Commodore
April 18, 2023

Tuesday 18 April – sad goodbye to Han and Meghan

A last breakfast with the girls seemed a milestone as they have been with us for 2 months, we’ve so enjoyed having them on board, it will be very quiet without them, we will miss them. Rowan and I went into town to do some provisioning and got rid of our rubbish while the girls were packing and doing a brilliant job of cleaning and hoovering their cabin. The dinghy dock is a great little enclosed harbour and empty, with all the rubbish collection and recycling very efficiently arranged right there. The 3 supermarkets were all a bit basic and nothing much fresh, but we did manage to stock up on eggs which we were very happy about. Eggs for breakfast again! The supply boat comes later today, so hopefully some fresh stuff tomorrow.

Finally we loaded the girls and all their luggage into JeldiJeldi for their taxi which met us at the dock at 1pm. It was very sad to say goodbye to Han especially when we don’t know when we will see her next, hopefully she might come back here for Christmas. But it is a long old way! They are flying to Rangiroa as there were no direct flights left for Papeete the main airport of Taihiti. They overnight there and have arranged to meet up with some of the Arc boats that are anchored over there. Then they fly to Papeete tomorrow evening and overnight there for their early morning flight to San Francisco. Han was originally meeting her new boss who is based there, she was going to meet him and another lady who works for him there in his US base. In the end they are both on shoots and couldn’t meet up, and the equipment she was meant to pick up, Noah (Han’s boyfriend) has taken it back to Botswana. Noah has just done a filming contract with Han’s boss in California. We are not allowed to know anything about it…..one day! They are all incredibly secretive about their filming, I guess it’s all about the competition of finding a new wild life angle. Han is going to visit a friend of hers who she went to Oregon University with, the friend fell in love and stayed on in California. She has about 5 days there before her long trek back to Botswana.

Meghan coincidently is also visiting an American friend in San Fran who she met working in Botswana, they are both doing their PHDs and give each other moral support by the sounds of it. Meghan then returns to Botswana to go and visit all her old friends and waits to hear about her volunteering job with African Parks in Chad. She is quite concerned about all the trouble going on in neighbouring Sudan. Pretty brave going to all these remote spots in Africa.

We had a quiet afternoon relaxing and then headed to the Arc Boat ‘Sara of Sweden’ for evening drinks. It landed up being a very Swedish affair as the two other Swedish boats, Blue Sunshine and Salt also joined us. It was a good distraction from missing the company of the girls.