Ingrid and Marcel World Journey

That’s it folks: finito la dolce vita, terminado il viaggio.

It’s now time to go back to Zurich, find an appartment and get a job.

Ouhhhh….das wird sicher weh tun!

Plus de grasse matinee, fini le chant du huard sur le lac, adieu les soupers avec maman, aurevoir les journees en famille avec Valerie & Stephane.

Demain soir 17h heure locale nous prendrons le vol LX87 a destination de Zurich. Ca fera exactement 4 mois que nous sommes arrives au Canada.

Happily for us Rene & Carmela have agreed to provide a shelter for us while we look for a place.

Guys, go to Migros get the Bratwurst and heat up the grill: we’re coming home!

This is an old story that happened at the beginning of August while Rene and Carmela were here, but I still find it worth telling.

After going up the St. Lawrence on the north shore and spending a couple of days at a camping right on the beach watching the wonderful view, we thought we’d take a ferry across and come back on the south shore, stopping en route to visit the seals at a national park. Marcel boarded the car on the catamaran and we went up to the deck to watch for whales on the way. After about an hour we reached Rimouski, and decided to go for lunch before heading to the park. We stopped at Tim Horton’s and ordered our food, sat down and ate, and left to drive the 15 minutes to the park. When we reached the park gates it was time to pay our entrance fees, and reaching for my bag at my feet I realised….there was no bag! I had left it hanging on the back of my chair at Tim Horton’s! HAAA! Quickly we turned around and drove back to town, re-entering the restaurant about a half-hour after leaving it: my bag was not on the chair anymore. I asked the ladies at the counter: they hadn’t seen it when cleaning up the tables shortly after we had left and nobody had reported a lost bag. Ooh it was not looking promising…. I started crying, Carmela went to look for the bag in the bathrooms, the guys went outside and looked in bushes and in garbage cans: nothing. My bag had been stolen!

I left my details with the restaurant and the tourist information in case the bag would re-appear and we drove to the police station to fill out a report for the insurance. We cancelled all my cards and lost over an hour with paperwork. The bag itself, the 120$ cash, the cards, they didn’t matter. The worst of having the bag stolen was the camera inside the bag….the one with our 5000 travel pictures. A camera that can not even be used in Canada because the power adapter is not available. Yes most of the photos had been transferred on the computer, but I can’t say I liked the idea of some bozo walking around with MY pics on the memory chip.

With a few hours delay we went to see the seals at the park, very cute laying on rocks drying their fur for the yearly shedding. On the drive back to Quebec I received a phone call from my sister: a nice lady had found my bag under a bench by the street and had found my sister’s phone number on the last page of my little travel book. All was still in it except for guess what? The camera. Grrrr to the a…s…h… who took it.

We travelled around the planet to places where people are very poor and nothing was taken from us.

No, it was in Canada that some scoundrel stole my bag.

Definitely not very proud to be Canadian on such an occasion.

It’s been a while already….but how unforgettable!

We’ve been quite mellow these last weeks, but one of the main highlight of our summer was to have Rene & Carmela with us for 2 weeks. We were extra excited driving up to Montreal to pick them up at the airport! Time always flies when you’re having fun, so the 14 days went by as quick as lightning, but we did enjoy them as most we could.

We took them for a stroll in old Quebec city, went to a fireworks show, to a nearby park to go down a river in canoes. Then we left for a little trip: 2 days in a chalet by a lake lost in the woods where we saw a black bear and her 2 cute cubs, camping in a national park where a moose and her calf said hello, then up the St-Lawrence river to observe belugas and whales. Met a deer, then found a super camping place right by the river where we beached for a couple days before taking the ferry across to another park to see the local seals. Never seen so many wild animals in so little time here, they really did coordinate super for the swiss!

We came back home to wash our clothes and so our friends could do some shopping (only food stuff, the gluttons). And then the highlight of their visit: we went 3 days canoe-camping. Ah, the undescribable feeling of being alone on the lake with only the loons as neighbours…. Roasting marshmallows on the fire at night and going for a dip in the cool water when you wake up…. Now THAT`s life!

