Down by the beach this evening, visitors seated around a rattan-and-mangrove table at the Vista del Mar Beach Resort watched fishermen in outrigger canoes plying a placid sea as a sunset gradually turned the western sky pink.
British Airways Holidays (0844 493 0787; ba.com) has two nights' B&B at the four-star Andel's Hotel in Krakow from £364 departing on 30 December Foxhills resort, Surrey Watch nearby fireworks light up the sky while lying, cucumber juice in hand, in the hot tub of the UK's first spa garden.
Some crowded balconies at the Waterfront Beach Resort to watch aerobatic pilots such as Matt Chapman and Greg "Wired Colyerr.
Shields was holidaying in Varna, a Black Sea resort, after watching Liverpool win the Champions League cup final in Turkey.
Farther downstream, at the more civilized Arapahu Island Resort, we watched the water tumble over the magnificent Frederik Willem IV waterfalls and life was good once again.
Down the road that runs behind the growing line of beach resorts, tourists watch two turtles that are flipping forlornly around shaded ponds in a rehabilitation centre.
The story tells of a Thai teenager living in a beach resort who watches Rambo on TV, has a pet pig called Clint Eastwood and, to the consternation of his mother, lusts after "farang" tourists.
But soon enough, I had to resort to watching through the filter of other audience members, whose fidgety demeanour indicated that they were just as stumped as I was.
There's no need to resort to watching The Cube, where games include 'catching a tennis ball in a plastic vase'countinging squares on the floor' and the extremely tense 'moving tennis balls from one plastic box to another'.
It was an extreme, larger-than-life version of what ski instructors call a "yard sale" -- an equipment-spraying tumble that happens at any local ski resort -- and watching from our cushiony sofas, we didn't just empathize, we felt her pain.
"They kind of lost (Cutter) right at the last," said Remington Slifka, general manager for the Convict Lake resort, who watched the futile rescue.
