Settling in

After five days in Fiji, we are settling into the lifestyle quite comfortably.  Mornings have been mostly dry, making them a good time to hit the beach, which is convenient to our rental house.  The Navure house where we are staying is about 6 kilometers from the village of Savusavu and close to the end of the road and the Jean Michel Cousteau resort.  The road is paved for only about one third of the way, with the final 4 kilometers a bumpy rocky ride.   

Big buses careen down the road, and I’ve been waiting to see a mass transit stand off on one of the many turns on the dirty surface.  The house we are in is on about one third of an acre on the side of a hill, above which the owner of the property lives, but is apparently currently away on a holiday holiday in Australia.  There are papaya trees in abundance, and most of the ripe fruit is targeted by the birds who serenade us frequently, which is another reason we’ve been up early.  Who needs roosters for a wake up call? Not us!   

Ben was determined to break open a coconut but couldn’t find the right kind to cut into.  We told our taxi driver Sirah, who showed up the following day with a bright green specimen and the proper tool to perform a coconutotomy. 

We tasted the fresh as fresh can be coconut milk, confident that we could withstand our time on whatever island the next version of Survivor was taped.

We’ve hit the village everyday, in part because the internet here at the house has only worked once.  There is a restaurant in town called the Decked Out Café, which offers free wi-fi if you spend at least ten dollars on food and drinks while you’re there, a threshold we have had no trouble reaching.  Our second time there introduced us to the new owner, Colin, who is from Australia, and his wife Jeanine,  who is a native of New Zealand.  They are, as she told us, a Kangaroo and a Kiwi, and they run a dive operation about 7 kilometers away called Korosun Dive.  They got married on the Fourth of July this past summer, their “un-independence” day as they described it with a chuckle.  It’s the second marriage for both, and she had in tow her eight year old son Blygh, who defines precocious.  He and Ben have become fast friends, or at least Blygh and Ben’s Ipad are on a first-name basis.  The café has also been a place of realization that bad music knows no boundaries.  Our first time there we were treated to “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing” by Leo Sayer, a song that thankfully we hadn’t heard in years and made us feel more like leaving than dancing.  More recent visits have allowed us to experience “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” (no, I think I would prefer to kill you at this point) and “Lady in Red”.  We will have a serious musical discussion with the proprietor before our second week here is out.  Collin offered up a free snorkeling outing for the family which Ben and Marley and Annie plan on taking advantage of.  While they are doing that, I’m going to investigate the local golf scene, as both courses on the island are close to where the Korosun Dive Center is.