Tenant - potholes - kava - dinner

10th August 2011

Well I can start off the blog with good news – a tenant for my house, after nearly three and a half months… I am VERY relieved. The contract is only for a few months, but…it is income, at last!

Yesterday afternoon Pete and I walked up to Au Bon Marché Numba 2. Next to this very expansive supermarket is…a lovely and enticing… hardware store! I walked around kindly for about ten minutes, admiring this and that with Pete, and then…it all went on too long and got very hot and stuffy. So I leaned on an Aussie BBQ – SPECIAL PRICE - in the doorway where there was a nice cool breeze and waited. I had to go into a sort of Zen trance to survive; I had foolishly not brought a book, or even my ipod. I became quite a fixture in the entrance. The large security guard got used to me and kept me informed of Pete’s progress (slow and steady) around the shop, nodding in the direction of the top of Pete’s head as it appeared and disappeared between racks, and I was able to watch many transactions, in a variety of languages. At one stage there was the security guard (Nivan,) the store manager (Vietnamese), a large white man wearing a US t-shirt (?) and a willing boy with a trolley – all speaking…French! Pete finally wandered out to the cash register. He beamed when he saw me. “This is such a great shop! Come and see what they have, down the back!” I very firmly said “NO.” I knew what would happen… Pete would go back into slow-motion hardware-store bliss and I would have to go and lean on the Aussie BBQ again.

We bought ourselves an almond Magnum at Au Bon Marché and then walked back down the hill to the yacht club. We entertained ourselves very happily envisaging the ghastly accidents which would befall us were we foolish enough to walk this treacherous footpath in the dark, or even at speed in broad daylight. “Aha! You would break your leg in this big deep unexpected hole, and you would scrape it very badly on the rusty reo, pulling it back out!” And…”Oh look, a steep precipice falling away from the footpath, which itself is falling away from the road! You would undoubtedly tumble and fall right down there!” And – my very own nemesis – a short sharp (and surely unnecessary??) pole in the middle of the footpath – of course I had to walk into it and bruise my thigh, even though it was bright midday sunshine. (I have an inexplicable magnetic attraction to poles in the middle of footpaths, and rode my bike straight into several in Noumea, sometimes more than once running into the very same one.)

We had another bit of 2XS-Café time yesterday. We were expecting Leah and Mark between three and four; they know how nice the fresh lime juice and cold milkshakes are at Yachting World. We had also invited Ness, one of the waitresses at the Port Café, along the main road, where we sometimes had beer and often struggled to get internet connection. ( Owned by Australians…) Ness had given Pete a small Vanuatu flag on our first visit to the café, and would always say, “When are you going to show me your boat?” So when we moved to the marina, we went to tell her she should call in after her shift at 4pm. She never did turn up, but while I was sitting at the (real not 2XS) café with Leah and Mark, I caught a glimpse of Ness, with two other young women, moving swiftly past the boats, looking VERY anxious. I called her and she looked around very warily. But when she realised I was not about to kidnap her for whatever nefarious purposes she might have envisaged, and that she and her friends (chefs from the Port Café, as it turned out,) were safe she was thrilled to bits. The three girls were very cautious walking the plank – gasp blink gulp –but they got across without incident and then had a lively time inspecting the boat. Pete was working benignly on his computer, not looking like a kidnapper, so they soon relaxed and darted around taking in close-up photos of…the stove, especially of – the coffee pot, which seemed to exert a particular charm. Out on deck they took lots more photos, insisting on having Pete and me in most of them…we smiled obligingly.

I managed to get them to settle at our table and bought them all a lime juice – I don’t think they are accustomed to being at the receiving end after all their years working in hospitality. By then Barbara had arrived, and then Punctual Fred (he may look Rock & Roll but…he is Dutch!) And right at the last minute…Egills and Harry, who had been very doubtful about visiting a kava bar. Mark and Leah debated about joining us, but they had work to do and went off in their big back shiny ute. The rest of us loaded ourselves into Fred’s big 4WD. Egills squashed into a small prison-type seat in the back; Harry, Pete and Barbara squashed in the back and Princess Marguerite had the front passenger seat, with a seatbelt!

