Read Hotel Living for Free Online

halted in yesteryear. The tortoises walked away from the water, and the whale bones were dark. I was trying to break one with a stone when Jeevan returned, holding a jar with something like fruitpunch in it. “Erik’s a friend of mine. He told me to take care of you,” he said with a smile.
    I looked at Jeevan and then at the jar.
    â€œIt’s rum punch! The colony’s drink!” he yelled.
    I was ready to ask what the story was with the arch and the colony, to find out what on earth he was talking about, where the hell I was, but Jeevan took a sip and offered me the jar. I stared at it for a moment, wondering how long the punch had been sitting out. “Perfect,” I heard myself whisper as the sea changed again.
    By the time Erik came back, I was passed out in our cabin.
    I SPENT MY MORNINGS SMOKING, having “breakfast” with Jeevan, and swimming off deserted cliffs at Moonhole. When the sun settled good and the sea stopped changing colors, I’d have a siesta. In the afternoon I would join Erik and his young local friends in saving baby turtles from “evil, bloody birds” at the turtle sanctuary in Park Bay. We weighed and fed the turtles, checked for trauma from birds, and moved them around the shallow nursing pools, following the park custodian’s assessments on the turtles’ “preferences and well-being.” It was a skill I couldn’t crack; as if one needed some tuning-in, some leveling with the silent turtles before one got to understand them.
    Erik’s entourage got bigger by the day. Kids kept showing up out of nowhere, while I couldn’t work out how these ten-year-olds made it from Port Elizabeth to the turtle sanctuary with no bus, cars, or bikes in sight. When I asked, they’d just shrug. I tried to explain what I saw by a bay of a small island without letting go of rationality; my Greek rural instincts failing me. I went as far as conceptualizing an HBR case study around them, hypothesizing on the kids’ timely appearances and disappearances, hoping to explain this mystery with a b-school operations principle that I thought I must be missing. They were unguarded, ubiquitous, screaming little monsters, splashing into the three-foot-deep pools, weight lifting the turtles, even throwing them to one another, ready to drop everything for a game of soccer on the beach. But the turtles were oblivious to their yells. They didn’t swim away, hide, or bite, adding to my Cartesian angst, which had been making me a touch less Greek every day since I left home a decade ago.
    Late in the afternoon on Christmas, I jumped into the water to rinse off an hour of soccer. After some strokes, I pushed my head back for an almost 360-degree view of the horizon. I could hear the kids’ yells and the metallic sound of their footsteps on the sand, through the water. I closed my eyes and floated.
    â€œLittle punks! That was murder,” Erik said, handing me a Carib when I got out. He sat next to me on the beach. “Jesus!”
    I smiled. “We stood our ground. For a bit.”
    â€œOh yeah?” He clung to my bottle, looked at me funny. “Last ten minutes I couldn’t even get close to the ball.”
    I took a sip. “I couldn’t see the ball,” I said. “We started with twelve. I turn around and there are twenty-five, thirty. They kept popping up, like in a video game. Swapping sides, too. I didn’t know who I was playing with or against.”
    â€œI know.” Erik nodded. “We’ll have to go shirts and skins next time.”
    â€œOh, you have a shirt?”
    â€œI was hoping you’d leave one or two behind. As long as they don’t say EBS,” Erik said with a wink.
    â€œYou still got my socks I left at Ian’s.”
    â€œOh, those.” Erik smiled. “Those are at my dry cleaner’s back home.”
    â€œYou do own a suit, right?”
    â€œ Now! ” He pointed a