Boat trips in the waters around Hong Kong are a misery for people who do not hit the bottle.
There is free-flow alcohol. Most of your fellow expats will start drinking as the boat departs pier 9 at 10am. So there you are, facing eight hours at sea, or anchored at Lamma Island, without recourse to the bottle which could make you one of their happy number.
I am not teetotal. I am pale-skinned with freckles. It's the bottle of fake tan I am talking about.
I've been on the wagon for a decade now, after several bad years of fake tan. It was always too orange. My ankles, the Achilles Heel of application, were streaked. But apply it I did, every day on exposed parts; entirely for holidays. People tried to tell me being fair-skinned was okay. It was "Celtic". I didn't listen. It took years before I finally realized it was a lack of self acceptance.
So I gave it up. I slept better, because the bed linen wasn't stained brown. My nearest and dearest - the sheets were high-thread count - seemed happier. I saved money, because my fake fix had been Lancome. For a few happy years, in the UK, where one's limbs stay out of sight for most of the year, it wasn't a problem. Then came HK. Suddenly, having skin the colour of snow that's been bleached wasn't something that could be hidden away.
And it's not just being pale. It's the freckles. Like other Scots, I am a Pointillist painting, and I am not giving myself illusions of being Seurat's muse. I am almost entirely made up of dots.
Thus, on the fake tan wagon and very white, I went on junk trips, as they call boat outings here. I found a patch of shade. I engaged in conversation with others, aware I was coming over as shifty, edging sideways along the seats as the sun's angle changed.
The anchor went down and the swimming began. It's actually okay in the water. Probably, below, there are jellyfish coming over just to see what the hell is going on. Saying to each other in jelly tongue: "What is this gleaming shape, why has our underwater world just become brighter?"
Back on deck, there was a girl at whom I was directing serious cover-up envy. She had a sarong that was tied in a knot behind her neck, which left the fabric draping all the way to her knees. My denim shorts, oh-so-hip in the dermatological privacy of my flat, were not covering well. They fully exposed my oh-so-white legs.
As the boat headed back towards the Central Piers of Victoria Harbour, there was no shade on deck. I sat below, beside the toilet. At the end of an eight-hour junk trip, with most people now thoroughly inebriated, that location is a sign of how much I wanted to avoid the sun, its effect on my freckles and my mood.
There is a new boat trip invitation floating around in my inbox. There are even water sports this time (which raises a whole new area of concern. Why do bikinis not have "wake-boarding elastic ratings" on them?)
I may hit the bottle for this one.
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