Month: October 2015

“I want boobie, I want boobie”, said Alec, approaching Gabe as she sat on the beach.

“Oh, look Alec, Daddy is coming back”, said Gabe, pointing to two small kites on the horizon quickly gaining in size.

I shaded my eyes and looked out over the dark blue water. There they were, Andrew and David, leaving the white breakers of the reef behind, crossing the deep waters. They had only just gone out to kitesurf the wave breaking on the reef some distance off Tenia island where we were anchored. “Already?”, I said “that’s a bit weird. Maybe it’s too windy”.

“I want boobie”, insisted Alec, pawing at Gabe’s wetsuit, his voice rising. “I want boobie, I WANT BOOBIE”.

We were sitting on the beach looking out over the anchorage. The big kids were making sand sculptures at the edge of the water, shrieking loudly whenever the gently lapping waves would overturn a newly created wall. There were only a few boats on the anchorage; it was too windy for most people to want to sail around, let alone anchor off a flat, windswept island offering little protection against the prevailing wind. The strong breeze lent a chilly note to the air, and we were fully rugged up, wearing rash vests and wetsuits.

The kites came rapidly closer; they were now across the reef and into the flat waters of the lagoon surrounding Tenia.

“Looks like they want to land”, I said. “I’ll go over and help”.

Bracing myself by folding my arms across my chest I made my way around the sandspit, abandoning the windless comfort of the leeward side for the chill embrace of 25 knots of wind just around the corner. By the time I came to the sandspit, the sound of Alec’s cries for boobie were long drowned out by the roar of the wind. Andrew was already standing there, waiting for me to land the kite.

Making sand sculptures

“What happened?”, I shouted as he lowered the kite towards me. “Was it too gnarly out there?”.
“Shark”, he shouted. “It was a big shark. David saw it on the surface, and we didn’t want to hang around”.

 

I shuddered. New Caledonia was teeming with sharks; the French Protectorate had recorded 19 shark attacks since the year 2000, many of them with a fatal outcome. Most attacks were on spearfishers hauling around their bloody catch, but in 2011 a 15 year old kitesurfer had been killed by a tiger shark after losing his board in a pass not dissimilar to the one off Tenia – experts reckoned that the shark confused the boardless kiter with a bird.

“So, if you guys want to go…”, said Andrew. “It’s nice and flat in the lagoon”.

Right.

I guess the big sharks don’t come into the shallows, they hang around waiting for large pelagic fish to come swarming through the pass. The bottom in the lagoon was mainly coral; the tide was on its way down, but there was still enough water cover to kitesurf, as long as you didn’t lose your board and got dragged over the sharp coral. In any case I was wearing a wetsuit. And we had come here to kite. The weather was perfect, a six metre kite plenty of power.

“OK”, I said. “I’ll go tell Gabe, she’s just feeding Alec”.

Our friends from Raglan, Andy and Gabe, and their two children Vida and Alec, had arrived in New Caledonia the day before. After provisioning, we’d left Noumea in the afternoon for Ilot Maitre, a nearby island where we anchored overnight. We’d gotten up early in the morning to watch the France – New Zealand rugby match at the local resort, with a group of increasingly despondent Frenchmen. When the score approached 40-13 New Zealand-France, the man seated next to me threw his hands in the air, grabbed his cigarette packet and got up.

“C’est terrible”, he said. “Quelle horreur. I am so depressed. I go now.”

I smiled in sympathy. Behind us the children were chanting “Go the All Blacks, the All Blacks are winning, go the All Blacks”, interspersed with the odd request for boobie. I didn’t blame him for leaving – who would want your nose rubbed in your humiliating defeat by a bunch of kids?

After the rugby we’d sailed to Tenia, anchored, and swiftly made our way ashore to go kiting, David excited to finally go wave sailing after a while of only flat water. Only to have his waves ruined by a shark.

When doing anything in the ocean here, as in a lot of places where we’ve been, we are always aware that there could be sharks around. As long as we don’t see them it is easy to pretend that they are not there and bask around in the water feeling safe and secure, even though we know that we would be unlikely to see a predatory shark before it bites us, the surprise being a key element of their attack strategy. The feeling of safety vanishes completely when you see them, when you can no longer pretend that they are not there and the cocoon of imagined safety bursts. It would be crazy to ignore a shark once you’ve seen it, to stay in the water with a large predatory beast, even if we know logically that most victims of shark attacks never see their attacker. We’d snorkelled with reef sharks on our travels, but had we seen a bull shark, or a tiger shark, we would have jumped out faster than quick.

