Rain, rain, rain rain!

Beautiful rain!

Today the skies are grey and humidity is 100%! It's cold and damp, but I don't mind. I indulged myself and the guests this lunch time, by preparing a good stout Taro chowder (based on a corn chowder recipe, with a few shrimp and taro chunks added for good measure). I love preparing Taro chowder when the weather is gloomy, it's SOOO thick and delicious, it really does warm the cockles of your heart, or was it just that I was a bit heavy handed with the white wine! Another reason why I'm not feeling down because of the rain, is because of my new gardening projects! I'm getting a bit of green-thumb fever here, and am trying to plant anything I can lay my hands. Of course sometimes it works, sometimes not, but it's fun to try and there are so many exciting plants that could grow here, if you could just get hold of the seeds/cuttings. I have some kiwi fruit seeds, longan (a bit like a lychee only different) and cape goosberry seeds planted up and have my fingers firmly crossed. I've been battling to get a bit of a veggie patch going outside our back door, and it's coming along, the basil, strawberries, green beans and tomatoes are all in, now it's a matter of defending the seedlings from the dogs/pigs/birds or whatever it is that goes rooting through my beds when I'm not looking.......I'll wait a few weeks, but hopefully I'll have something to show you......

The Gospel Arrives in Tahiti!

This year I didn't get to celebrate St.David's day, as we were busy doing stuff in Tahiti, and anyway there's a serious lack of daffodils! Even the more Tahitian holiday of march 5th, was a total washout in Tahiti, heavy rains drowned the celebrations for the "Arrival of the Gospel". More than 20cm of rain fell within 24h in Tahiti.....leaving central Papeete in the drink!

Oh and yes, you heard right, the day commemorating the arrival of the first Protestant missionaries is a national holiday here.

(Johnnie Williams, the famous Pacific Missionary, buried here in Samoa, but his legacy
has left an indelible footprint on the Polynesian culture across the Pacific.)

The ministerial visit that never was!

Matotea was ready..... the village of Avera was ready........

The commune had been feverishly filling in potholes and decking the roads with coconut palm fronds, but in the end the minister canceled, due to Oli, who has decided to come and visit, bringing >100km/h winds and 6m swells to the leeward islands.

So, at 8h00 this morning the commune were out feverishly pulling down all the decorations, in anticipation of the cyclone-force winds. At the moment he's doing somewhere off the coast of Maupiti, this evening Tahiti and Moorea are on red alert. Inhabitants have been advised to stay home from 18h00 and driving is forbidden after 21h00 this evening! After that he heads our way, we're still only on orange alert right now, but we're expected to go red by tomorrow morning. So there's a meeting at the mayor's office tomorrow morning to plan for the worst, which is expected to occur on thursday evening/friday, meanwhile our heart's go out to those already in the hurricane zone.......

Now it's Oli

What is going on here! There's yet another tropical depression brewing - it's enough to give you a tropical headache. Whatsmore there's a whole blog devoted to tropical depressions! This time our depression has been called Oli, by the Fijians, and is currently in the northern Cooks, it's not clear whether it will actually make it to cyclone status, but if it does, then it will be here on Wednesday, just in time for the arrival of the french Ministre for d'Outre-Mer, Marie-Luce Penchard. Yes, you heard right she'll be right here in Rurutu on wednesday, we are part of the real world! Our works department are knocking themselves out repairing the roads and making Rurutu presentable. Maybe they could stop illegally extracting sand from our beches to fill in the holes in the road. We'll find out if she has any magical solutions for the political and economic pickle we've gotten ourselves into here in PF! (You can follow her every move and that of our second tropical depression on our French Polynesian national newspaper's site http://www.ladepeche.pf)

The cyclone that never was!

Well, after all the hype, today played out much like any other sunday, in fact the sun shone and it was a positively nice day, considering we were supposedly experiencing the tail end of a cyclone - there must be a good fairy looking out for us somewhere!

Tropical Depression Alert!

A moderate tropical depression named 'Nisha', is supposedly heading our way, and is expected to hit on Sunday. It's caused general panic in Tahiti, in particular the meteorology office has been on red alert! The possibility of a weekend in the midst of a cyclone has been enough to scare our guests off, so after getting all geared up for a full-house, we're suddenly off duty again! I suppose we should set to securing the rigging, buying in water and tinned foods - that's the official advice we're getting. The storm is currently about 1000km away, in the Cook Islands, with winds of over 120km/h, it's predicted that it'll pass somewhere between the northern Australs (that's us) and the Society Islands. But it's actually losing strength (it's almost the Ex-Tropical Depression, previously know as Nisha), and while it will cause some stormy seas, it'll probably bring little more than wet weather, fingers-crossed!

Homecoming

Yesterday we arrived back in Rurutu in the middle of a torrential rainstorm, with squalls which lasted most of the evening and through the night. It was definitely a wintry reminder that we're back in the Australs, compared to the sticky humidity of Tahiti. I'm glad to be back, and ready for the onslaught of guests. My daughter Heimana Hafwen was born on the 12th of July at 19h46, three weeks 'early', just like her sister. But I suspect that's where the similarities end, she's clearly quite a different little character - she's an unbelievably mellow little creature, not to say she doesn't have a good pair of lungs on her, she just prefers to keep quiet or kind of grunts her disapproval rather than full on screaming....
She loves to sit quietly squinting around at her surroundings, just taking it all in, quite a different temperament from her bossy big sister, who was always very ready to make her presence heard!

