Greetings!
It's been a couple of days since I last chimed in and that's due to the nature of authentic Fijian life, meaning not a lot of stuff is happening, plus I didn't have a power socket adapter, and wasn't able to power my laptop. I bought one now, which means the updates ought to come more regularly from now on.
As for a typical Fijian workday; usually we do about 90 minutes of work each day, and just chill the rest of the time, as it is too hot to really do anything.
I'll break down the past four days in this part of the blog.
On Thursday Zare and I went for a stroll in the jungle behind the house, where we discovered some wild spinach. We took it down, cut the stalks into smaller pieces, and planted them in a plot of land we prepared earlier. After planting, we watered them and covered the soil with bamboo branches to prevent the rain from washing the soil away.
That was all we did on Thursday, besides eating loads of fruit and relaxing on the porch.
On Friday I went to greet Jack. He was staying in a resort near Zare's house. We also got word from Lucie (she's French, we met at Bamboo backpackers on the first day we arrived there). She said she wanted to go to Taveuni, which is the third biggest island in Fiji, and after that we could meet. After hearing the news, Zare suggested that she should come to his house for a couple of days, and then we head on to Taveuni together. I conveyed the message to Lucie, and she agreed. She had a ferry from Suva on Friday night, and she was supposed to arrive to Savusavu on Saturday morning, where Jack and I would meet her and arrange transportation back to Zare's.
I got up at 6:00 AM on Saturday, called Vinu (the taxi driver from blog part 8) and headed on a 15 minute walk to his house. On my way there I was greeted by this amazing sunrise:
After meeting Vinu we picked up Jack and he took us both to Savusavu port, where Lucie's ferry was going to land. It was supposed to arrive at 7:00 AM, but since we are in Fiji and everything is running on Fiji time, the boat appeared at 8:30.
After greeting, we headed to Savusavu to buy a few things and took a taxi to Zare's, where we were served with Zare's excellent pasta with minced meat.
After lunch we hanged out for a bit and as the day was going to an end, it was time for Jack to go back to his accommodation. Naturally, Zare filled him a bag full of fruit and spices to take with him, and told him to come back the next morning at 8:00 AM and spend the day with us. He also acknowledged that we are going to slaughter a couple of roosters, as there was too many chickens in the henhouse already, and having visitors would be an excellent opportunity to eat them since his freezer is too small to store them.
Which brings me to Sunday morning at 5:30, when Zare woke me up and said that it's time to go catch the roosters, as they were still asleep. We went in the henhouse, he grabbed the first one and passed it to me. I was only supposed to hold it until he caught the other one, and then he beheaded them with a machete. He hanged them on a tree afterwards, where they waited for Liku to clean them:
After the dirty job I went out to the garden, where I took some pictures of local flora again:
When Jack arrived at 8:00 AM, Zare sent the three of us in the jungle to find some cassava and bring it home for lunch. As I was the only one of us that had the slightest idea what to look for, I gave my camera to Lucie, and she made a nice picture of me and Jack walking back home:
After lunch (the roosters were excellent by the way) we spent the whole afternoon sitting on the porch and talking, as it was Jack's last day with us (he headed on to New Zealand on Tuesday). There was a wasp building a nest above our heads, and I had to pull out my zoom lens and shoot it:
I also made a pic of the mosquitoes eating bananas:
And one of the surviving roosters:
In the evening, after Jack's departure, Liku, Lucie and myself sat down and drank about 5 litres of Kava. I can't say I didn't feel anything, and my stomach was angry with me the morning after. There are no pictures from that evening, as we were having too much fun to bother taking them ;)
Because of that, Monday was a day of lying in bed and watching It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, I only got out of bed to take pictures of some dramatic clouds during the sunset:
I'm writing this entry on Thursday evening. On Tuesday Lucie and me moved from Zare's place to Taveuni. The boat ride took us almost whole day, and we arrived pretty tired. The good news is that there's free wifi, which means I'll be able to update more frequently.
I took some pictures here yesterday, but I still need to sort them out, and I'll post a special entry with pretty much photos only, because since I'm on low budget, I can't really move around the islands too much, and there's not much do write about if you stay in or near the resort most of the time.
See you all tomorrow with more content, have a nice day :)