 

As it turned out, Gabe and I had a good time on the flat waters of the shallow lagoon, whizzing around on our six metre kites watching fish scatter to all sides as the shadow of the kite fell upon them, Alec staring forlornly out from the beach, waiting patiently for his boobies to return. We didn’t see any big sharks, only the gray shadows of small reef sharks cruising the sandy channels of between the magnificently coloured coral, the blues and purples and yellows and greens turning the lagoon into a blur of colours.

We stayed at Tenia for five days, the men managing to bravely / foolishly ignore the shark they had seen on the first day and return again and again to the break, having a ball on the wave. As the wind lessened over the course of the week, more kitesurfers and windsurfers appeared, but there was still plenty of space for us all in the vast lagoon.
The kids frolicked for days on end in the shallows, snorkelling the nearby reef, jumping off the kayak, making glue for sculptures out of liquified sand, Alec busily ferrying water from the sea to the sculpture factory for hours on end at the orders of the older children.

“We need more water, more water”, yelled Matias, who was busy mixing the sand.

“Water, more, water”, panted Alec, running as fast as he could on his little stumbly legs, tongue out, balancing his little water bottle in his hands, carefully emptying out water where instructed.
“We need more powder, get more powder”, shouted Vida from the nearby dune, her and Lukie busily grabbing tubberware full of soft, dry sand and running it down to the factory.

Thus occupied, the kids played for hours on end by the water’s edge, only interrupting their play to come eat – snacks of juicy pineapple, crackers and emmental, dried fruit, lunches of rice salads with parboiled haricots verts and crunchy cucumbers, or sandwiches, stuffed with french cheese and cerrano ham, fresh succulent tomatoes, crispy lettuce and French dijon mustard mayonnaise.

“I want boobie, I want boobie”, wailed Alec, not satisfied with the solid food, his voice rising with despair as he pushed away the proffered carrot sticks and orange wedges. “I want boobie, I WANT BOOBIE”.

The French know how to take care of and equip their deserted islands. Many of the little ilots dotting the lagoon are marine reserves, sporting pristine coral teeming with fish and turtles, dugongs hiding out in the deeper seagrass beds. Mooring buoys are provided in the ones closest to Noumea, making it easy for day boats and yachts to visit and reducing the damage done by anchoring. Compost toilets and fire pits with chained down picnic tables and fire grilles are scattered over the islands, and firewood is delivered daily or weekly depending on the number of visitors expected. It is free to camp here, and one could have an awesome, cheap camping holiday, kitesurfing and snorkelling, sleeping in zipped-up tents (to prevent warmth seeking seasnakes from entering) – all you would have to bring is food and water.

 

One evening on Tenia we had a bonfire in one of the firepits provided, feasting on French saucissons, crunchy salad and freshly roasted corn on the cobs, the kids piling into the dinghy in the dark to go back to the boat, full of sausages, sooty tribal patterns in their faces, sand in their hair.

 

Despite not seeing them for a year, it didn’t take Vida long to acclimatise to the boys.

“I LOVE Star Wars”, she said, after a briefing session watching excerpts from Movie III staged by the boys to familiarise her with their play. “The light sabres are SO cool”.

In the evening, before falling asleep, she would lie in her bed reading Matias’s Captain Underpants book, appearing freshly faced the next morning with quotes. “Pee on your socks for warmth, they changed the sign”, she chuckled, showing me a page in the book.

“Sorry, Gabe”, I said, “didn’t mean to introduce toilet humour to your family”.

“I want boobie, I WANT BOOBIE”, cried Alec somewhere in the background, distracting Gabe from a reply.

 

Once the wind died down a bit, we went back towards Noumea and stopped at Ilot Koue for a last day of kitesurfing. A tiny stretch of creamy sand scattered with white bleached corals and clinging succulent vegetation fighting to hold down the sand, Koue has only a few trees scattered on the raised platform of the centre of the island, and is surrounded by a turquoise lagoon fringed by a reef teeming with life, topped with a stretch of beautifully flat water to kite in a fresh seabreeze. The sun was fierce and the kids were splashing in the water as we took turns speeding across the shallows on our kite boards, just inches away from where the kids were peacefully playing in the shallows. At the end of a day there in the hot sun we were all red-faced and roasted, finally feeling warm after a week of chilly but enjoyable winds.

