I am in the 70th minute of my two-hour Balinese rubdown when that John Milton line swims into my head. You know: ‘Man can make a heaven of hell, and totes the opposite too’ (I may be misquoting slightly). More than three centuries on, the Paradise Lost epigram remains apt. I’m in a sun-drenched, five-star, tropical resort – and I’m miserable.
It’s my own fault; I always forget how much I hate body massages. The hole in the table is too small for my muppet-sized head. It locks my jaw fiercely open, forcing the muppet to discreetly suck in his drool every half-minute. I’ve desperately needed to pee for the past half-hour, and the masseuse is prodding my taut bladder with the insistence of a Gestapo Oberleutnant whipping a prisoner for information. I am unable to tell her to stop, because I’m unable to find a polite way to phrase: ‘If you poke me one more time, I will absolutely piss all over your hand.’
This, then, is a good example of my case, if not my curse – the fancier the surroundings, the less apt I am to enjoy myself. Resort holidays, with their tightly-packaged, high-budget perfection demanding that you Enjoy Yourself, For The Love Of God, are simply too much pressure for a neurotic guest like myself. Every experience, through no fault of the hotel, is primed like a beartrap to snap shut on my pale ankle until I howl: ‘I wish I’d stayed hooooome.’
Worse than the massages are the many-fanged wildlife. Most tropical resorts, I’ve found after careful analysis, are in the tropics. Literal hotbeds of critters dripping with six legs and countless eyes and, my, don’t they just love to pop up where they’re least wanted. Honey-mad red ants invade the breakfast table if I dare eat anything sweeter than a bowl of salted kale. Biblical levels of flies descend on me pool-side. My wife, a masochist who doesn’t understand the point of holidays is to lie horizontal until you develop bedsores, likes to go on runs. On our last trip, she sprinted back to our jungle villa, breathless and wide-eyed, minutes after popping out for a jog. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘Chased… by… monkeys,’ she panted.
One final monster tale: a few years ago, a night into our first post-Covid getaway, I was padding to the hotel bed when I froze. Nestled under my pillow, inches from my wife’s head, was a spider the size and hairiness of a wrestler’s hand. Whimpering, I called the front desk, who promptly dispatched the sons of the gardener: two grinning 12-year-old boys who killed the heinous thing while singing, ‘Spider-Man, Spider-Man…’, just to make sure I felt thoroughly emasculated. They walked out, I kid you not, swinging it by one leg like a fur purse. Is it any wonder that, years later, I still prod each pillow I lie on with the trembling hands of a bomb defuser?
Primed by such masochism, no doubt I will continue to glumly book holidays that cost as much as a secondhand Volvo
Then there’s my bleeding snowflake heart, which is uncomfortable living in luxury when so close to poverty. The sad fact is that the lushest resorts often lie in the poorest countries, where many daily incomes hover in the single digits, USD-wise. Abandoning my unfinished tower of breakfast pancakes, infested by red ants as they may be, makes me feel like a real tosser when said stack is whisked away by a smiling waitress whose grandparents may have perished in the Bengal famine. Every interaction therefore comes loaded with the clammy-palmed guilt of a Catholic onanist. Each ‘Hope you enjoyed your meal sir,’ met with my reply of: ‘Yes, I did – God help me, I did!’
But Daniel, I hear you ask, can you not simply drink your troubles away? Drown your cares in the placid waters of a piña colada? Alas, not as often as you’d think. While there are many fine resorts staffed by platoons of well-trained bartenders, I seem to find those run by the Temperance movement. Translation: my drinks are more watery than a mermaid’s bra. At a supposedly high-end resort this summer, I made the mistake of ordering a martini. It came out tepid, thimble-high and not strong enough to drown a mouse, let alone get him squiffy. The only man-sized thing about it was the price, which was far more than its well-made cousin would cost at the London Ritz. I know because, wanting to ensure 100 per cent that I would rue this particular stay, I Googled it.
Primed by such masochism, no doubt I will continue to glumly book holidays that cost as much as a secondhand Volvo for years to come. But part of me hopes that, when next summer rolls around, I craft my own paradise. Destination: nowhere, reclined on my couch, with a homemade martini the size of a bidet in hand. And one eye still open for spiders.
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