Calypso's Journal: Anyone for cricket?

Looking ever so professional

Life on Oneata was a joy. The anchorage was a tad rolling at times but spending time with the locals was worth this small discomfort. We joined the villagers for their church service one Sunday which was followed by a big lunch consisting of fish, sweet potatoes, cassava and their version of spinach done in coconut milk. We were always invited to lunch whenever we visited one or other of the villages, in fact, we got the impression that they’d love us to visit every day to eat with them but, we had to confess, boiled fish, boiled root crops and boiled spinach loses its appeal after a while.

Thursday is cricket day. All the younger chaps from both villages gather on the village green to enjoy a full day of the game and some are darned good both batting and bowling. In fact, two play for the Fijian Under 19 team and one plays for the national side in Under 21 and is off to South Africa shortly for a three month tour. Amazing when you realise just how far from any sort of town/city life these islands are.

The village green lies in the centre of the homes and church and that means that some of them are within the cricket boundaries making for very interesting scoring. With this and the many piglets, dogs and chickens running freely across the pitch, the game is far from boring.

Each village has its own church but there is only one school. Helmke and I were asked to take a group photo of all the children in front of the schoolhouse which was a fun thing to do. Extremely well behaved and polite, they stood patiently while we took literally dozens of photos just to be sure. Afterwards, they lined up for their lunch, something the villagers take turns to make each day. Afterwards, we could see them all standing in the school yard cleaning their teeth. As a whole, the older villagers have terrible teeth but it looks as though this problem is being addressed with the younger ones.

The "official" school photo

Fishing wasn’t as good as we’d hoped. The guys went out spearfishing on several occasions but

either didn’t find much or, in Bronte’s case, every time he shot something big, the sharks took it from him. Before long, the sharks were becoming a major issue; one actually bumped him which was a close encounter of the unwanted kind. So one day Bronte decided to take Cooee out trawling in the hopes of catching something big. The idea was to follow the outside of the reef around the atoll in the deeper waters but for some crazy reason, all the bites were within the boundaries of the atoll. When Paul & I first arrived, we caught and lost something huge just after passing through the reef’s opening and almost in the same spot, Bronte caught a huge Spanish mackerel or waloo as they call it here. Apart from that, we really didn’t manage to pick up anything else but this was big enough to keep us in meals for a while and absolutely delicious too, especially as it meant another one of H’s sushi evenings.

Bronte doing his smokin' thing

On another occasion, we went quite ’native’ after the guys managed to bring home a few medium sized fish that we decided to smoke. B & H had learned how to make a palm-frond smoke house while they were in Tonga so we set about preparing one. It took almost the entire day to build and then smoke the fish but they were delicious and the smoke house was a masterpiece.

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