Monday 5th April

Anything I’ve said about Telekom in the past, and I know I have said some nasty things about them, does not come close to how I feel about them at the moment. A week ago they had a sporadic mobile service running over the weekend while they upgraded to 3G, then during the week they replaced all the Breeze topup cards with their own Telekom Cash cards, and a new number to call to enter the credit. The only thing they missed out on doing was to connect the number, which leaves me with $100 worth of topup card, and “The number you have dialled is not in service” message when I try to credit my phone.

A good national motto for the Solomons would be “It’s not quite right”

I had to go back to the market on Sunday, I stocked up on Friday with fruit and veg, but then had a huge splurge Friday night and Saturday with fresh fruit, green stuff, broccoli, spring onions, chillis and stir fry, so by Sunday the fridge was looking a bit bare. I could have walked down this week, my knee has come right from slipping over the other weekend, but having the truck makes it so much easier. The freezer is full of spring rolls, I’ve got a container of fruit salad (banana, pawpaw, pineapple and lime juice) for breakfast, and still some bananas and a pawpaw left.


Today I finally got to the beach for a few hours, the bridge is still out, as you can see by the photo, and will be for a few months yet I think. Everyone cuts through the river now, which is fine so long as it isn’t flooding. Got to the beach about 10, paddled around for a while, read a book, went for another paddle, read, swim, then came back about 2pm. Slightly sunburnt, but more brownish than red finally. There’s not a lot to see on the reef, it’s been fairly well fished out over the years, mostly small fish under a few inches, and some small parrot fish. A lot of Nemos cousins, and a lot of dead coral.



We’re going back out tonight watering, hopefully Emory and Vincent will be there, otherwise I won’t get too excited and hope for rain instead.

Later. We got rain instead which is better, so we aren’t driving around Honiara half the night.

The Bulk Shop has moved, from the tiny little corner shop they had, across the road to the old ITA Hardware store. A lot bigger and a better layout. And they had flour, gluten, brown sugar, spices, and real olive oil, not olive flavoured vegetable/canola oil. Ok, it was $60 a 750ml bottle, but I had an attack of the “want its” and had it in the basket before my brain kicked in and tried to say no. They stock New Zealand Mainland Cheese as well, $35 for a 500gm block, Tasty, Mild and Edam. I’ll wait for that, although I find that dairy food gives me sinus now, even milk, butter etc. So even though I would love a cheese toasted with everything I’ll give it a miss.

I spent Saturday afternoon bread baking, and making eggroll pastry for spring rolls. Then had the ultimate in decadence, a Basil and garlic loaf, sliced thickly, with tomato slices, lettuce leaves, olive oil, sea salt and crushed black pepper sandwiches. Well, for here, it is utterly decadent, how my life has changed.

It’s all relative I guess, if you have never left the Solomons, you wouldn’t know about any other food, there aren’t any books to show any different, very few locals have a television, let alone power to run one, everything they know comes from family, or what they read in the newspapers.

I’m having an email exchange at the moment with the Solomon Star Environment Report, Moffat Mamu. I wrote in last week about an article he had in on Monday, we haven’t come to blows yet, he is actually reading the links I send him, and coming back with questions, so hopefully he may get off the IPCC propaganda, and actually start writing environment articles, instead if blaming everything on AGW/CG. So long as AGW/CG is the scapegoat, no one will do anything, preferring to sit and wait for the billions of dollars to come in aid, which I seriously doubt is going to happen. We can start cleaning up here once people realise they are the problem, not the solution, co-existence with the land and sea is what we have to strive for, not continue to pollute both, and expect money to fix it.

A bit of an aside to all that, Moffat apparently won the Pacifica Environment Award for an article he wrote last year, about how AGW and CO2 were destroying his homeland. So I’m going to have an uphill struggle trying to get him to look a bit further than just accepting the garbage the IPCC put out.