 

On our last day, a hot windless hazy morning, we went to Ilot Nge to show Vida the incredible sealife there. As we approached the mooring buoys through the glassy waters of the early morning we saw turtles and sharks, huge remora, giant trevally and large coral trouts gliding through the crystal clear waters. We soon went snorkelling, and Vida was ecstatic to see a turtle, snorkelling above it as it glid gracefully through the water just above the seabottom for hundreds of metres, weaving in and out of seagrass groves, stopping to visit small coral outcrops on its way away from the shadows following it around on the surface.

We celebrated our last night with a bonfire on the beach, roasting potatoes in the hot coals and chargrilling vegetables on a grille handily provided by the French authorities. The kids rummaged around the area and quickly turned into Indian savages, their faces covered in soot, feathers in their hair, bones and fish carcasses tied to their belts, fierce expressions on their faces, tent pegs in their hands as weapons, Alec’s facade the only one crumbling as the night wore on.

“I want boobie, I WANT boobie, I WANT BOOBIE”.

“Are you sure we should go today?” I asked.
David shrugged. “It won’t make a lot of difference if we delay it, this weather pattern will last to next week”.
I gulped. It had been a very rough passage from Fiji to Vanuatu, and I had been sicker than ever before, unable to do much but sit in the skipper’s seat and stare feebly at the horizon. It wasn’t that it was super windy, although we had been hit by a front or two; it was more the angle of the swell, the confused seastate tossing us around, jerking and slamming us one way and another until we were all covered in bruises.
“Well”, I said. “I guess we might as well go, then. I’ll take some seasickness pills, and give Matias some, too”.
And so we went, and in the end the seasickness wasn’t too bad, the pills keeping the nausea at bay for both Matias and myself. It was rough, though, waves crashing over us so frequently that it was impossible to sit in the cockpit without getting completely soaked. David kept maintaining that it really wasn’t that rough, that it was just the angle of the swell. But as far as I can remember, we’ve never before had so much water entering the cockpit.

On the second day Grande Terre of New Caledonia appared on the horizon, misty rocks rising steeply out of the dark grey water. Apparently Cook named it New Caledonia because it reminded him of the Scottish highlands, and on our approach we could see why – dark, rugged, green hills set against a background of the bleak grey sky. We were further south now than we had ever been and the weather was cold, a chill southerly breeze blowing. I went inside and got out the woollies – we hadn’t needed them until now, but there was a limit to what we could stoically endure – and we rugged up, in layers topped with our offshore jackets.

 

New Caledonia was first settled by the Lapita people (named for a site on Grande Terre where their pottery was found) who arrived from Vanuatu arund 1500 BC. Captain Cook spotted Grande Terre in 1774, and a few English and American whalers and sandalwood traders settled down in the area in the 1800s. Missionaries arrived soon after, both Tongan protestants and French Marists. The indigenous people, the Kanaks, were meanwhile stolen in large numbers and sent to work as slaves overseas as blackbirders.
In 1853 Napolen annexed the country, ostentiably to protect the Catholic missions there, but really to claim the land and establish a penal colony on Grande Terre to ease up space in France’s overfilled prisons.
As settlers began to spread skirmishes between Europeans and the Kanaks became more common until they culminated in the Revolt of 1878. Following the revolt the Kanaks were brutally suppressed by the French regime.

With World War II came the allies, with US forces setting up camp in Noumea from where they would lead attacks on the Japanese in the Philippines and Coral Sea.
After the war New Caledonia was changed from a colony to a French Overseas Territory, and Kanaks were finally recognised as citizens and the wealthier Kanaks given the vote. Great nickel reserves were found on Grande Terre, leading to an economic boom in the 1950s and 1960s; today New Caledonia remains one of the world’s largest nickel producers.

