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!