Savusavu goes off on Saturdays

Way before dawn the ‘Match of the Day’ starts: Cockerels –v- Dogs who resume their battle for supremacy of the hillsides above the anchorage. Before the day gets too hot, we start EARLY in the market, aiming to beat staff from the outlying Resorts who usually grab the best stuff. At the weekends, villagers from a wide area come in with unusual produce, as the Cruiser Network Controller says ‘………to sell seaweed and fresh fish and fruit so they can go and buy cigarettes and tinned fish’. His words, not mine.

The lobsters crouch in the cool boxes, ‘sea grapes’ and pretty pink and green strands of seaweed are piled on leaves on the trestle tables; the fish almost spill from the freezers and there are fresh water prawns (I think we’d call them yabbies in Australia) and crabs.

The local ladies sit behind their tables which are piled with $1 heaps that cater for the multi-cultural cuisines with various fresh herbs and Western salad vegetables, even cabbage and cauliflowers; for Chinese stir-fries there are ingredients like bitter melons and bok choy. Suited to Indian dishes are okra and eggplants and a table full of colourful spices and dahl-pulses (“some ‘give air’, others don’t “ explains the stall holder). For Fijian dishes choose from fresh fern tips, local ‘spinach’ and cassava, outside rows of taro roots stand in seemingly identical bundles from which the village men choose.

I go for the exotica, lashing out on a single cacao bean from a whole pile – I had to ask two ladies what the heck to do with it, their advice had nothing to do with iced chocolate but was (I think) to take the seed out and suck (but not eat) it for the flavor – please speak up quickly if you know differently!

A dozen varieties of fruit: bananas and plantains (not quite sure what I’d do with them), I get the only soursop in the whole place. Chilled and sieved it will make a delicious drink, adding alcohol optional but a Soursop Daquiri does set off a tropical sunset to perfection. More passionfruit, heaps of tiny, vivid orange limes to liven up the water which, made on board by desalination, needs a lift. Pineapple, pawpaw, water melon – short of vitamins we are not! Such variety, my Skipper says we are eating better than last season.

Saturday is $$$-day. Kids in plastic tunics are trawling the street collecting for the Red Cross, the local Police Box is decked out with poster describing the Raffle prizes: First Prize – One Live Pig. Inspector Manueli offers to hand it over in a less-than-live condition but as we buy tickets, we ask that (should we win) it gets a reprieve, even just until next weekend; impressed by our thoughtfulness he offers to help if WE get into any kind of trouble, I’m thinking the pig is already in deeper!

Next comes a BBQ stall, raising funds for their church they sell a paper bag containing a freshly cooked a lamb chop, a sausage, a spoonful of coleslaw and large chunks of cassava, $3.50 takes care of lunch back on board before we whiz ashore again to pick up the newly upholstered salon cushions – the turtle design looks amazingly smart.

Children from a local school have been cleaning small amounts of rubbish from the low waterfront stone walls, but now it is play time with a wide range of options: how many kids can you pile on one bilibili? Who will slip off first if the big boys start it rocking? Who can do the best back dive? Who will swim out if one is pushed out un-crewed? Pity my camera is missing the fun.

Afternoon and everyone seems to have gone home because ‘town’ has quietened RIGHT down, the Yacht club has Music on the Grass in the afternoon and a Darts competition in the evening but we are happy to ‘stay home’ and do a few boat tasks, still hoping to leave on Monday and then we will be away from the internet world for a few weeks.

Ah, as I like to show off to my friends, ‘back to the world of wall-to-wall turquoise waters’! If I was truthful I’d add ‘enlivened by the occasional reef’.