With the improving economy came decades of bitter strife and bloody fighting between the Kanak independence movement and the French. Finally in 1988, the French Prime Minister Michel Rocard brokered the Matignon Accords, under which it was agreed that the French would support education, construction and infrastructure to help the economy of the territory, and that a referendum on full independence would be held in the future. The referendum was held in May 2014; the outcome was that New Caledonia remains French Overseas Territory for the time being.

After spending a couple of days checking in and stocking up on parmesan, baguette and terrine du campagne, we left Noumea to spend some time on Ilot Nge, a wonderful little island about an hour’s sail from Noumea. The island has a great sandspit from which to launch a kite and wonderfully flat water behind the beautiful reef that surrounds it. The whole area is a marine reserve, and turtles and sharks came to greet us as we moored up on the buoys helpfully placed on the seagrass just off the beach.

A giant trevally and three remoras soon took up permanent residence under the boat; whenver we jumped in the water they would swim towards us in a hopeful manner, perhaps thinking that we were going to feed them.

Seasnakes were also showing some interest in us, swimming up to us in the shallows, snuggling up to the fire we lit on the beach, and one even climbed onto the boat one evening, making me nervous about what I could expect to find in my bed the next morning.

 

Seasnake venom is the most toxic venom known and one bite from a seasnake can easily kill a grown person. However, the snakes are quite small, and their mouth can’t gape over much, so in reality the risk of getting bitten by one is rather low, although we did have to issue stern warnings to the kids to leave them alone.

 

When kitesurfing over the seagrass beds, David saw a couple of dugongs, huge brown shapes sitting near the surface calmly chewing the seagrass cud. Large turtles were cruising the bay, coming up for air every 20 minutes or so. What a place – we’re looking forward to spending the next month or so here!

“Woah”, shouted Matias. “Look, it’s exploding”.

Grabbing my hand he pulled me away from the dark edge and stopped to watch from a safe distance, ready to run if necessary. The mountain roared and crackled, shooting up scores of glowing rocks from its molten interior, the luminous fragments thrown high up into the sky only to drop back down into the crater against the background of sparks fanning off in all directions. Billows of thick black smoke rose and fragments of ash and dust blew up and around, landing in our faces and covering our clothes. It tasted of sulphur and sand, a sour, gritty paste coating our nostrils and mouths.

We were perched on the rim of the caldera of Mount Yasur, cautiously peering into the famously active volcano that keeps the southern end of the Island of Tanna in Vanuatu warm. We had come here for a quick stop over on our way from Fiji to New Caledonia mainly to view the amazing volcano and to spend some money in the area which was devastated by Cyclone Pam in March this year.

Our first sight of the Mount Yasur volcano was on our approach into Vanuatu, where, on my early morning watch, I had seen the blaze lighting up the sky in the predawn light, a pinkish orange hue spreading from the top of the mountain to nearby clouds. Tired and miserably seasick, the light first had me confused – we were heading west, so the sunrise was supposed to be behind us – what was that red glow, then, dead ahead? A giant bush fire? Only once I could make out the shape of the terrain did I realise it was the volcano, spitting out flames as if to challenge the rising sun.

 

Vanuatu is incredibly geologically active, sporting earthquakes, volcanoes, crustal uplift and subsidence in abundance within its 83 islands. When entering the anchorage at Port Resolution at the southern end of Tanna we saw steam rising from the sides of the bay, the seawater bubbling away at the margins of the rocks where a hot spring resided. Port Resolution was named by Captain Cook when he anchored in 1774, but the spot where he anchored has since been uplifted and now forms a shallow, treacherous reef.

Cook wasn’t the first European to visit; before him came Pedro Fernandes de Queirós who spotted the largest island in the group in 1606 and claimed it for Spain. Following him, the islands were rediscovered by Bougainville in 1786. However, it was Cook who charted the island group first and named the archipelago nation New Hebrides, a name that stuck until independence when it was renamed Vanuatu, from vanua (land / home) and tu (stand).

Vanuatu has been inhabited since the first Austronesians came to settle the volcanic island group from the Solomon Islands about 4000 years ago. Ni-Vanuatu (Vanuatu people) lived in relatively isolated small villages based around kinship, and warfare with neighbouring clans was common, occasionally with the aim of capturing a male or two for the coming week’s dinner. Religion was based on the worship of ancestors, and magic was eagerly practiced to ward off evil spirits. Into this society arrived increasing numbers of Europeans in the 1800s – at first Brits from Australia, later French people associated with the increased French interests in New Caledonia. With the Europeans came the usual disastrous mix of disease and weapons, which combined with blackbirding, the forced removal of adult males to work on plantations in Fiji and New Caledonia, acted to decimate the Ni-Vanuatu population. Overall, the native population plummeted from estimates of more than 1 million people prior to European contact to about 41,000 in 1938.

