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!
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