There is a strange pressure attached to holidays these days. You arrive somewhere beautiful and immediately feel obliged to start doing things. There are mountains to climb, reefs to dive, golf courses to play, museums to visit, restaurants to book and local attractions that apparently cannot be missed.
Or you could ignore all of it.
There is a strong argument for taking a holiday where the main objective is to do diddly. Wake up when you wake up. Make coffee. Sit somewhere pleasant. Read three pages of a book, put it down and stare into the distance for half an hour.
Leave The Itinerary At Home
The key is not to replace work stress with holiday stress. You don’t need to get up at 6am because somebody online said the sunrise from a particular hill is spectacular. You don’t need 14 restaurant bookings, a diving excursion, a hiking route or a carefully planned cultural programme.
Also, you don’t need to know what’s going on.
Get off the screens. Don’t spend half an hour flicking through 70 television channels in a foreign country trying to find the one broadcasting in a language you understand. Do not doom scroll. Don’t keep checking the news to see what fresh disaster has unfolded while you were having breakfast.
In fact, don’t check anything unless you really need to.
The emails can wait. So can the messages, the weather back home, the sports results and whatever argument everyone is having online today.
Doing Diddly Properly
Find somewhere comfortable, preferably with a beach nearby, and slow everything down. Breakfast can become lunch. Lunch can drift towards sundowners. A swim is optional. Shoes become increasingly unnecessary.
Surfing deserves a small exemption. If you wake up and there are clean little waves peeling down the beach, it would be ridiculous not to have a board nearby. Have a surf, come back, eat something and resume doing diddly.
You might finish a book. You might sleep in the afternoon. Or you might spend an unreasonable amount of time discussing where to have dinner.
And when somebody asks what you did on holiday, the answer is simple.
Not much.
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Further reading:
Réunion Island Delivers A Different Kind Of Indian Ocean Escape For South Africans
When your world starts to press in, Happy Hour awaits in Mauritius
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