July 21, 2015 Blue Lagoon to Somosomo

July 21, 2015   Sunday    Blue Lagoon to Somosomo

It is a beautiful day for our short motor down to Somosomo Bay.  Tis time we are the only boat in the bay.  It is Sunday night and we can hear loud music and preaching from shore.  Apparently there is a revival service going on.  i am sorry to miss it but I am not feeling too well, just a slightly queasy stomach, so we just stay on board and enjoy the music from a distance.  Next morning we headed into the village.  This is the first time that we have been to this village some take a bundle of kava root for the chief.  As usual, there were people on the beach to welcome us and guide us to the chief.  Surprisingly, this time the chief is a woman.  First time we have encountered a woman chief.  We were received in the main room of her house where she was seated on a mattress on the floor, covered with brightly colored fabric.  On the wall behind her was an extraordinary tapa cloth, about 10 feet square, covered with intricate patterns. While I have seen some tapa cloth in the tourist stores, this is the first time I have actually seen one being used in a home.  We learned that she had made it herself.  She was a delightful old woman, looked to be about 80years old, full of questions about where we were from an what we thought of Fiji.  She had a guest book for us to sign which stated that we were expected to give $10 for the general village fund.  Unfortunately we had not brought any cash with us, not expecting to need any.  We were offered pieces of breadfruit to eat. and then told that it was time for us to leave because she was going to have lunch.

Our guide for the village tour turned out to be from the mainland  His mother and father had separated years ago and he had been living with his grandmother on the mainland and going to school.  He was just here to visit his father and had been pressed into tour guide duty.  It is not uncommon for the children from the islands to be sent to the mainland to live with relatives and go to school.  Many of them never get back.

This village was distinguished by large numbers of solar panels.  Every house had a tall metal pole with the panels mounted on top.  We learned that three of the seven villages on Naviti now have extensive solar arrays.  The government paid half of the cost and the village raised the rest.  Little by little they intend to get solar to all the villages.  It was altogether a very neat, tidy village, somehow seeming more prosperous than some of the ones we have seen.   

Once we were through with the tour we wandered down the beach where we came across a small backpacker resort.  The staff were having lunch while the young people played games and laughed and flirted and did all those things that teenagers do when they are out on their own.  We were invited to sit down and join the staff for lunch, tuna mixed with chopped cucumbers and onions dressed with cocoanut cream.  As we chatted about life in the village I asked if it was possible to find clams along the shore.  Shortly I found myself following one of the women out into the water to see what we could find.  Other times when I have dug for clams, I have looked for soft mud, then shuffled my feet along until I felt the rounded shape of the clam with my toes.  This time, we walked along in an inch or two of water over hard sand and rock.  My guide carries a long knife and studied the sand carefully.  From time to time, the knife would shoot down and then be raised up with a clam clinging to the tip.  She was seeing just the edge of the shell buried in the sand.  When she slid her knife into the opening, the clam snapped shut and was caught on the knife blade.  Try as I might, I could not see them.  I only found one the whole time we were out, but we came back with a large bag full.  Dinner that night was bouillabaisse using the clams, a small fish that swam into the crab trap and a lobster sold to us by a couple of young men who cam by in a boat

When it was time to go, the ladies asked if they could come see the boat, so of course we said yes.  They were charmed and amazed to see how compact it is.  When Alan ran them ashore again, he got involved in helping to fix the school boat that takes the kids from this village to the next for school every day.  And then the men wanted to know if we had any fish hooks.  I was glad to share since I almost never use anything but the cedar plug for trolling.   All in all, we left Somosomo the next day feeling like we had been adopted into the village.