Hard for us to believe, but we’ve already been in Canada for 2 months now. Time does fly….

After the US immigration and 39-hour journey episode we landed in Toronto kaput and disoriented. We stayed at my sister’s place for a week, sort of softening our final landing. Feeling tired of being on the go all the time doesn’t mean it is easy to arrive after a year of travelling and discovery…. It’s kind of freaky actually.

While still in Australia we used to talk of all the things we could do here during the summer which we normally never get to because we’re not here long enough; there were talks of camping, of visits, of falls, of people to see, of local travels, landscapes, etc. Well guess what? We haven’t done one of them. And it suits us just fine. We’re beached here in our home and I can’t really tell what we spend our days doing but somehow we’re never bored, we just live and it’s enough to keep us happy for now. Needed rest maybe??

One important event must be mentionned though: Valerie & Stephane got married!

Valerie is my best friend in the whole wide world since I’m 11, so I was more then happy to be back to attend her wedding. And since they’re already done with popping kids (5 between the two of them) they didn’t go on a standard honeymoon: they rented a chalet for 4 days for the whole extended family! So we got to run around in the grass with the small one, eat Val’s brother-in-law’s BBQ cooking, have evening drinks with opa, go on the lake in kayaks with the big kids…. Now that was a change from the both of us alone travelling in our van in Australia!

Now we are very excited because for the 1st time ever our friends from Zurich are coming over to visit us in our Canadian home. Only 4 more sleeps before we pick Rene & Carmela up at the airport. Hourra!

After 5 days on the beach in Fiji we felt like we could have stayed a few days more…. But it was time to go, this resort was majorly busting our budget and we had our tickets to Honolulu.

So on May 17th in the morning I got up early to go for a short hike up the mountain next to our resort to get a last glimpse of the beautiful scenery from the heights: soft green hills of the surrounding islands bathed in turquoise blue waters, we could see up to the main island 42 miles away. Not bad…. Went back to the resort for a last dip in the ocean, then showered and hopped in the boat for the 5 hours ferry ride to the main island. A bus ride to the airport where we had 5-6 hours to wait for the 8 hours flight to Honolulu. All together a full-day journey. Little did we know….

It was not going to end there. See Marcel had registered online for the Visa waiver program that allows Swiss citizens to enter the USA without a visa. He just sort of disregarded the small print that said “valid only for people without a record with the US Immigration”. Ha. Ha. Ha ha. So when we arrived in Honolulu we both showed up at the immigration desk where they stamped my passport within seconds, no eye scan nor finger prints needed thank you I’m Canadian. Then they scanned Marcel’s passport….and ushered us to the back office. We thought this would be a question of minutes like it had been in the past, Marcel would explain his story of overstaying his tourist visa by 2 weeks 15 years ago and we’d be on our way. Well he did. And then the officer went to check this. And came back. And Marcel explained some more, that after he overstayed he got a 10 year visa which was in his previous passport and had in the meanwhile expired. The guy went away again. Then came back. More questions and explaining. This went on for a while until the end result came out: Marcel had only been allowed in the USA in the past years because of the visa he had, and since that was expired, he was now not allowed in. Lovely….we were going to be sent back to Fiji on Pacific Airways! Or not? Seeing that we were not going to say Aloha to Hawaii this time we mentioned this was a stopover on our way to Canada, if we could please be deported there instead? Luckily we had our tickets to Toronto already booked, so the immigration people took the details down and got us re-booked on flights out for that same day. In the meanwhile we’d been in the immigration office about 5 hours, eating instant noodles they gave us and reading in the waiting room. More waiting later one of the immigration officers escorted us to the Continental check-in counter and hurried us through security, because with all their paperwork we were just going to make the flight. On the way to the gate I had about 5 minutes to call my sister and tell her we were not arriving next week as planned….but the next morning. The immigration officer handed out Marcel’s passport and transfer papers to the airline and we boarded priority. Then on our stopover in Chicago we (I should say HE, ’cause I was a free woman, Marcel not) could not transfer gates alone, Marcel had to be escorted to the next flight. With about an hour stopover it was not very convenient that the flight attendants called the Chicago police instead of the airport’s immigration office…. We had to wait for this huge policeman and his partner to arrive and then realise he had nothing to do with this case, and then wait again for the immigration guys to show up and drive Marcel to our gate in a minivan while I had to run around in the terminal with all our hand luggage. Too bad, because I missed the movie worthy comment of the immigration guy: “now I’m not going to handcuff you and I’m keeping my gun where it is, hopefully you don’t do anything stupid.” Isn’t that super? At least he was living up to the american standard, the immigration guys in Honolulu had been way too nice and accomodating.

