Water, water everywhere. . .

To my left were a thousand yachts anchored along the beach and to my right countless French boulevard cafes. We walked, ate, played ball and made merry. Late at night we escaped the smoky, Mexican party and sat at the waterfront looking at sprinkling lights draped on lighthouses, that France has put up everywhere as Paris contends to be the Olympic venue in 2012. We quickly summed the length and breadth and heights and depths of our countries for each other and wondered where we’d be seven years hence. Thousands of folded sails swayed in the night breeze, hitting against their masts, creating an euphonious rhythm that sounded like spill-overs from another beach, another world.

The next morning we visited the Aquarium. The colours, the texture, the size, the camouflage, the life and being, of ten thousand aquatic fauna and floral specimens from oceans all across was a strangely humbling half-experience of the day. The other half came when we took a boat to travel twenty kilometers in the sea to see Fort Boyard, an old prison now used for treasure-hunting television game shows during summers. Water water everywhere …. recounting tales of adventures on the sea, some real and some almost so. One felt so small against the magnanimity of life.

To be able to shake the albatross off and sail out in the unknown in search of a new land … aye! aye!

That was nearly two years ago, but this time the swim around (un)familiar bays was strangely nostalgic.

The journey to finding nemo in the next post . . .