Wednesday 13th February

Wednesday 13^th February

I had my hair cut a few times in the islands:

Noumea – not a problem, a lovely French woman who chatted away while NOT cutting my hair too short.  I loved being in her salon, full of people with amazing heads of curly CURLY hair in various shades of…black.

Port Vila – we will draw a veil; a not-so-pleasant encounter with a delightful young styliste who cut my hair so brutally short I kept my TilleyHat rammed onto my head for many weeks.

Honiara – not so bad; a very friendly, chatty Solomons Islands woman, large and cheerful, with a mass of black curls, who didn’t do anything too ghastly to my straight foreign hair…

One of my friends, Victoria, is blessed with beautiful long straight hair. In her day, it was a very dark brown; it turned to steel-grey curls when she had chemo, and now it is long, straight, shining and silver. Her daughter’s father was from Fiji and Torika is very beautiful with a mass of dark curls. Her own little girls have a father from PNG and their hair is even wilder, a profusion of outwardly and upwardly extending spirals. These little girls just LOVE Victoria’s hair. They comb it, brush it, pat it, and say, “Oh Nana, you have such lovely DOWN hair!” Theirs is UP hair!

More India 2006

I think our boat trip took about two and a half hours; it usually is less than an hour. Lots of time to Make Friends! Vish and Mary palled up with a delightful young bloke who reminded me very much of Jeff, my son-in-law. That is if Jeff were Chinese. Pete and I spent a lot of time talking to an Israeli girl, Danit, who was being thoroughly bored and annoyed by a guide her father had hired to look after her. She was 22 and quite capable of going to Elephanta Caves by herself, but her wealthy banker father provided escorts for her every moment in Mumbai. In the afternoon someone else was taking her shopping. I’m sure this would have been much more fun for her. We could quite understand why she preferred our company to that of her guide. He was very pompous and full of information, a lot of which was plainly quite incorrect. For example, Pete was looking at a sign on the wall in the cabin which said:

65	56
Fair	foul

Now obviously this meant that if the weather was bad the boat was only licensed to carry 56 people. But no; Mr Guide told us, in no uncertain terms, that:

Fair = lots of people, lots of rupees

Foul = not enough people, foul profits

Danit looked upon him with a very jaundiced eye.  She was staying with her father at the Taj. She and her sisters and her mother travel a lot, accompanying Mr RichBanker on his business trips, and they only ever stay in five star accommodation. We told her about our travels, second-class sleepers on trains, funny accommodation, Lovely Restaurant in Jabalpur, and she sighed wistfully. Poor little richgirl.  She was a very intelligent girl, about to start a university course in politics and journalism, intending to go into the diplomatic corps. We talked to her about the recent highly publicised skirmishes in Lebanon and she was astonished and dismayed to hear that world opinion was not entirely with Israel, that in fact even people she considered to be just lovely (ie Pete and me) were shocked by the brutality of the Israeli retaliation. When we got back to Hobart, I had a few emails from her. She had started at uni, and had auditioned to join the debating club.  She had starred because the first debate was on this very topic, and she had been able to quote Pete, who had not been sparing in his condemnation of the Israeli tactics.  She got a standing ovation!!