Rowan’s day started early with loads of work calls. At least it got me going early enough to attend my yoga class on time at 7:30am. This rather lonesome, attractive young Finnish woman came touting around the pontoons yesterday, drumming up support for her yoga class, and trying to get a crewing passage. I joined up for yoga and sadly for her I was the only person to turn up this morning. A bit of pressure on me, I was feeling very stiff in the intermittent drizzle. I wondered how things would progress when she started the class with a couple of very loud farts! She apologised and we continued to have a very good class. When we finished she asked if we had any spare filter water on board as they were out and she didn’t like drinking the chlorinated marina water. Turns out she is staying with Marty on Pec, the guy who came around yesterday evening.
Rowan was finally finished with his meetings on zoom around 10:30, when we headed into town to meet Simon who took us on a tour around some of the sites. Simon served in the British army for 11 years, serving in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Lebanon and Ireland. He was stationed in Wales and in Darlington too, and was full of stories. Rowan was tickled to find we were being driven by the same taxi driver who took him to the hospital a couple of days ago. The sad news is that Rowan could not get our new navigation card to work, he has discovered he had got the wrong type. In the meantime he has put our old cards in and out a number of times and they too are not working now. Either the card reader is broken or we have damaged the cards using the pliers to get them in and out behind the nav station. So it was back to the chandlery to get a new one posted from the mainland. This means we wont be leaving tomorrow as hoped.
First stop on our tour was our request to go to the KokoMana chocolate factory which had been recommended by our rally. Sadly we arrived too late to join the tour, so we just bought a few bars of delicious chocolate. It was in an amazing location up a hill in dense forest, the cocoa plants like growing under a forest canopy. Started by an English couple, he grew up in Nigeria, and has been an agronomist here in the Pacific Islands for years.
Gorgeous vegetation at KokoMana
Cocoa pod
Next up was a swim at the Blue lagoon, on the windward side of the island, an enormous hole in the reef, 300m deep. You could tell the deep blue outline of the hole, and apparently it is great to swim in, but in the grey overcast weather we were not tempted. Sadly the little beach where we sat and had a beer instead, had rather a lot of rubbish and was not that appealing. From there we headed back over the island passing the turn off to our waterfall yesterday, driving through incredible lush jungle, mainly covered in creepers. Finally we turned off onto a little track and a couple of kms later turned up at a house. By this time the sun had come out and we walked to the river where we were told to swim in cold and hot water. We got into our swimming gear and waded across the knee high river to the other side that had some logs and stones creating a little pool, the water in here was really hot and the ground even hotter. We then spotted a section cordoned off that was even hotter with the odd bubble surfacing. SavuSavu has a hot spring in town that is so hot the locals still cook on it, and have done for years. Our spring was no that hot but still incredibly hot. We had a very relaxing time reclining in the hot water and then refreshed ourselves in the cold river water when we returned to the bank.
The windward side of the island with extraordinary rock formations, amazing that the palm trees can grow on them
Lime stone carved rocks
Beers at the blue lagoon, the dark blue beyond Rowan is the deep hole and the reef way beyond that
Taro plants a staple food here, growing beneath the palms
Gorgeous hibiscus of some sort on our way to the river
Taro plants
Papaya tree, that we call Pawpaw in South Africa
In our own little hot bath
Reclining in the hot water
This is the agricultural area on the island
We stopped off at a look out point with a cafe sponsored by many organisations from around the world, great views over to the marina. Yesterday it was too misty to stop. We rushed home as we had a guy coming to climb the mast to try and fix our tricolour light, the light you have on when under sail at night. It stopped working a day after we left NZ so we cruised at night with our anchor light on. We had a problem with it before, on our passage from Colombia to Panama. The guy couldn’t find any thing wrong with it, and it seems to be working again, it might have been the trip switch, just another little quirky issue.
View from the look out cafe
Simon our guide and the taxi driver the far side of Rowan
Travis climbing the mast to fix the light
We went out for supper in town with Adrian and Tasi, on the catamaran next door to us, she has Samoan parents but both are kiwi born. A very sweet couple. We also invited Nancy on Aldabra, she is a solo American sailor in her mid 60’s (we think). We have twice anchored rather too close to her, once in the Tuamotus and then in Tonga. We had a very good meal at the Surf & Turf restaurant in town, which looked rather run down, and next to a seedy looking nightclub. However we had excellent food, it certainly deserved all it’s rave reviews. I had a mud crab soup and Rowan had a mud crab curry, both were delicious – we suggested he got a more appealing name!
Rowan’s Mud crab curry
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