Work and Travel
17 April 2015 | Our bure, First Landing
Happier Bill
We didn't work all day! What a great break to take the bus into Lautoka and see something other than the boat yard.
News on the charger and batteries: The batteries are aboard. Amazingly, we own two new 200 Ahr AGM batteries, although they're not installed. I called West Marine this morning and they said that it was being handled and that we'd receive a tracking number today, but we didn't. I'll call them tomorrow and try to get things confirmed and acquire a tracking number. I don't think that they appreciate our situation, but how could they? The batteries are not the ones that we wanted, but to receive two AGMs of their capacity within two days is absolutely amazing.
I got several projects completed, thankfully. Conni called boat work at noon and we scurried to the burr to change and gather our wits for a bus ride to town.
The bus is a big, open-air coach, much like a school bus but with seats closer together than any school bus. We drove down every road that we met and we were able to see a lot of the area between here and Lautoka. Seeing the tiny villages, seeing how the locals lived, all was terribly interesting.
Lautoka, the commercial center of western Fiji, is a bustling city with Christians, Muslims, and Hindus all massed together with their traditional clothing and colors. I felt like it was a place in India it was so crowded and the colors were so bright and vibrant. We walked through a market, saw raw kava (I wrote about this root infusion yesterday), and found one of the two supermarkets in town.
The supermarket has virtually everything that we wanted and Conni was pleased with the options. It was an IGA, for heaven's sake. Paper towels, the staple of life aboard Wings when she's in project mode, soup, packaged food, UHT milk, Tide detergent, Palmolive dish detergent, Mexican and Chinese food, and LOTS of Indian food. By the way, American detergents are simply the best in the world, by several orders of magnitude. The personal care aisle was also better than we thought.
There was also an on-site bakery that made beautiful bread, and it smelled so good! The main issue is that we will able to properly provision the boat for most of the trip, and that means that we'll not need to be searching for food at every stop. This is a major problem that's been solved.
The bus trip between Lautoka and Vuda takes about an hour, and the bus soon filled with school kids in their uniforms. This area of Fiji, at any rate, has a functional bus system that serves the entire community around Lautoka, including a special bus that takes family to visit prisoners.
When we returned to Vuda Marina at 1600, Conni started packing food and I worked on the boom, the horizontal aluminum tube aft of the mast. I've to to drill and tap some new holes tomorrow.
We've decided to stay in the resort for another four days until the boat is livable. Things are still too messy and we still have no lights or fans, although we have high hopes that we will.