Beez Neez now Chy Whella

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Big Bear and Pepe Millard

Sat 12 Sep 2015 22:47

Egg Event and the Path Home

We got back late morning from our sevusevu with Chief Adi to the promise of Bear’s Best Boiled Eggs. Well colour me happy, I had my very own egg event. Such a rarity, this must mean his is of giant proportions, but for now I’ll admire mine. Today cannot get any better.

When Bear put his eggs on the table I could only gasp Wow. I opened my very own egg event to find if I threw it at someone it would indeed hurt but hey, looking across the table made me realise that if we had a blog for Egg Event of the Year, I was looking at it. Oh, I thought you had done your pictures, I’ve just popped in the golden curtain hanging from the one on the left. Don’t spoil the moment for me, I’m staring at the best on the right. Are we sad ??? Now we are fed and watered it’s time to set off in Baby Beez to find the plane wreck that gives the name Spitfire Bay on the other side of the island. It’s a well defined track, it says so in the cruising guide. Mmmm. After walking the full length of the beach and trying one likely through the crab holes, we turn back and as luck would have it we see footprints that disappear onto a grassy overhang, we give it a try and found a ‘sort of’ track. Feeling this is our best shot we stretch out at a faster-than-average-bimble. We meet a lady with three dogs. Asking her if we are heading the right way she nods and points left. “When the path does this, do that”. As she waggles a gnarly hand to the right she is more emphatic about the left. Bear nods sagely. We know about his penchant for turning right as happened on the last ‘choice’ en route to finding Lo’s teashop. This memory is all too fresh in my mind and I set off once more but this time firmly in the lead.

After a bit of luck, an educated guess and a fair bit of wading, we did indeed snorkel over the wreck, actually the remains of a Grumman Hellcat. The local story goes – the pilot ran out of fuel after departing his carrier ship and landed on the reef at low tide. That year a cyclone picked the plane up and dumped it where it is today. The pilot had been missing for several months and eventually his brother came out to Fiji to search for his remains and take them home. He found his brother in one of the local villages living well, with many of the admiring village women tending to his every need............

Wading back.

By the time the water was knee-deep it was very hot, we beached some way down the beach from our pile of ‘stuff’. We walk by an outboard, what a view to end your days to.

We walk through the coconut grove with new, young green shoots planted in straight rows and well tended. Another outboard, this time a Johnson. We lift a large clam shell and are amazed at the sheer weight and thickness of the shell.

We had been so looking forward to chatting to the elderly owners of this house, set back from the beach, the lady is said to have seen the plane come in to land all those years ago. Sadly, all was closed and locked. These welcoming people must be away for the weekend, we hope to get them pointed out to us at church tomorrow.

Watching my intrepid co-explorer coming back from washing his snorkel shoes made me think, suppose this was the view you had year-round from your front windows and door, just as our away-just-now couple have. They lead such a simple life, grow their own food, fish when they need to, trade for lobster and octopus and have reached their eighties in very good health and are very happy - so we are told by the many who know them. Their nearest neighbours a young family, within shouting distance but privately situated through the coconut grove. Simple, modest and hard-working, like so many of the people we have come to admire in Fiji, always smiling, always welcoming and always prepared to share.

Their personal path to the beach, talking of paths it’s time for us to find ours.

The baby poinsettias, the three burnt stumps and the dead pal, all letting me know we were on the right track.

Through the first bit, easy. Next came the cul-de-sac with uncertain onward bit.

No worries, intrepid remembered the baby banana, then I recalled the grassy bit with all the grasshoppers taking off and opening their wings for onward glide, then came the flat bit across the middle.

All we had left was the little copse, the jump over the tree root over the grassy overhang and we should pop out on our beach. Half an hour later...............