Up the River

We awoke to another dawn chorus, sunshine and a rainbow. Our depth here is 20 feet and we can clearly see every detail on the bottom - squid, fish, coral, sea cucumbers, crabs, and baby lobster/crayfish on the hull. How lucky can we be? We have a date with Chief Solomon to go up the Jordan River this morning

Barry went speeding down to the river mouth with his newly put together big motor. He is so proud of his children who could find another motor like his, test it out, disassemble it, take pictures of the disassembly, find and print diagrams, buy new parts and ship the whole lot successfully all the way to Vanuatu. And feels pretty good about himself that he could get it all re-assembled into a perfectly and smoothly running whole. I think he is amazing!! The chief was wary of taking the dinghy up the Jordan River. It is the biggest river in Vanuatu, wide and very fast flowing. The smaller entrance was blocked by a sand bar and the chief wanted to beach the dinghy and walk up the river. But on Barry went like a true American knowing that he could do it. The chief turned out to be a pretty fun companion and put up with the intrepid Barry. We joked about finding hippopotamus and crocodiles in the river and I feigned fear. He thought that was so funny. Barry said it was like being on the jungle boat ride at Disneyland but Chief Solomon had never heard of Disneyland. Eventually, the river split into 3 fast moving, shallow sections and we could no longer make progress against the current while the motor was hitting rocks on the bottom. And so we turned around and floated back to the ocean.
We saw many Pacific Black Ducks, white and dark morph reef-herons, Great Crested Terns and Glossy Swiftlets galore. Oh, and someone crossing the river mouth (where it was wider and slower) on a horse then galloping off down the beach. On the way back we stopped at a monument to Quiros, a Spaniard who "discovered" Vanuatu just over 400 years ago. The chief said he killed the niVanuatu with guns and the niVans only had bows and arrows and spears for fighting back. Bad.

People always ask us where we are from. They almost always think we are from Australia. Then I ask where they are from and they laugh and say, "Right here" or Malekula or some other island of Vanuatu. I ask do they like living here and they grow rhapsodic telling about how good life is here. I have given this some thought and have decided it is because there is no electricity here and thus no television which means no television telling them to buy this or that to be happy or seeing all the stuff some people have. They have sun for warmth, food from the garden, water in rivers and food from the sea. They know how beautiful it is here and how healthy, good and beautiful their life is.

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