Du chunsch natuerli an hug ueber, wenn ier im August choemmed Carmela…
He, dae Mike isch au intressiert
Driving back at the end of the day was a bit freaky. Since there are no street lights here, you rely solely on the car’s head;ights to drive. Theoretically this is no problem, except there are always people walking on the side of the road, or more exactly on the road, so you need to constantly watch very carefully not to hit someone. The trip’s official driver Marcel did wonderfully, as usual: no casualties to report!
After this fun outing we stayed in the next day. We’re living life easy here with Sally and Ben, cooking meals together and spending hours talking in the kitchen every day. However….towards the end of the day on Sunday my back started to ache. I got my personnal massage therapist to try and sort that out,but by the next morning it was not any better, I couldn’t move my head and was stiff like an old baguette left out on the counter. Turning 40, I tell you….and climbing up to tarzan ropes…. After 3 days in bed or sitting up straight, some muscle rub (you know the one that smells like toothpaste?) and a couple chinese plasters, I am happy to say that I can move again! No more twing with every small movement, I can even sleep properly! So much so that we could even go diving on the reef today. We saw a huuuuge lobster. His head was around 15cm wide. HUGE!
At lunch time we sat on the beach and ate sandwiches and fresh peanuts (fresh, can you imagine!) and fruit, and at one point Ben asked the dive guides where one can see coconut crabs (yes, crabs that eat coconuts!). The guide asks for Marcel’s lighter and disappaers into the bush with his knife saying: I’ll be back in 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes later indeed he comes back, still in his wetsuit, with a blue coconut crab tied up in a liane! Oh, and while he was gone his colleague opened a coconut for us on a tree branch, easy peasy.
Marcel, Ben and I were joking the other day, that if you left a European with a Victorinox in the forest for a week you’d come back and he’d be half dead. But if you left a ni-Van in the jungle with his machete you’d come back 5 days later and he’d have a whole resort built.
Probably not too far from the truth….
?
Tomorrow we’re going on an adventure: 2 days out in the jungle on a trek and village visit. He he….
We also socialised with the guy from the airport, Ben, who turned out to be a dive instructor also here to see the underwater, and a super friendly guy, despite being German. J Wer haette es gedacht? Das gibt’s! (pour les francophones qui me croient raciste, detrompez-vous, mais c’est trop long d’expliquer la relation suisse-allemande….)
So the next morning we were picked up at 8h00 and taken to the dive shop to prepare the equipment and sign the usual forms (“if you die no one can sue us” type of thing) and drove the couple kilometers to the USS Coolidge dive site. This american boat used to be a luxury liner and was transformed into a troop ship during WWII, before it sank just off the shore of Luganville. It’s supposed to be the most accessible and biggest wreck in the world. On the 1st dive we were taken on a general tour of the outside top part of the boat and saw some funny items like a gun, helmets, a gas mask. On the 2nd dive we went inside the wreck to see one of the statue from the ball room, also saw a line of toilets (?). Funny that before going down I thought a wreck would give me the creeps, but once underwater it didn’t feel that way, even inside the boat it was not really freaky. However I realised that wreck diving is not my thing, it mostly seems to me like just old rusty metal covered by corals. With exception of the night dive, this was special: there are gazillion of little fishies living in the wreck which light up at night, some bacteria in their cheeks or something that makes like a stroboscope. That was impressive to see, tons of little light flashes in an otherwise pitch dark environment.
We also dove at a site called Million Dollar point, which is basically a huge pile of american equipment: bulldozers, wheels, tanks, crates of Coke, etc. They say after WWII it was all offered to the local government who declined, and instead of carrying all back home it was just thrown into the ocean. Go figure.