Arrival in the Land of Down Under

After a nearly 5 hour flight on one of the worst airlines I have ever flown on (Pacific Air) we arrived in Brisbane at about dark on Saturday the 28th. We got our luggage with no problems and made our way thru customs. It was only when we got to the car rental place that greg realized we (he) did not have Fred’s phone number to give as a local contact. So off greg goes to the airport internet to try and find it. Half an hour latter he got it from the local phone book (sometimes high falutin’t technology isn’t the best course of action).

So we finally got out of the airport and were on our way. Just trying to remember which side of the car to get in on is a test and Greg was now trying to keep us alive on the motorways of Brisbane! It was scary, as all our habitual instincts have to be put away, since every thing is “backwards”, plus it was raining fairly hard. The wiper and turn signal are on the opposite side of the column so that just added to the fun.. I was playing the very vigilant backseat driver and helped greg avoid a couple of wrong maneuvers. Every time you make a turn you have to think about it and hopefully there is one car on the road to help you figure out which lane you want to turn into, Three days later it is starting to feel a bit more familiar.

We ended up driving for about an hour and half looking for a place to lay our heads and somewhere we could get a bite to eat. For some reason (a lot due to the scariness of just driving) we could not manage such a simple act. The man at the car rental counter had sent us off into the industrial neterlands of Brisbane saying, “We would have lots of motels to choose from.” So much for local help.

When we woke up the next morning we were in Coolingata, near the famous currinbin alley (a surf spot on the gold coast) on the Gold Coast, the beginning of the resort towns for Brisbane. It was a glorious fall day and the road did not seem so intimidating in the morning light.

After a light breakfast and some time on the Internet talking to both aaron and rena and lana (who had signed up for Skype!!) we leisurely made our way south. After we got out of the cities, the countryside was beautiful, very green with pineapple, Coffee, macadamia nuts, and lots of sugar cane and no trash. Yamba is at the southern edge of the growing of sugarcane. Remember it is getting cooler as we go south!

Australians are very strict about speeding, and here in NSW (New South Wales) they have cameras posted frequently along the motorways (read highway), that take your picture if you are speeding and then send you a ticket. To many tickets like that and you lose your license.

more adventures in paradise

i would like to share some details of the buildings on namotu, which i assume are traditional fijian techniques for making their dwellings beautiful. i have always been interested in the crafts of peoples, as in the crafts of a culture they beautify everyday objects. i think everyone should be surrounded by beauty.

the walls of our bure are covered with intricately woven patterns of what i assume is palm fronds in dark and light colors. you can see one example of this as well as a picture of the wall looking out the door which i hope is good enough to give you an idea of how it looks.

another wall covering they use for outside is the flattened bamboo that is then "woven" in a less intricate pattern, shown in another pic. i think this probably wears well in the weather and it covered most of he outdoor walls on the island.

all of the posts holding up the roofs of the buildings here have this hemp rope work on them (sorry the pic is on it's side i have not figured out how to rotate pics yet!!) the patterns are varied and each post has about 18" of this work at the top of the post.

i have also included a pic from our back yard of the closest island, tavarua, whicih about 1/4 mile away. it is about 3 times bigger than namotu and a well known surf camp where they hold many competitions at a break called cloudbreaks. it is quite hairy!!! the break is at a far off reef and they have built a huge tower from which they do the judging for the competition that looks like it sits out in the middle of the ocean.

this brings up another point which is that all the breaks we surfed were reef breaks. it is amazing to be just out there with no land for reference points. it is hard to tell where you are suppose to sit. at lefts you have to paddle almost all the time to try and stay in the right spot....quite the work out!!

April 23

Big Day of surfing yesterday, two 2-hour sessions and the body feels a little bit tired today and stiff. Wow it was fun though! It is so wonderful to be in warm clear water. I surfed the lefthander by my self in the morning and got two really good waves that I felt like I was surfing the wave and not just riding my board. After that I went out at Wilkes for another session. It seemed pretty big to me, but as I was paddling back out Liam, one of the camp guys who is really good says to me “it’s pretty fun for being small”. Oh well!

All the staff here is really nice. Sereiana does a really nice job of arranging the flowers and I hope I can help her one morning. I tell you this place is 5 stars! The food is gourmet and lots of it. We have sashimi every night for hor dourves. Last night we had Wahoo. It was great.

I just love the tropics. I have been getting up in the night and walking out to the sand to look at the stars. I love the night sky.

April 24

It’s smaller today so we are going to Desperations, way out on the reef. Winds are light so it should be good at high tide.