As colonial interests ramped up in the region, Vanuatu was claimed by both France and Great Britain. The two nations fought for many years over the control of the islands before they finally agreed on a British-French combined management of the archipelagoing in 1906. An independence movement arose in the 1970s, and after the brief Coconut War of 1980, the Republic of Vanuatu was founded.

It must have been quite a feat to unite such a diverse area. Vanuatu sports an impressive 113 distinct Austronesian languages, evolved because the mountainous terrain cuts off contact between adjacent villages. It is the most language dense area in the world, each language spoken by an average of only 2000 people. The offical languages are English and French (which nobody speak) as well as the pidgin language Bislama, which is phonetic English spoken with a French sentence structure and combined with Melanesian grammar. Bislama is hilarious, reminding us of the language spoken by the Gungans in Star Wars. Overfilled is ‘fulap tumas’; please is ‘plis’; thank you is ‘tangkyu’; very sorry is ‘sori tumas’, and a ladies bra is called a ‘basket blong titi’. Finally here are some people who can understand our boys when they are immersed in their Jar Jar Binks impersonations.

To the newcomer, Vanuatu is an incredible place. Steep rocky islands covered in lush vegetation topped with steaming volcanoes spitting out ash and fire. Third world villages with chicken, pigs and dogs rummaging in amongst houses made from Pandanus mats thrown over a wooden framework, cooking fires out the back. A water pump, donated by an Australian aid project, in the centre of the village, in constant use, swarmed by half naked, snotty nosed children with big tummies and flies in their eyes, clutching their aluminium pots. Solemn men fishing in the bay just off the village, in tiny, hand-made dug out outrigger canoes which they paddle with expert deftness. One came to ask us for fishing line (‘string’), and we happily gave him a wad of 60-pound line which would see him catch some big fish if only he could get his hands a bigger boat to allow him to go into the deeper, rougher water on the outside of the bay.

 

The poverty is palpable, with men and children wearing tattered, dirty t-shirts bearing strange slogans from foreign countries, donated by a charities to foreign aid projects. Although only slightly worse off than Fiji in terms of GDP, Vanuatu seems to us orders of magnitude poorer; perhaps it is the effect of the recent cyclone, or simply that our impressions of Fiji were biased by the wealthy resort islands with locals employed in the tourism industry. Or perhaps it is the houses – erected quickly and cheaply, ready to be blown away in a cyclone, the clusters of woven huts remind me of villages in Africa, only there the houses are sturdier. Villages are still very traditional, with sharply segregated roles and separate areas designated for men and women.

“This is where the men sit to drink kava”, said Miriam, the kindergarten teacher who was kindly showing us around the small village just behind Port Resolution. She pointed towards the village namakal, a little covered area where men drink kava.

“What about the women?” I asked. “Do they drink kava?”

“No, we’re not allowed. Western women can, but not Ni-Vanuatu”.

We continued walking, the path weaving right in front of the namakal.

“Women can walk this way only during the day”, she said. “When the men gather to drink kava, one hour before sunset, we have to walk the other way” she gestured to a path going off to one side “so that we don’t see them. We’re not allowed to look at men drinking kava”.

“Why can’t women drink kava?”

“Because kava makes you lazy, and the women are too busy to be lazy – we have to look after the children, grow the vegetables, cook the food. We don’t have time to be lazy like the men do.”

Vanuatu women are not allowed to stand higher than a man either, or to walk over a fire, because it’s smoke may rise higher than a man. Within the village are areas set aside for women to use when they menstruate, and during their entire pregnancies they are confined to a hut.

Miriam’s situation wasn’t easy.

“My husband left me, for a woman in Vila”, she said. “But my brothers and sisters helped me, and I stay with them”. She is one of nine, six brothers and two sisters, the brothers remaining with their mother in the village, the sisters married off and living on their husband’s compounds.

