A Comped Trip and Other Animals

I now know the beauty in accompanying a spouse on a corporate business trip lies in how little is expected of you. You’re along for the ride, without responsibility to schmooze, power lunch, or strike deals on a handshake. In fact, it’s such a far cry from any other normal scenario that it takes a while to feel comfortable abdicating all controls to those in charge. But abdicate you must, feeling rather like a driving instructor letting a first-time driver take the wheel.

The Texan trip coordinators possessed complementary matching names of Misty and Mandy, like a pair of television hosts. Stripped of any expectation that we may be capable of managing our room accounts, we’re provided with blue wristbands to distinctively identify us as part of one Borg-like collective. The corporate colleagues, blown in like tumbleweeds from west to east, slap shoulders, down drinks and compare sales and fish catch. Spouses exchange names and compare iPhone pictures of Jimmy Jr and Isabella left at home in Houston, Tampa and Santa Barbara.

Comp-ed an island weekend getaway on someone else’s dime, ten years senior to the hard-partying management group, and lacking any corporate obligation, I decided to drift between novel protagonists. I aspired to be an Ernest Hemingway character wiling away time on a deserted beach. Instead, by night, I found myself Carrie Bradshaw, shod in beloved stilettos normally catching dust in upstate New York (for the record, sand, cocktails and stilettos don’t mix), watching the guests wrestling over free sunglasses and Mont Blanc pens with the same zeal you might witness among brides at a Vera Wang trunk sale. And by day, I morphed into a veritable Gerald Durrell chasing lightening fast geckos and manhandling hermit crabs the size of my fist.

For the inexperienced, wild iguanas can be intimidating at a few feet long with their dinosaur faces, spiked ridge-backs and snaking tails, but I soon learned their real weakness is French fries. The staff laughed as I nervously offered lettuce leaves to placate one iguana intent on climbing onto my sun-lounger. “He doesn’t want your lettuce, he wants your fries,” they said, and soon the iguana and I were working on a double act. I paid him the going rate of at least fifteen fries for his trouble. In my new confidence as something of an iguana-whisperer, I started trying to pet any iguana that stumbled into view until an anxious hotel staffer interrupted my daring efforts with a warning that it could bite or smack me – hard - with its tail. The fact that noone had thought to offer similarly sage advice while I was hand-feeding another was not lost on me. Perhaps they were hoping for a scene.

Boarding a local taxi - arguably a brightly-painted haycart with bench seats - I almost sat down on a huge black centipede. My first thought, mostly based on a scene out of Platoon rather than experience or biology, was that it was a huge leach. Our crusty old taxi driver just laughed, telling me “it’s just a black worm”. Had it been a centipede, he added, it would have stung me. Well, that was reassuring. When I told him centipedes in the UK don’t reach such mammoth proportions, let alone sting, it set him off on a tear about the British monarchy and the Queen’s 1959 post-coronation visit which swiftly unraveled into a tirade about his father’s seventeen children, unforgiveable adultery (as though there is another kind), and his two wives, before dog-legging back to Prince William’s recent wedding. All this emanating from a comment about a multi-legged, six-inch armoured black worm, and all taking place during perilously steep hairpin turns at a life-threatening speed. I wondered where the conversation would have gone had I asked him about the resort-tamed iguanas.

On a hike to reach the crystal waters of an unspoiled beach, our guide suddenly pushed us ahead of her up some steep paths. The afternoon rains, it turned out, often bring out snakes of which she’s deathly afraid. I drew comfort from the fact that she still leads hikes at all, although I wasn’t prepared for the overhead assault of crabs launching themselves off rocks into the sea. At sea level, flopping our way sideways into the water in snorkel and flippers, we sidestepped over the black sea urchins peppering the shallow waters like landmines. As I peered at every rock I found red urchins, subsequently identified as fire urchins for their skill at inflicting discomfort. Then I spotted the white ones which seemed to unfairly skew the odds.

With all this time to observe nature, I took note of the corporate wildlife back at the pool and a visible pecking order among the sunning guests. Without titles or corner offices for reference, you could still identify the VPs by the sheer volume of traffic circulating around them. That, and they were the ones signing off on the hefty lunchtime bar tabs. I was reminded of Ralph and Jack in Lord of the Flies, and wondered how long we’d need to be castaway on the island before factions formed under these transplanted VPs, one with a penchant for civilized order and the other hungry for the hunt. In the wild world of sales, I’m guessing both have their place.