Back for Despos It was really fun overhead surf. Kinda like a beach break with peaks popping up with lefts and rights. Getting caught inside was a drag with a long paddle up the reef and “around the horn” to get back out. It’s not that shallow so it’s not dangerous but it’s a hell of a paddle out.

After scooping out the wave and just watching a lot of them go by I was actually able to catch a couple good waves. I am able to go right or left now without thinking about it. Something must have clicked in my brain, after the two sessions at Lefts the last couple of days. My fade is not as good as when I go right. I will have to work on that. I smacked my ear as I pulled out of a wave going left, it really hurt. I think I bruised the eardrum (if you can do that!).

The Guests:

Team Argentina – Ceasar, Chris and Lucian are three brothers from Argentina although Caesar lives in NY and is an investment banker and Luciano lives in Sydney and is an engineer. Chris shapes boards in Buenos Aires. Really good guys.

Keith and Steve – From Dana Point, Keith and I were constantly on the look out for basketball scores.

Ben and Christy – From Park City Utah, Ben is a rep for Reef, Christy looks like a Reef girl. The Namotu resort got tagged with a new coat of Reef stickers during there stay.

John and Rikia – John is an ab diver in southern NSW and a really good surfer. He competed with Nat Young as a junior back in the day. So he is like 60+. He rode a 7’2” and ripped. He took his daughter Rikia to Namotu for her 21st birthday. She didn’t surf but did all the other activities and was really a cool young woman, (and a hottie!)

Matt and Alex - Matt and his wife were also from southern NSW, he is a chef and she is an occupational therapist. We really got along great with them and between them and John we are considering going down to their neck of the woods during our stay in Australia.

Craig, Ann, Jackson, and Harrison –They are a family from Oz with two boys like 14 and 11. We keep trying to get Craig to come out of his shell….not. Craig was the life of the party; his bar bill was $1,200. It won’t be hard to pick him out of the pictures.

Karen and Matt – From San Francisco, I saw Matt take off on an overhead stomper, and when he pulled in the wave tried to push him through his surfboard. He was all right but his surfboard was done for the trip, luckily, it was on the last day of surf. One night we got up a game of Texas Hold ‘em; too bad her cards weren’t as good as here enthusiasm.

April 24 afternoon.

Greg
Took out the standup paddleboard for a spin and then went outrigger surfing with two members of Team Argentina . What a blast! We went to Swimming Pools, which was a perfect 1ft. I wouldn’t say it we ripped it in the classic style but it was fun.

Kate
I went out to Desperadoes this afternoon to go snorkeling. It is fairly deep out there, I would say between 15-20 ft. one of the boys told me the snorkeling was good there so I decided to give it a go. The water doesn’t seem as clear as the tuamotus, and I think this is partly due to the heavy rain they have been having and the heavy number of jellyfish in the water!! Jellyfish in the water does not make for a good time! Even a little piece of jellyfish will give you a little sting not unlike a bee sting. So the boat that took us out to the break dumped us off and then took off trolling (a type of fishing). So there I was bobbing alone in the wide-open ocean.

The first thing I saw were 3 big (I’m talking 5 feet long) fish that I first mistook for sharks. I later decided they were big yellow fin tuna. The reef is pretty flat where I was, but you could see how it sloped up causing the waves to break. I wanted to stay clear of the zone where they were breaking; it would not be fun to go over the falls! There seemed to a lot of little sting in the water, although I could not see many jellyfish. I did see some moon jelly fish that I recognized from our recent visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which if you ever have a chance is well worth the visit. I also saw a big purple jelly, probably a foot across, that was very beautiful. She had “columns” around her perimeter that had little fish swimming in and out of, probably cleaning her. Jells are so ethereal looking; I enjoyed studying her from a safe distance for 15 min or so. I also saw a squid shaped jelly. The moon jellys were by far the most prevalent. When the boat finally came back to get me after about an hour of snorkeling, I was swimming toward it (I still had my mask and snorkel on) when I saw a bunch of small silver fish near the surface in front of me. Looking closer I saw they were feeding on moon jellys, and there were hundreds of them in the water between the boat and me!! So I yelled to the boat that I was not going to swim over to them because of the jellys, and they came and picked me up. Dodged that bullet!

The highlight of the snorkel was the turtle I saw; she was a young one, about a foot across. She and I hung in the water for probably 5 min looking at one another making eye contact. She did not seem afraid of me at all, only curious. I imagined I was the first human she had seen. From the description I gave folks it appears she was a green turtle, her shell was beautiful. Greg and I had just seen a wonderful program on loggerhead turtles on PBS before we left, so I had a greater respect for turtles than previously. It was amazing when she finally drifted off to the bottom, how she did it without letting out any air. Loggerheads can stay underwater for 6 hours so I imagine she had a similar time frame. Turtle for all their difficulty in manuvering on land are a study in grace and effortlessness in the water.

