Yachtful thinking

If I owned a yacht I would sail away to Zanzibar. Zanzibar has always seemed a most mysterious and wonderful place, tropical and eastern and ancient. In fact Zanzibar is made up of two islands in the Indian Ocean, and these two islands both belong to Tanzania. On one of them cloves are still grown in an economically significant way, one of only two places in the world where this is true. I would like to watch cloves grow.

No I wouldn't. Good God, what was I thinking?

If I owned a yacht I would fit it out for deep sea research. I am particularly interested in the communications between squid (squids?), which use bio-luminesence to create amazing light displays that clearly have communication as a goal. I would like to learn what they talk about. Maybe mess with their heads a little bit... They do have heads, don't they?

I'd sing to them old sea shanties from Newfoundland like "Squid Jiggin' Grounds" to see what sort of reaction I'd get. I'd listen to see what sea shanties squids sing so bio-luminescently. What jokes do squid enjoy? How do they insult one another? What is the squid equivalent of "Huzza, huzza?" What do they pray for, and to whom?

If I had a yacht I would install a huge stereo and steer into the wind to Ride of the Valkyries, run before it to Bolero, tack across it to Carmina Burana, and run aground to Brick in the Wall. I have a confession to make - I put a submarine aground once. We kept it our little secret, but there we were, up on the mud right in front of a swanky hotel on the Carribean island of St.Thomas. Swacked tourists were toasting us from the bar with great hilarity while we churned, full speed astern both engines, and dragged ourselved slowly off the shore.

It was... It was a bad start for a brand new navigator. I misjudged the current while trying to come alongside the jetty there... I made my teetery way up to the bar and that's all I remember from that day.

If I had a yacht I would sell it and blow the money on a 5 star hotel vacation for 2 for as many days and nights as the money lasted. The last time I was in China a 5 star hotel in Beijing was $90/night. Unfortunately this is no longer the case. Too bad, it was fabulous, just down the road from Tiananmen Square. It had a glass front and was set to open just before the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. A tank passing by the day before the massacre machined-gunned the glass front (apparently out of nothing more than a sense of mischief) and destroyed $500 million worth of glass in just a few bursts. No injuries. It was the China World Hotel, and that same room now, about five years after my visit, is $290 a night. If you have a moment, check out the link to the hotel and compare it to the photo of the yachts at the top of the blog. And if you clicked on the link tell me honestly - if you were a young punk kid on important government business and you had a machine gun and you knew you'd get away with it - wouldn't you like to break those windows too? Just to say you did it?

The sort of yacht I had in mind when I started this blog goes for about $3,000,000 plus $10 for a license, so despite the grotesquely inflated prices that would still pay for over 10,000 nights at the China World Hotel - a little over 28 years.

How do people get yachts? And what do they do with them when they aren't communicating with squid?

Twenty eight years in a Shangri-La hotel in Beijing. A yacht.

It is so hard to choose.