Robbie’s Nakamel wasn’t really in walking distance so we were glad of the ride. We spent an hour or so there, sitting at a table under a thatched roof with a disparate group of expats. (Locals kept more to the dark bushes...not sure why!) I drank lots of kava, which was a mistake… It is not, I can assure you, yummy, but the whole experience was great fun – getting a little bowl of putrid-looking liquid, skulling it down, rinsing out the bowl, having a big spit in the bushes – what was not to like? And the initial effects were, of course, very pleasant – kava is a drug, and this is what drugs do, make you feel good, to begin with. Very relaxing, that’s about it. My problem with it was I just couldn’t sleep properly when I finally got to bed. I lay like a zombie under the sheet; I am sure Pete thought I was dead to the world. But in fact I was only NEARLY asleep, with my head buzzing unpleasantly, till about 2.30. And NEARLY asleep is not really all that satisfying. So yes I will drink kava again, but…maybe not five helpings…

Egills, who very swiftly transferred from kava to beer, had the best time at the table because one of the expats, Kellie, turned out to have – a Latvian mother! They exchanged Bonegilla stories, and Latvian retirement home stories, and were very happy. (By another Vanuatu coincidence, it turns out Kellie is Leah’s landlady, at Island Princess – she works in the office upstairs, and has been in Vanuatu since the early 80s.) All of the long-term expats had stories about how to make a business work in Vanuatu – not easy… Fred said, “If you want to know how to make a small fortune in Vanuatu – come here with a big one.”

When we got back to Yachting World we left them all, and gave Fred Jessica Watson’s book, True Spirit, to read. Pete and I had further plans for the evening. We had a bet, before we arrived in Port Vila, about the availability of consumer items. I was sure, not certain why, that the supermarkets would have a bigger selection than the ones in Noumea, and Pete was equally certain the shelves would be bare. We made a list of our own KPIs (key performance indicators) and decided that the reward for winning the bet would be – dinner at a restaurant of the winner’s choice. Well – ahem – I won. Au bon Marché has everything you can imagine except, strangely, RyVita.

My choice was to go to La Tentation. When we had first arrived at our anchorage in Vila, we putt-putted in to shore in the tender and tied up to a floating jetty. It turned out to be a private dock, belonging to a very fancy and beautiful waterfront restaurant. Pete went and asked the manager, David, if we could leave the tender there while we wandered around forlornly trying to find Mark and Leah, and David could not have been more obliging. He even offered to have a security guard watch our humble little dinghy! After that auspicious beginning, we used La Tentation as a toilet-stop and beer or coffee stop, and to use their WiFi, but we never spent much money there at all. So it was a good choice to go there for a slap-up Tuesday meal. It was a wonderful meal, well worth the walk along the bumpy potholey footpaths. Pete had fillet steak stuffed with (a very generous bit of) lobster, and I had poulet fish, which is similar to mahi mahi, ie a local, large white fish, served with mashed potatoes and lots of steamed veggies – yummo.

Our waitress, Sylvia, was just beautiful. She has two young children and is saving up to get married. She lives in a vilej near the airport and works 3-11pm every day… Her grandmother lives with them and looks after the children; they do not have an easy life!

When Pete went up to pay, David said, very seriously, “We have an issue.” “Oh Gawd,” said Pete, “Isn’t my visacard working?” But no…the “issue,” David said, very seriously was, that people here have too many mobile phones. “They have no money,” he said, “and yet they have three or four phones each, which they don’t need and can’t afford.” The two men stood at the counter and contemplated this issue for a while, and then they parted amicably and we walked home to 2XS. Our friends were still at the café, drinking coffee. Barbara told us that David isn’t the owner of La Tentation; the owner is – what a surprise – an Australian called Nick.