Thursday, August 29, 2013

Fiji: Day 25 - Going Ashore

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Today we took a dinghy ride to the little island here to meet its inhabitants. 

The beach is beautiful as always.

There are just two guys living on the island, Mattia and his Uncle Moe. Their family originated here, but have all moved to the mainland now. Mattia and Uncle Moe came here a few months ago to live permanently and try to rebuild the island while making a living selling lobster, sea cucumbers, and copra to the mainland. They live in a bunch of little shacks that they have constructed for temporary shelter.


Here is Uncle Moe with a smoke fire set up to repel Mosquitos.

There is no source of fresh water on the island, so they have to collect all the rainwater they can and store it in cisterns.

Mattia and Uncle Moe took us on a hike through the Fijian jungle to see the other side of the island. We had to cut our way through with machetes as they haven't finished making a trail yet.

We got to see a blue Coconut Crab on the way.
This is just baby and they grow much larger. They are supposedly very delicious because they eat coconut, which sweetens their meat. Uncle Moe said he is going to catch us a big one tonight to give us tomorrow along with some papayas and bananas.

We also saw one of the little salt water lakes they have on the island.

It took less than an hour before we saw the eastern side of the island through the trees.

We stopped for a coconut water break.

We hiked down to the water where I found a ton of shells. It was a real shell collectors dream there.

Gary and Uncle Moe resting in the shade.

After the hike back to their village, Mattia and I knocked some more coconuts down from a tree with a huge stick which we opened and drank by the beachside.

We returned to the dinghy to find it high and dry on a sandbar where we anchored it.

When we left it, the dinghy was anchored a few hundred meters off shore, but now we could just walk back to it.

Mattia saw us off with two huge bunches of bananas and some coconuts. We are going to return tomorrow and bring them some kava, a hammer, and a lighter.

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