The conference really was very good in spite of the rotting seaweed
I’m primarily a city traveler. Everyone knows this. 95% of my most successful writing is about some cool thing I found in a city. Yes, there are national parks in my life sometimes, but there’s nothing I can write about Joshua Tree that doesn’t already exist in better form already.
And so it is with this perspective that I found myself, once, on the beach. I was going to Melbourne, Wellington, and Auckland for a conference in 2016, and on my way back I met someone halfway in Honolulu. We got an Airbnb near Waikiki and, on day 1, hit the beach.
We put our blankets down, threw on some sunscreen, laid there, and less than five minutes had passed before I rolled over and went, “Ok, what now?”
“What?”
“What are we doing now?”
“We’re… going to continue laying on the blankets.”
“what”
This is what happens when you try to take me to the beach. My brain cannot stop. I am in a new place. In the case of Honolulu, that place has buildings. They’re right there. I must explore them.
And so it is in the spirit of all of this that I found myself on a beach again, nine years later, in a far smaller town with far fewer things to do than go on a beach. The reason for all of this was a conference, and that conference happened to be on the Caribbean. Fine.
In the meantime, climate change happened, and so a species of seaweed exploded in volume throughout the Caribbean, and every May it now rots en masse along the whole coastline of the Yucatan, stinking up the entire town. Apparently, this makes May the low point of the tourist season, because nobody wants to deal with that. Conferences love this in 2025, since they’re held in a room that may as well be anywhere, and so they get to cut a nice deal with the hotel.
One thing I rarely discuss in text is that I am fragrance-sensitive, and so truly I cannot put into words the sheer mind-blinding poetry of wandering around a town for dinner, putting on a nice face for a bunch of other top performers, kind of wanting to puke the whole time. I am grateful for this, though, because it drove all of us away from the beach. Just imagine: someone meets me for the first time, and then we try to do a beach hang. I will last five minutes again, demand to do something. And unlike Honolulu, this town is pretty much built for the beach. There are restaurants, souvenir shops, a beach, and nothing else. There is nowhere to run.
People do this on purpose. On my way to the resort town, the bus took us past a dozen-ish other resorts: story-tall signs, flawlessly arranged palms, a guy stopping cars at the front gate. I pulled them up on my phone and every time saw only a compound of buildings, some pools, a road to the road, a little arcology of relaxation.
Rest can take many forms, of course, and so bless those who are able to enter the compound and vibe, eat whatever, drink whatever, and die softly in the sun. But I think I usually need to go somewhere with less seaweed.