Pikinini

Found this little fella hanging around outside the office door...

Torch with a twist

Found a really cool thing for sale today in the bustling metropolis that is the JC Shop (the same place that was selling the potatoes).

I was on the hunt for equipment for the upcoming Tetepare and Rendova leatherback turtle season. The turtle monitors patrol the beaches at night to look for nesting mothers, conserve nests and ensure the hatchlings make it safely to sea. The monitors are obviously careful not to disturb the nesting mothers and hatchlings, but in a place where the nights are as black as you'll find anywhere, the monitors do need a torch sometimes. Black sand beaches have a habit of sucking up light.

Tetepare receives at least six-metres of rain a year, so the turtle monitors are often patrolling in torrential rain which has a habit of killing standard torches fairly promptly. I was

delighted to discover that JC had waterproof torches for sale, but these torches had a special extra feature.

Apparently this otherwise fairly standard looking dive torch has magical shark repelling properties – see close up of the packaging below. I'm not quite convinced of the efficacy of the 'special yellow body', especially since the torch appears to me to be blue...but the shark in the picture does seem to be sweating! Who am I to judge.

How much would you expect to pay?

People say you can tell when you’ve been away for too long when you start feverishly hankering for the familiar.

And in some instances you’ll go above and beyond what seems reasonable just to fulfil your basest desires... no really, I promise this isn't going to be a story about THAT!

We’re staying in Munda town at the moment, mainly waiting to welcome a good friend of ours who will be returning after a long absence. While we’re here, we luxuriate by living in the office which features such salubrious facilities as a lack of running water and a bed under a pink mosquito net on a wooden floor – but hey – we’re livin' the life.

Was down at the bar last night having a Sol Brew with Mi and Stew when the Malu Raider turned up.

The Malu Raider and her sister ships the Santo Star, the LC Swift (if only she lived up to her name), the LC Diana and the Western Star are essentially the only way to bring anything of any size into Munda. Some tiny packages (mostly mail) manage squeeze into the Solomon Airlines Twin Otter which touches down almost daily. But anything else, particularly food, has to come by landing craft. And recently we’ve been lucky to see the any of these ships once every couple of months.The Malu Raider is a medium sized green ship called a 'landing craft' which basically means that it has a very shallow draft and can actually run itself right up on the beach and lower its draw bridge to unload cargo directly onto the shore.

There have been few times in my life when I’ve been so excited to see a landing craft, but this one was different. It held the promise of something great. Having been here in Munda for a while I’ve found my perspectives somewhat skewed.

Part of the reason we were so happy to see the Raider was that the astonishingly reliable ‘coconut wireless’ (rumour mill) had suggested we’d be seeing some very exciting cargo unloaded from this particular boat.

Now to put this in perspective, I need to explain that the staples for a vegetarian Solomon Islander (not that I've met one - people think we’re quite weird) would include such delights as sweet potato (desert and potato just shouldn’t be mixed), eggplant (I used to like eggplant), cassava (whose idea was it to eat stringy-cardboard roots anyway?) and plantains (rock solid bananas that require extensive boiling to be chewed). Needless to say we are pretty tired of all the aforementioned.

So you can imagine our delight when the coconut wireless prophesies were revealed as true! The rumours had predicted real English Potatoes and sure enough, here they were being unloaded down the slippery ramp, across the muddy market...

...and up the hill for sale in the JC Shop!

Well actually... ‘sale’ might be a stretch – they were roughly five times the price at home, but we didn’t care and bought them up by the kilo.

So how much would you expect to pay? About SBD$30 per kilo for potatoes as it turns out and I dread to think about the carbon miles I’m going to have to offset now, but hey, sometimes these things are worth it! Yum.

Somehow I think this might be the best thirty bucks we've spent in ages!

Who is this guy?

Thanks for visiting!

Welcome and allow me to introduce myself to those of you I've not met.

I'm currently living in the Solomons Islands with my wife Michaela Farrington who has a great blog you can also check out. We're working on a conservation project on the remote and beautiful Tetepare Island - a 120 square kilometre slice of tropical paradise which was mysteriously abandoned by its inhabitants more than 150 years ago.

As a young fella, I unearthed a seething nest of travel and photo bugs. This wasn't nearly as painful as it sounds and before long I was on the way to recovery, but travel itch remains.

I’ve since dedicated years to soothing those itches, via the nunataks of Antarctica, the lamas of Tibet, and the ashrams of India.

I’ve dived the reefs of Australia, South East Asia and the Pacific, trekked across mountain passes in Nepal and slept in yurts with nomadic Kyrgyz families.

I’ve been lucky enough to be commissioned by Lonely Planet to shoot cities books and sections of coffee table books, including assignments in Mexico, Belize, San Salvador, South Korea and Japan.

But neither bitter Kyrgyz kumys, nor smooth Belizean Beliken beer has cured my hankering for a peripatetic life.

I’m now fulfilling one of my other lifelong dreams of working on a conservation project. The project is based on the incredible Tetepare island in the Solomon Islands and many of the blog posts are about my time here.