Do I need to precise I was relieved to read “Welcome to Canada” when we landed in Toronto and Marcel had gotten his passport back?

So we did finally make it to Ovalau Island. We arrived after dark and for some reason the few and weak street lights were not working, so we sort of felt our way to the hotel. We were staying at the Royal Hotel, Fiji’s oldest one. We were showed to our room and in the corridors and hallway we could already marvel at the colonial feeling of the place. Actually the whole town of Levuka has kept ist charm. It used to be Fiji’s capital city (before that a whaling town) and not much has changed since then. Walking through the town you feel like time has stood still; there is one main street with small shops and old house facades which have not changed in a century, on the few side streets are more colonial buildings, old schools and monasteries, imposing houses with long verandas in lush gardens. Need I precise: we loved it.

We spent our first day in Levuka walking around, getting acquainted with the town and admiring the views. Marcel also got a haircut at a local salon, and when the barber took an old razor out to nicely cut the hairs at the base of his neck he knew he had to get shaved too. The young indo-fijian took a new blade out and started to shave his beard just like you see in movies: elbow up, tighten the skin with one hand and scrape scrape with the other, then rinse and wipe the blade with a twist of the wrist. A once in a lifetime experience.

The following day I left Marcel to nurse his hurting back in the room while I went out diving with an australian couple and funny instructor Charlie who liked to pick on me as his victim-of-the-day. Sea-sickness was kept under control, dive’s highlights were soft corals, a turtle swimming closeby and a black tip reef shark having a snooze on the bottom. That evening we went to bed early in preparation for the next day’s early start (board the bust at 4h30, AM that is).

We made it back to Nadi where we had to sleep one night before going on the ferry taking us to the Yasawa islands. He this is Fiji, of course we were going to spend a few days at the beach lounging on a sunchair and taking a dip in the turquoise ocean! North west of the main island are a series of small and smaller islands where various resorts are located. The ferry leaves in the morning and makes the milk run up, dropping off and picking up people along the way. We had 4h30 to spend on the boat, which I snoozed away because I had tried to take a Gravol (pill against motion sickness; fazit: do not take when going diving). And then….we made it to a picture perfect small resort on a blue lagoon, and spent the next 5 days in bathing suit and barefoot. La vie est dure….

We have enough of travelling, but since we’re here we figured we’d give it a go and explore at least a fijian island or two. So yesterday morning (geez, it seems like it was a decade ago) we packed our bags and started our journey east to go to Levuka, the old capital of Fiji which is said to still have its colonial charm.

The journey in 6 easy to follow steps:

1. Taxi to the bus station.
No we will not pay you 8$, please start the meter.

2. Minibus from Nadi to Suva.
A couple dollars more expensive then the bus but faster because it doesn’t stop every 10 minutes. Starts when it’s full, waited only about 20 minutes.
No kidding it’s faster, the guy does give gas. And passes all other cars.

3. Looking for Patterson Brothers Shipping office in Suva.
Yes we are located at the western bus terminal, you can purchase your ticket there.
Followed a fijian who had decided to show us the way. Ha ha. He didn’t know the way.
Left him standing and found the office: closed. Oops, lady forgot to mention they close at 13h on Saturday.

4. Finding another bus to the boat landing.
Dedicated bus left already, without us. Man in bus terminal booth suggests getting local bus up to the boat, said bus is leaving NOW. Don’t think, hail the bus and hop on it.
Sit on the bus for 2 hours just above the diesel exhaust. Bus has no windows. Ye!