“Your English is good”, I commented. We had come to the village looking for her brother, Stanley, who arranged for volcano tours for visitors. Miriam had approached us as we stood there, looking lost, and had offered to help. A small, wiry woman of perhaps 35, clad in a loose, flowery dress, she had offered to show us the village whilst we waited for her brother. We gladly accepted – you need a local guide to enter a village, and we were keen to explore the settlement.

“I completed grade 7. After that there were no more money for school, my father said I had to start working. I’ve been teaching kindergarten at the school for more than ten years now”. She stopped on the path and turned to look up at me. “We never used to get paid, the government only pays teachers of Grade 1 up. But the community gathered some money, and now I get paid a bit”.

We asked about the cyclone.

“We all stood together, in that house.” She pointed towards a collapsed house, mats hanging off the wooden framework. “It was raining hard. It was very, very windy. A lot of damage to the village.”

Cyclone Pam hit Vanuatu hard, in particular Tanna. A total of 15 or 16 people died in the cyclone, and thousands were injured. The storm formed in early March east of the Solomon Islands from where it tracked south, strengthening until it reached Category 5 Cyclone Status in mid-March, with winds peaking at 250 km/h as it directly hit Tanna Island and its more northerly neighbour, Erromango. The cyclone crippled Vanuatu’s infrastructure, compromising telecommunications and destroying hospitals, schools and water supplies. It was estimated at the time that 98% of the nation’s buildings were damaged by the storm.

In Miriam’s village in Port Resolution Bay the damage was still visible – uprooted trees, damaged huts, washed away roads. Miriam told us how they received help in the form of rice, as all their crops were destroyed.

Back on the boat we gathered all that we had that might be useful and donated it to the village – tins of food, books, pens, paper, clothing for children and adults.

 

Miriam’s village is modern, a brand new concrete school building erected after Cyclone Pam, a UNICEF tent on campus. Just around the corner is a village where locals live according to kastom – a set of traditional customs and taboos. Here men wear only nambas (penis wrappers) and women just grass skirts, living life much the same way their ancestors did a thousand years ago. In these kastom villages Christianity was spurned in favour of the infinitely more exotic John Frum religion, a Cargo Cult (a movement seeking to obtain material wealth through magic) centred on the belief in a mythical messianic figure named John Frum promising Melanesian deliverance. The phenomenon started in the 1940s when US forces landed on the islands, stirring the imagination of islanders with their seemingly unlimited material wealth, fresh supplies (cargo) being air dropped as if by magic every week or two. The cults arose when charismatic leaders had kava-induced visions commanding them to persuade followers that the worship of certain “Americans” (like the mythical John Frum) would lead to unlimited material wealth like that enjoyed by the American forces. All they had to do to obtain the goods was to mimic the day-to-day activities of the US soldiers, leading to a host of men in Tanna performing military drills with sticks for rifles, sitting in makeshift control towers wearing coconut headphones and waving landing signals on quickly cleared runways in the jungle in the belief that this would attract the cargo. Although less popular now than 50 years ago (some adherents impatiently dropped off when the promised wealth failed to materialise), John Frum today is both a religion and a political party with a member in Parliament.

Even more peculiar is the Prince Philip Movement on the other side of the island, where villagers of the Yaohnanen tribe worship Prince Philip, believing him to fulfill the ancient myth of the pale-skinned son of a mountain spirit who ventured overseas to look for a powerful woman to marry. When Prince Philip visited the island with the clearly important Queen Elizabeth in 1974, villagers rejoiced at the opportunity of seeing their deity firsthand.

It is easy to laugh at these practices, but I guess most religious beliefs are hard for outsiders to understand. Cargo Cults certainly served a purpose to reinforce social relationships that were under stress in a changing world, and even if the cargo never materialised, who can blame them for hoping? When asked how long they were going to wait for, a local man allegedly replied back in 2003 “We can wait for much longer. Christians have been waiting for thousands of years, we’ve only been waiting for 63”.