April 25,

Went back to Desperations, it was smaller but still fun and clean with off shore winds. Then the wind stops, and although it was glassy the open ocean bump kinda killed it.

Hung out at the pool for the rest of the day. Reading Next by Michael Crichton, a good book.

April 26

Windy out of the south, which basically kills everything. Caesar is a really good kite surfer and brought his gear, which included a training kite. It looks like a regular kite surf kite but much smaller, so you can stand on the beach and get the hang of handling the kite. It was really fun between that and watching Caesar, and the lifeguards I really want to Kite surf. I was told that it requires lessons that they couldn’t provide on the island. John gave me the names of some kite shops in Oz and I’m going to pursue it there.

April 27, 2007

Last surf day, we went to Despos again but it was way too big for place. I got a couple of waves; Matt for SF got hammered and almost broke his board. Everybody got caught inside a couple of times. After an hour of all that fun we called it quits.

Kate went out at lefts and got a bunch of waves. She was dominating the peak!

here are some pictures of namotu, the island we stayed on. the second one is the entrance, as you pass through it you have to step into a pool of water that is fed from both sides by water falls that washes the sand off your feet. we hardly ever wore shoes on the island, just when i walked on chunkes of coral looking for shells. the next picture is taken looking at the back entrance of our bure and the final picture gives you an idea of how beautiful the beach was.

April 23

Big Day of surfing yesterday, two 2-hour sessions and the body feels a little bit tired today and stiff. Wow it was fun though! It is so wonderful to be in warm clear water. I surfed the lefthander by my self in the morning and got two really good waves that I felt like I was surfing the wave and not just riding my board. After that I went out at Wilkes for another session. It seemed pretty big to me, but as I was paddling back out Liam, one of the camp guys who is really good says to me “it’s pretty fun for being small”. Oh well!

All the staff here is really nice. Sereiana does a really nice job of arranging the flowers and I hope I can help her one morning. I tell you this place is 5 stars! The food is gourmet and lots of it. We have sashimi every night for hor dourves. (see first picture) Last night we had Wahoo. It was great.

I just love the tropics. I have been getting up in the night and walking out to the sand to look at the stars. I love the night sky.

arrival in paradise

April 22

We arrived in Fiji yesterday. here is the van loaded with everyone's surf board as we leave from the airport. i am sorry it is on it's side i will have to perfect my blogging. We are staying on a small island called Na Motu, which is about a 15-minute boat ride from the mainland. We can see the beautiful green hills from the back porch of our bure. A bure is a small cabin and we have an outdoor shower and toilet. We are about 50 yards from the beach and can see tavarua across the way.

This place is amazing!! I don’t know if I can do it justice in a description. First of all it is the tropics. The water is clear and turquoise, you can see the waves breaking on the reef all around the island. They have done a wonderful job in designing the little bures and the main areas. There is a lot of vegetation, which makes the close quarters, seems very private and surprisingly there are lovely sandy beaches.... i expected broken coral like we found in the tuamotues.

The food is gourmet. We had yellow fin sashimi last night and some lovely ceviche made with coconut milk. Liam caught a wahoo today. I hear it is great fish. He says they are the fastest fish in the ocean. Got some good lefts last night and this morning. I will let Greg tell you about his go outs.

First, let’s talk about Air Pacific, the skow of the airline industry. If you have a chance to fly it, don’t. And we have three more legs on this trip on this airline. Pray for us.

After all our ground transfers in Nadi, we arrived at the boat landing on the main island. As we were preparing to go out, the previous weeks guests were leaving. They were talking about 15ft surf. Crikey! When we got out there we figured that they were talking about how long the ride was cuz the waves weren’t that big. Thank goodness. But it was fun although we are a little stiff from all the fun of an Air Pacific flight.

today's the day!!

well today is finally here. we are leaving our safe nest for parts unknown....i will miss talking to my kids nearly everyday. aaron sent some pics of trekking he did in argentina that are spectacular. now if i just knew how to do a link here you could see them for yourself. we are fairly ready to go, and we finally got he gmail thing figured out yesterday after a 2 day struggle and much $. gotta stay connected. i hope that greg will do some writing here and it won't just be all me blabbing. gotta go....i'm excited!!!

one day and a wake-up

hi i am trying to learn to work these things.....wow we have alot to do before we leave tomorrow