5. Wait for the boat.
24 hours.
See details below.

6. Get on ferry and make it to Levuka.
Hourra!

Details of number 5:

We knew we’d missed the boat and thought we’d been pretty gaga to get on that bus since we knew it really couldn’t make it on time and had started to discuss our options in the bus: find another bus back to Suva (another 2 hours of diesel fumes) to sleep there and come back another day (another 2 hours in diesel fumes) or try to make it to a village accomodation mentionned in our book close to the boat landing. Did I mention that according to the schedule we had there is no ferry on Sundays? This meant we could have 2 days to kill! Anyways….

We were dropped out of the bus on a street corner 500m from the pier, of course empty. We ran under pouring rain to the closest shelter possible: the Natovi Shopping Center. See picture. The Natovi Shopping Center is actually a small shop annexed to a 2 family house, and although we’ve seen a lot on this trip, I believe this was the shop with the most modest merchandise choice we have seen: some eggs, a few biscuit packets, about 10 instant noodle packages, the same quantity of 200ml oil bottles, some soft drinks. A young man was minding the shop, we asked him to confirm if our boat had left already: it had. We then asked if there was someone with a boat who could take us over: no, there wasn’t anyone. Was there a bus to go back to Suva: possibly it was too late, there were no more buses. Could we walk to the village accomodation close to there mentionned in our guidebook: no, it was too far away. Hmmm….our options were becoming scarser…. Suddenly another young man appeared and told us his dad had a minivan, we could call this number with our cell and give him the phone and he’d explain the situation. After a short conversation the young man said his dad was coming over, if we would follow him. We walked to the side of the building and were invited inside the house where a bunch of kids were watching a movie. We dropped our bags and sat with them on the leaves mat in front of the telly. About half an hour later the dad came in his van and we discussed our possibilities with him. Rain was still pouring and had made a stream closeby overflow, so he doubted he could drive us to the village accomodation, we wouldn’t make it across the stream there. He thought there was a boat going the next day despite our schedule, even called a family member to confirm. He could drive us to the previous small town for the night, but there wouldn’t be much to do there. Or he was offering us to stay with them, they would put us up for the night and we could save the hotel cost (his words, not mine). Sensing adventure, we decided to stay there for the night.

After the father had left to go back to work we finished watching the movie with all the neighbourhood kids. Then they all disappeared and we figured it was dinner time. The son cooked rice for us and we bought a bottle of oil and some eggs in the little shop, which we cooked on a portable stove in an extension in the back of the house, the equivalent of a back veranda for us I suppose. We ate at the kitchen table, happy to get solid food in our empty stomachs. We took our time chewing, but still, when we looked at the clock after dinner it was only 19h00. Oh yeah….
Having to wait around for a day with not much to do is never very exciting, but doing so in a stranger’s house seems to make time drag on even more. Well I got my book out and Marcel watched another DVD with the neighbourhood kids back from their dinner, and eventually it was time to sleep. They had given us their room, it seems they had enough beds elsewhere for them to sleep in. Please take a moment to realise this: we were perfect strangers there, those people invited us in their home, helped us cook food and even gave us their bed. How many of us would do such a thing?

In the morning we had breakfast and went for a walk along the road (average traffic: 1 car/half hour) and played Yatzee on a bench in the pier‘s waiting area. Eventually some people arrived, a whole family with many mamas and a papa and bags and bags of stuff like sacks of flour and margarine containers and bread and more food. We asked them where they were going….to Ovalau! Hourra! There WAS a boat leaving today! When we went back to the house they had some chicken soup for us, which was very good. OK, the skin and bones and stuff were not a hit but he, I’m pretty good at dissecting meat now.
We packed our bags and went back to the waiting area (such a nice term for a couple old wood benches under a corrugated iron roof) and looked forward to our departure. Waited a while. And then some more. The boat finally arrived only about 2 hours late, so we made it to the island only short after dark and early enough to get something to eat before bed.