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Thus in a way, the trip really began the following morning. Our cabin is double-glazed and air-conditioned, so the full impact of our exotic location only hit me when I opened the curtains, to find the ship already resting at anchor.
Outside, we were in one of a cluster of small bays of bright blue water, surrounded by towering slopes covered in lush vegetation and dotted with villas. Watercraft small and medium-sized scurried around on the water, tens stories below; yachts bobbed at anchor and speedboats bounced over surf of a colour never seen in European waters. It was of a degree of loveliness that it struck the eye as just being unreal – a sensation I've not felt since my first sight of the Austrian Tyrol.
One leaves Salzburg airport and drives out into flat countryside of impossible, unrealistic greenness, dotted with tiny perfect villages like something off a particularly large, tasteless and over-the-top cuckoo clock. Every house of whatever size is a perfect, two-story Alpine cottage, with shutters and window-boxes full of bright red geraniums. Every garden, rustic and implausibly photogenic. Every cow mascara-ed and equipped with a cowbell on an embroidered collar.
It's like an exceptionally expensively-fitted theme park. My immediate conclusion was that the road out of the airport had been artificially landscaped, tailored, Astroturfed and managed to within 2.52cm of its life. Even the mountains framing it in the distance were posed to perfection, like a chocolate wrapper: towering, grey, prettily snow-capped, like a cartoon of ideal mountains.
But over a seventy-kilometer drive, it never stopped. It is all like that. Every town, large and small. How people don't snap and run amok I don't know. Perhaps they're clubbed into insensibility by Austrian retail prices.
My first impression of St Lucia was like that. It is so pretty, so picturesque, so perfect, it doesn't look real. It's like when you see your first living chinchilla: as the little girl in Despicable Me screams, "it is so fluffy I am gonna die!" It doesn't look remotely realistic; it's an expensive stuffed toy. Then it blinks and whiffles its nose at you.
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Outside, we were in one of a cluster of small bays of bright blue water, surrounded by towering slopes covered in lush vegetation and dotted with villas. Watercraft small and medium-sized scurried around on the water, tens stories below; yachts bobbed at anchor and speedboats bounced over surf of a colour never seen in European waters. It was of a degree of loveliness that it struck the eye as just being unreal – a sensation I've not felt since my first sight of the Austrian Tyrol.
One leaves Salzburg airport and drives out into flat countryside of impossible, unrealistic greenness, dotted with tiny perfect villages like something off a particularly large, tasteless and over-the-top cuckoo clock. Every house of whatever size is a perfect, two-story Alpine cottage, with shutters and window-boxes full of bright red geraniums. Every garden, rustic and implausibly photogenic. Every cow mascara-ed and equipped with a cowbell on an embroidered collar.
It's like an exceptionally expensively-fitted theme park. My immediate conclusion was that the road out of the airport had been artificially landscaped, tailored, Astroturfed and managed to within 2.52cm of its life. Even the mountains framing it in the distance were posed to perfection, like a chocolate wrapper: towering, grey, prettily snow-capped, like a cartoon of ideal mountains.
But over a seventy-kilometer drive, it never stopped. It is all like that. Every town, large and small. How people don't snap and run amok I don't know. Perhaps they're clubbed into insensibility by Austrian retail prices.
My first impression of St Lucia was like that. It is so pretty, so picturesque, so perfect, it doesn't look real. It's like when you see your first living chinchilla: as the little girl in Despicable Me screams, "it is so fluffy I am gonna die!" It doesn't look remotely realistic; it's an expensive stuffed toy. Then it blinks and whiffles its nose at you.
( Read more... )
