Survival in Paradise
Vega
Hugh and Annie
Fri 13 Jul 2018 23:22
Jese our host said that he had lost his outboard motor while out fishing back in April. He was interested in the fact that we had scuba diving equipment and it became clear that he would like us to go down and look for the engine. Annie was keen to do this but, given that it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack in 30m of water and poor visibility, I was not enthusiastic. The compromise was that we would allow his cousin, a qualified diver from the next village, to use my gear and he would bring his boat around the following morning. We then heard from another villager that the crew of a previous yacht had also dived to look for the engine and two of them had failed to find it. We were now both decidedly lukewarm about the project. We also heard that the engine had been considered to belong to the whole village, having been given to Jese by a previous yachtie, and he was being given a hard time for treating it as his own and then losing it.
The following morning we hoped that the diving expedition wouldn’t materialise. Jese and his wife were spending the week at the local boarding school cooking school meals (something the villagers from the the three villages sharing the school do in rotation) and he would need to arrange a lift back with his cousin. However, Jese plus cousin and another guy who turned out to be a former dive master, arrived at 0930 and we were committed. Annie hitched a lift ashore with Jese having been invited to join the village women in the community hall to weave mats, while I sorted the dive gear and waited for him to return. I took our anchor float to mark the assumed position of the engine going overboard and this was attached to a concrete block that was dropped into 30m depth. Cousin donned my gear (reassuringly expertly) but just before going in Jese insisted we all pray. He said a long and presumably pleading prayer to the Almighty and then cousin was overboard and we were able to follow his bubble trail hading off in the opposite direction to the float. After 20 minutes of fruitless searching cousin returned and handed the gear to the dive master who went down for another attempt - also nowhere near the marker float. Another 20 minutes went by and the diver surfaced, clutching the outboard motor!! Apparently he had all but run out of air, was about to surface and looked down one last time and there it was, perched on a rock! He had just enough air to inflate his buoyancy jacket and lift himself plus outboard to the surface!
Back in the village there was much posing for photographs with the engine and a mixture of pleasure and disbelief that it had been recovered. Annie had received all the meaningful gossip from the mat weavers including the background on the outboard and also the disquiet about Jese’s efforts to provide services for the yachties. This was seen as not in line with the communal approach to life. In a similar vein the village mayor (who is the representative of the government in each village and considers himself more important than the largely ceremonial chief) was concerned that the chief had asked us if we could source a propellor for his outboard and some fibreglass resin. We were told that it would benefit the whole village much more if we could get them a machine for scraping the flesh out of coconuts from which they could press virgin coconutoil to provide more income for the village.
So, were Jese’s plans to develop yachtie services (guided walks, provisioning, hull cleaning, guided surfing and diving) just a pipe dream to be thwarted by the community? Interestingly the dive master was telling me that he had been advising Jese as he had worked for some years in the tourism office, still had good contacts there, had IT qualifications and could build a web site, knew all the good dive sites around the island and seemed to know how to promote the enterprise. So why hadn’t Jese mentioned this and also, if all this expertise was at hand, why had nothing happened?
We have now moved on to the islands of Dravuni and Namara. Namara is uninhabited and is the set for the “Survivor” TV show at which groups of contestants have to survive self sufficiently while carrying out various tasks, games and assignments given to them. There are versions filmed for different countries with sets of contestants from each country. Each set of contestants has a double, a set of “testers” who act out each game or task to make sure it works and set up the film sequences that the contestants will be expected to follow (or even provide footage that is mixed with that of the actual contestants). It all sounds rather contrived but is nevertheless good business for the locals from Dravuni (who own Namara) and are employed to work on the set and provide accommodation for the testers. The producers and film crew seem to be accommodated in a nearby resort on Yaukaveluvu island. After sevusevu with the mayor we were talking to one lady who provides accommodation for up to 22 testers in her house. The testers come from all around the world and some like it here so much they stay on for months after the filming is finished.
On Dravuni preparations are in hand for the arrival of a cruise ship next week. 1200 passengers will arrive for an island experience via a floating jetty that is brought ashore between visits. They will drink Kava, walk up to the local high viewing point, have a massage on the beach and buy green coconuts for drinking at 5 Fijian dollars a coconut (about £1.60 each). Other stalls selling souvenirs (sourced from Suva, the capital, and not made locally) will be set up and reggae music will lull them into a laid back Caribbean frame of mind (!). After four or five hours of island revelry and a show of Fijian dancing they will reembark and move on to their next island experience. After an hour drinking tea (the leaf from a small tree that gives a strongly aromatic delicious lemon flavour) with one guy who was keen to show us a photograph taken of him with Prince Edward on a visit in the 1983, we learned that the locals are both tickled by and grateful for these opportunities to generate income.