This morning we pulled up our anchor and headed over to Beqa Island proper, into a beautiful protected bay surrounded on three sides by steep, heavily forested hills. This was an extremely comfortable anchorage – no rolling about in the waves while we try to sleep at night as the water is so protected that it is nearly glass calm.
The village here was the friendliest yet and we became friends with some of the inhabitants. Following our sevusevu (no kava this time), Anouk went off to the gardens to purchase some fresh produce and Rod was checking out a fishing boat motor that wasn’t running. An older woman snagged me and invited me into her home where she served tea and a freshly baked flat cake (looked like a tortilla but slightly thicker and sweeter). We soon had a regular coffee klatsch session as she and a couple of her daughters and a collection of grandchildren all entertained Anouk and me both. By the time we left, our hostess had arranged for us to return in the afternoon for a Meke – a traditional Fijian dance performance – and requested if possible that we videotape the performance and make a DVD of it for the village, which did own one community TV and DVD player kept in the chief’s home.
The performance was lively and lots of fun – with singing, dancing, a comedy routine (which caused great hilarity among the Fijians who could understand the words!) and a kava ceremony. I videotaped the entire thing non-stop except when invited to join in on the dancing which happened several times later in the performance. We did make several DVDs on the iMac aboard Raven and can only cross our fingers that the disks will play on the village’s old machine.
At this stopover, Anouk cleaned house and was determined to discard several unneeded and unwanted items taking up our limited space on the boat, so she gathered together a bag of stuff and presented it to the chief’s wife as a gift. However her plan backfired, as the chief’s wife immediately scurried around collecting gifts she could offer us in exchange and Anouk returned to Raven with a bag equally full of unwanted (but different!) items.
The dive boat trip lasted until two or so in the afternoon, with two separate tank dives and an hour’s rest/decompression time between. Back at Raven, we pretty well crashed for the rest of the day, until it was time to return to the resort for an evening out at the nice restaurant at the water’s edge. Then it was early to bed because we had all determined we just couldn’t miss the Shark Dive scheduled for Friday!
To be continued;-)