Diving again...this time Tuvalu
Well it's was in May that my cousin in Fiji, Edwina, contacted me and asked if we would be interested in doing a diving job for a Fiji based company in Tuvalu...after much consideration and deliberation...about 2 seconds...I said it was a go and Judith and I started to get excited about another adventure...
We had to wait for a while as Edwina and her family went to the States for a holiday and the guy we were supposed to be working for didn't speak much english...we had got to the point where we didn't think it was going to happen when we got the call and a weeks notice to move...the deal was for all expenses and pay...
We both managed to get time off work and Judith was still uncertain that we were going until we got the seat allocation tickets at the airport...the first leg of the trip was to Fiji where we got a taxi from Nadi to Suva...what a ride...and arrived in Suva around 9pm at Edwina's. Hr hisband Alex was the other businessman involved in the deal so he booked us into a hotel for the night and reimbursed us our taxi fare and gave us some meal money...yep you guessed it we had a few drinks...
Following day we flew out to Funafiti which is the capital of the 4th smallest nation in the world...Tuvalu...what an amazing place it is...we were booked into the only hotel on the island and proceeded to look around and meet the local members of our team...everyone was extremely friendly...dinner in the hotel was either fried fish, stir fried chicken or stir fried fish with rice...that was the menu every night we were there...because they are so isolated and have very little ground for growing anything their supplies must come by boat weekly from Fiji...the food and supplies was ordinary but the people more than made up for that...
Our job in Tuvalu was to dive and survey the sea floor for sea cucumbers which are a chinese delicacy...Judith and I were introduced to Tuvalu time when waiting for the boat the next day...it makes Fiji time look like a Swiss watch...we were told that only a handful of people had dived the lagoon and only scientists and the occassional yacht crewman..
What we found was disturbing...we estimated that 80-90% of the coral in the lagoon was dead..we think it is from the extremely warm water temperature...it was 30 degrees celcius at 30 metres depth...we mentioned our findings to a guy that was having dinner with us that night and found out later he was a member of parliament and brought our observations to the notice of the government...
We ended up having to stay 10 days here as there is only 3 flights a week...the locals use the international airstrip as a soccer pitch in the afternoons...again I'll say it's an amazing place...
the trip was an eye opener and so much happened that I can't tell all here as Judith says I write boring stories...we came back to NZ having had an awesome time and our hosts even picked up our bar tab at the hotel...
posted by Rob&Judith @ 2:23 AM
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