After a few days paddling and camping on uninhabited islands, landing only briefly to dump used food packaging in port dustbins, we decided to do the tourist thing, pick up some more supplies and visit the picturesque Ile de Bréhat.
Landing was fine and we strolled up the island towards the village, admiring the neat hedges, banks of blue and white agapanthus and palm and eucalyptus trees and looking forward to sitting in a café and seeing some shops. But in the village itself we had an almost universal reaction:
The shock of moving from the pure visual simplicity of sea, grassy islands and swell beaten rocks, with which we had become comfortable over the past few days, into a typical tourist spot was too much to take. Shops selling souvenirs were no longer something we could just walk past without seeing; we were overwhelmed by the excess of visual clutter, the uselessness of the goods on display, the aimlessness of the holidaymakers wandering about and just wanted to get back to the boats and our own calmer version of civilisation or reality. It was a feeling that someone else’s agenda was trying to take control of what you were supposed to do, persuade you to come back in and engage in a commercial world from which you had drifted way off course. And the whole commercial world was remarkably unappealing, distasteful even. The whole experience felt strangely unsatisfying. Slightly dazed, we wandered back to the beach and our boats.
So is this all it takes to escape from the mainstream? A couple of days in a sea kayak in a wild and beautiful place with a bunch of good mates and no external pressure to do anything or be anywhere, moving to a rhythm governed simply but uncompromisingly by the tides, the weather and the topography of the spot?
Maybe the human race isn’t lost after all.
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