Jake Gordon

Such A Fantastic Time

20 March 2001

The first evening on the island I went out for a meal. Ate my meal, felt a bit bored and lonely. Well… then some lovely girls invited me to join them at their table. Four of them - Chrissy, Abbie, Fiona and Tara. All very nice and friendly, rather than some people who you bump into every now and then who are just so false. I got on well with them, and we ended up spending the rest of the week together. I can’t remember exactly what we did every day, but the general gist was this: went for a walk to a banana plantation where we got a superb view over the island; went snorkelling and saw some amazing multicoloured fish; splashed around in the waves; sat under the stars and around bonfires and chatted for hours; ate lots of meals at the same restaurant (Shake Shack). Well, it was all great fun. Then, it was time for the wedding I’d been invited to.

The weddin involved getting to the other side of the island. We (Chrissy, Abbie and I) were planning to go for a ‘jungle trek’ of a couple of hours to get there, but after speaking to the locals and getting told things like “Are you mad? I would never go there” and “Phone 999 when you get in trouble” we decided to get the boat round instead.

We thought the wedding would be like a non-stop celebration between 10am and 10pm, but it wasn’t quite like that. We arrived at midday, and an hour later we were treated to some food for lunch. Then we played cards… for about five hours. Oh, and I was told that I’d have to sing a song in the eveing, and there was no way out of it. Now, anyone who has ever heard me sing before will no just how hilarious this concept is. A thousand people standing around at a wedding looking at me attempting to sing in tune. P’ah! It’s pure madness I tell you. Well, this is what I had to do, so reluctantly we tried to think of a song to sing. After about an hour, I’d decided that the only ‘song’ I’d even contemplate singing was ‘Head, shoulders knees and toes’ - yes, quite crazy! Well, luckily I managed to wiggle my way out of having to sing it after pleading for several minutes. I wasn’t going to die of embarressment then!

Finally, at about 9 o’clock something started to happen. We, the Westerners, went to visit the groom and followed him to the wedding room like a trainer followers a boxer to a ring. Once there, we were in this lavishly decorated room and saw the bride and groom sitting together. We then got up and gave them presents, and everyone took photos and clapped. After this, we went off to see a cultural show, were we saw/heard the locals doing a musical fight scene. Quite interesting at first, but got boring after a while.

At midnight, we got a boat back, and saw something quite amazing. Phosphorescence (anyone know how to spell that?). If you’ve seen the film ‘The Beach’ before then you may remember this stuff - it’s in a scene where Leondardo Di’Caprio has sex under water with that nice French girl. It’s all the glowing stuff in the water. And it’s cool to look at, flying up around the boat. Not only that, but there were no lights on the boat so we had a great view of the sky as well, and we could clearly see the Milky Way, Venus, Saturn and Mars.


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by Jake Gordon, some rights reserved