Here are some pictures from the hospital of Heimana and family.....
The birth ended up happening a bit sooner than 'expected', Viriamu didn't even make it in time. He had decided to stay on in Rurutu for the horse races on july 14th. I had also been hoping to make it over to Moorea for the 13th to see the midwives, obviously Heimana had other plans!
Second time 'round it was a very different experience, partly because I had half of my very well-meaning but noisy clan hanging around the hospital room for most of the day that I was admitted - funnily enough I didn't manage to get labor properly going until they had left (6 hours later!), but from then on it took me less than two hours to get dilated and deliver, talk about speed! Well, they had threatened to induce me if I didn't give birth within 24 hours of my waters breaking, so I had the incentive! But I also had some good advice from 'Birthing from Within' (I recommend it strongly as a great resource for pregnant couples) and unshakable confidence in my own body's ability to perform - which it did. Heimana was born just before 8pm on a sunday evening, just like her sister, weighing about 3kg and at 37 weeks, just like Matotea!

Close encounter with a coconut!

Yesterday, I was out in the garden collecting fallen coconuts to make some coconut milk, I had just stopped to give one of Viriamu's horses a pat behind the ears, when a coconut came hurtling out of the tree beside me, with a cartoon-style whistle, before glancing off my left shoulder onto the floor. Our coconut trees can't be more than 10m high, but still it was quite a shock and I'll have a bit of a bruise on my shoulder to show for it. I had been warned and of course had heard plenty of tales of people injured by coconuts, but I'd never been quite this close to it before myself! Falling coconuts supposedly kill ten times more people than shark attacks....though there doesn't seem to be much actual data behind this figure. Nevertheless my advice to you, when living in a tropical paradise beware of the falling coconuts! Today it's just rain that's falling, in a steady refreshing drizzle.....

More rain!

I'm afraid I've been rather neglectful of my journal just recently, so here I am doing pennance, with a bumper edition! Life continues much the same here. I was just in Raiatea doing fieldwork, for our French Polynesian terrestrial arthropod survey. It was a very special expedition, we made it up to the summit of the highest mountain in Raiatea, it was a hard slog, took four days total, there and back, and it rained almost the whole time....it was quite an experience, we were the first entomologists to collect in the area, and I like to think I might have been the first woman up there!


We also got a chance to see the Raiatea cicada (Raiateana oulietia), which is really quite beautiful, and extremely rare, it only occurs on Raiatea and not even on Tahaa, it's sister island. The next closest island with similar cicadas is Fiji, so it almost certainly arrived in Raiatea on a Polynesian voyaging canoe - cool huh!


Viriamu was looking after the house in my absence, working on getting the land-sale finalized. In particular getting a surveyor in to the site. They've cleared it a bit now and staked out the limits - it's a huge area, and I'm excited to get a small hut built there so we can move in and start the process of building.

The rainy season is still in full swing here in Moorea – it has been raining pretty much steadily for the past few weeks. Which makes cycling to work and to the store much less fun! The plus side is that I can fill up our drinking water bottles from underneath the leaky gutter outside the backdoor, rather than cycling to get filtered water at the Gump, or going halfway around the island to the natural source. Everything seems to be seething and alive, counter-tops quickly morph into organic mats of ants if you don’t quickly clean them off – my backpack which had been hung up on the front terrace to dry, turned into an ants nest overnight – ideally situated hanging on a nail out of the rain! Even as I write a cloud of mosquitoes have greedily set to devouring my left leg. The smell of damp hangs in the air here all the time – clothes grow mold, books curl and become soft. The house seems to be crumbling in front of our eyes – I am always sweeping up neat piles of termite poop, under the living room furniture, doorposts and kitchen cabinets. In the morning the floor is peppered with rolled up woodlice seeking refuge from the rain. Last night the rain was particularly heavy and this morning there were a horde of earthworms wriggling in agony on our terrace, casualties to the early morning break in the clouds.


Strangely Maroro wasn’t all that interested in eating them, he seems to like most other things. He’s become very seriously insectivorous of late - several times I’ve caught him tormenting solitary wasps under the outdoors table, his ‘den’. Just a while ago I was surprised to find him chewing on an adult banana weevil outside the back door ....mmm..crunchy!

When it’s not raining there’s always that anticipation that it might, the taste of it in the air...I don’t know why but it makes me restless. Maybe it’s just because Viriamu’s not here and all I have to face is the gaping void of my thesis!!!! (which is advancing, incidentally - and I suppose I should get back to it, now that I think about it!)........

The rainy season

Here in Moorea the rainy season has begun....and it rains, it rains like it really means it, it rains from the inside out. It starts like the rumble of distant thunder and grows and grows until the sky sounds like it’s about to break apart, you think it can’t get any louder but it does, then for an instant you think that maybe it’s you that’s about to break apart. The air around you is brittle. But then just as quickly it eases off, leaving you stunned and mesmerized by the whole thing.

I cycled home in the rain today, it was so heavy that I could hardly see where I was going, my skin felt like it had dissolved. The ride was punctuated by puddles on the road splashing warm on my feet and cars passing me in the opposite direction sending up an arc of muddy water – but it didn’t matter because I was so wet I couldn’t be sure where I begun and the rain ended.

I can’t sleep right now so I’m lying in bed listening to the dregs of the rain dripping from the trees, the pounding of the surf on the reef away in the distance and the drone of crickets, taking advantage of the lull to claim back the night for themselves. Now the mosquitoes have started to whine around my ears and the moment is over....