Tuesday 26 August – a cooling snorkel

Rowan had read somewhere that the tiny little island in the middle of the atoll had great snorkelling, we headed off with Claudette and Jen, Kary is not risking his sores getting worse. It was about two miles from the boats, a magical uninhabited small island with beautiful powdery white beaches. The snorkel turned out not to be that great, the visibility on the one side was pretty poor, most probably from all the rain. The other side was better, but the coral was in pretty bad shape, everywhere was covered in sea urchins. The fish were tiny, felt very overfished sadly. Us girls sat on the beach, while Rowan did a second circumnavigation, mainly just to get exercise. The island was just a huge coral rock eroded by the beaches with magnificent huge trees leaning over the coral cliff face. Beautifully cool for sitting under. Sadly Rowan cut his foot wading in, so another little cut to nurture. Rowan had a snorkel in the pass later in the day which was a bit better, more fish.

Supper was a surprise as Agnetta has given us all these vegetables we have never seen before. A giant bean the size of a watermelon, when we ask how to cook it, they say cook it like a cucumber, they are baffled when we say we don’t cook cucumber. So we took the skin off removed the seeds and fried it up, it’s actually like a white squash. With all the capsicums and aubergines, I made a sort of ratatouille on Bulgar wheat which turned out alright, a sprinkling of feta cheered it up. We had our snake beans on the side which were very nice. We had loads of feta in the deep freeze, now carefully rationed as we are down to our last one.