Back on the volcano magic was certainly in the air as darkness fell, obscuring the sharp drop-off immediately in front of us and leaving us suspended in thick blackness, peering at the spectacular light show on offer. Thunder roared and crackled as luminous rocks the size of cars, nay buses, were spat out high when the mountain belched again, glowing sparks spraying the heavens. Oddly, the scene felt safer in the dark when we couldn’t see how just close we were to the abyss into the inferno. Had the mountain been almost anywhere else in the world solid bars would have kept tourists from plummeting into the depths, but this being Vanuatu there were no railings to cling onto and no lit path to follow on our way back down the mountain. So we stumbled down using our dim head torches, stubbing our toes against fresh lava deposits, Lukie falling over once or twice, until we finally reached the car park where Belbup, our driver, was waiting to take us back to Bob in Resolution Bay.

“Mummy, why is there not very much food?” whispered Lukie, leaning forward across the table. “Is this all we’re going to get?”

“No”, I whispered back, “don’t worry, we’ll get more”.

We had told the kids that it would be fine dining, that there would be no kid’s meals, no pizza or chips. But it was a bit later than our normal dinner time, and Lukie was starving.

The waiter finished pouring the water and left.

Four prawns lay beautifully displayed in the centre of a square plate, smothered in a masala sauce, delicately decorated with thin strips of carrot, cucumber and coriander. They smelled delicious.

“Mummy, can I please have a prawn?” asked Lukie. “Or maybe two, maybe I can have Matias’s, he doesn’t like prawns”.

“Let’s save the extra one for Daddy”, I said. “It’s his birthday we’re celebrating”.

We were at the exclusive ‘1808’ restaurant, at Castaway Island Resort in the Mamanuca Group of Fiji, splurging on a gourmet meal out to celebrate David’s upcoming birthday. His birthday is tomorrow but as we’re leaving Fiji today, we thought we’d have a meal out whilst having access to a nice restaurant.

And it certainly was an inspiring dining experience, fusion Asian Pacific cuisine executed over a camp-out kitchen set up in the sand, overlooking the sea, the dishes arriving as they were cooked, all locally inspired sensational bursts of flavour and texture such as seawater confit of pork belly, lemongrass tea chicken with coriander salsa verde, and sizzling Yagara pepper beef. We’d had a wonderful day at the island, snorkelling the pristine reef, watching superyachts and seaplanes whizz by, relaxing one final day. And now this incredible meal to round it off with, easily the best food we’d ever had in our lives.

We were on our way to Nadi, to provision for our upcoming passage before checking out. Originally planning to go to New Caledonia, we’d made a last minute decision to stop over at Vanuatu to see the famous active volcano at Tanna on our way to New Caledonia, making the trip three nights rather than four. The weather was looking good for a departure on 2nd October, steady winds, fast sailing on a nice beam reach.

Since Alexis and Cara left us we’d been relaxing in Blue Lagoon, swimming and snorkelling, and had watched Wales beat England in the rugby at the local yacht club. Huge super yachts had arrived there and anchored some distance away and we watched the kerfuffle as the resort staff got ready for the ‘cultural welcome’ for the owners. One of the huge ships anchored looked like a research or navy ship, decked out as it was with a helicopter and a crane. The staff told us that this was the ‘shadow ship’ of the other yacht, the vessel bearing the toys for the owner to enjoy – the water skiing boat, bigger than Bob, being the tender, the helicopter for the scenic rides, the sports equipment to ensure a great experience for the owner without him having the inconvenience of having to interact with lowly helicopter mechanics and kite surfing instructors during the remainder of his stay.
Different world – I wonder how much fossil fuel they burn up in a year, two huge vessels chugging along from one desirable destination to the next, ready for the owner to descend upon them whenever he or she gets a break in their busy schedule.

In any case, I hope they enjoy Fiji as much as we have. It has been an incredible place, full of beautiful islands and underwater treasures. But the best thing has been the people – the incredibly friendly islanders, the cultural melting pot mixing Indians, Fijians and on the mainland also Chinese, resulting in breathtaking diversity on the streets and buses, delicate Indian ladies adorned in sparkly jewellery and glittery silk saris next to huge Fijian mamas sporting the signature short cropped afro and sober church wear. The food at every street vendor is wonderful – delicious curry bites dipped in hot sauce, a street version of the Indo-Fijian fusion cuisine, without the refinery of the 1808 restaurant but still tasty and at a fraction of the price.

Oh, Fiji, we’ll miss you and are sad to leave – we have so enjoyed visiting here, getting to know the culture a bit, visiting villages on remote islands from east to west. Moce, and Vinaka for your hospitality.