Harvest

Probably almost exactly 2 years after planting a pineapple head, I've eaten my very first home grown pineapple. It's grown and grown since the last you saw of it and the last few days it really started yellowing up. Today was the day, I felt, and I harvested my pineapple.

I'm immensely proud of it. For one thing it's huge. It's a $35 - 40 pineapple for sure. At its widest point its 13.4cm in diameter! Last night we had fruit smoothie with our pineapple, and some paw paw and bananas. But I couldn't resist cutting some up as well to eat. It was the sweetest yummiest pineapple I've ever tasted. For one thing it was fresh. Picked at 9:16am, put in the fridge at 9:17 and stored there till the afternoon when I ate it so it was deliciously cold. But because it hadn't a full day in the back of a truck, on a ship, and then a few days sitting in a pile on the ground in the market waiting for me to buy it, in other words, because it was fresh, it was amazing. I thought pineapples were generally yummier here than I've ever tasted but I've just found out they're even yummier straight from plant, to fridge, to mouth.

There's still over half left, so come over if you want and have a taste. Theresa was real excited about the prospect of eating the pineapple:

In other news, we also harvested our first passionfruit. They are rather spherical as opposed to the oval ones in NZ, and are pink in colour on the exterior. They were a tad sour for me, but Theresa slurped all the delicious seedy stuff down.

Jair and the boys have been very busy lately with a number of jobs on the base: building a new tank stand for bore water, replacing the roof on the director's house just to name some of the major jobs.

And holidays are here - so this commences the busy time, with stacks of teams coming and going. So far, since the 18th of June I've been to the airport 5 times to pick up/drop off teams and that number is only going to grow. I'm estimating that me or someone from SWIM will go to the airport a further 12 times at least before July is over. That counts for a lot of hours of waiting! But, no worries. The airport has joined the band wagon of tourism, by providing a local panpipe group to greet guests with beautiful melanesian music. It makes waiting for people so much more lovely, as panpipe music is so beautiful.

Queens Birthday Weekend

As soon as we heard that Friday the 15th of June was a public holiday for observing the Queen's Birthday here in the Solomons, plans were underway for a long weekend away. It's the first time in the two and a half years we've been here that we've left the SWIM base for a weekend away. Luxury.

So we headed out to a little place called "Nugu Eco Resort". On the way I was debating whether it was "eco" as in ecological, or as in economical. Banish from your head for a moment the picture of clean tropical seas teeming with coral and fish, a frangipani lei garlanded around your neck, a fresh, cold coconuts for you to sip with a straw. Nugu was a bit more economical than ecological but it was the perfect spot to get away because we were the only ones there so we had the whole place to ourselves. We spent the three days languidly stretched out on the white sand beach, reading in the hammock, eating fish, snorkling and playing pit with the locals.

It was a fantastic little holiday. Anyway, why spoil the story by boring you with details. I'll just give you some photos and say that the best thing, I think, of the whole weekend, for me anyway, was seeing a pod of wild dolphins on the way. We circled them to get a few photos - it was exhilarating to see them jumping up in the water, diving, doing tricks. Such fun! I think they were enjoying it more than me!

It was hard to capture (on camera) the dolphins jumping because it all happens so fast - they would jump, honestly, about 1-2 m in the air, by my estimation when they jumped up vertically like this..