire crackles as you read a good book. The next morning you can go round taking photos of carribou and all the rest of Canada's wildlife that live in those massive pine forests. I'm not sure if this is possible, but the sheer clarity of the night sky and the cabin's proximity to the North Pole would mean a night looking out for the Aurora Borealis, that incandescent display of incredible colour in the obsidian sky. And if the Borealis doesnt appear, there's always the Champions League final in Milan between Arsenal and Chelsea, which Arsenal will win 4-1, on the plasma screen with cable TV in the cabin, and the victory is so impressive that Lionel Messi and John Terry move to Arsenal.
It all sounds quite fantastic to the point of being rubbish, but thats what an ideal vacation is to me. Notice that none of them have the idea of tramping around in a phucking jungle with mosquitoes the size of thumbnails and rashes and humidity which simply drowns you, and the stench of the mud and rotting tropical shit. That's one of the things that pisses me off about the cramped potty island I live in. Of course its much better than Darfur or Somalia, but it simply pisses me off at times. And anybody who goes on and on about the paradisical lush green verdant jungles of South-East Asia, with their diversity of flora and fauna and natural beauty, obviously has not been on a route march through Pulau Tekong with the SAF.
