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Although I was sure I had been scammed yesterday I believe that people in general are honest, so in the morning I waited in the hotel lobby just in case my ride did turn up at 9am. I had the number of another driver, Jerry, who’d said he would take me to Lalomanu for 80 Tala so I was going to hold off until 9.20 and then call him. At 9.20, just as I was about to call Jerry, the woman from yesterday walked in. I’ll call her Violet, because that’s what she said her name was. Immediately the reception lady said she’d have to give me my receipt and when I went to the desk she wrote on a bit of paper “this woman is no good, she is a thief and will steal all your money”. I had a hurried discussion with her and found out that Violet used to stay at this hotel a lot and scammed a lot of money from other tourists and had been in a lot of trouble with the police. We debated what to do and decided that because I’d already given her the money for the ride then I may as well
Taufua Beach Fales
that's my one closest to the camera still go, but don’t let her take any more money (doi!). But sure enough, no sooner had the taxi left the hotel than Violet asked if she could get 30 Tala for petrol and she’d pay me back when we got to “her shop” in Lalomanu which she apparently owned. So I just said to take me back to the hotel and once there I called Jerry to take me instead. Obviously I never got my 40 back off her but them’s the breaks.
The reason most tourists go to Lalomanu is for the beach. I was staying at the Taufua Beach Fales which was actually very nice, much nicer than my usual style of accommodation, but it was overflowing with hot girls in bikinis. I felt a little out of place in my cargo pants and boots. I never was much of a beach person.
My reason for going to Lalomanu was to try and get across to Nu’utele Island which lies directly off the coast. There I would have a very very very slim chance of finding a manumea (tooth-billed pigeon) which apparently still occur there. No boats go to the island as a matter of course, due to it being inhabited by evil spirits and the graves of lepers, so I didn’t know if I was going to be spending the next couple of days struggling through jungle looking for birds or sitting by a beach looking at girls.
The ace up my sleeve was a trip report by Lorand Szucs from October 2012 (yes, before the December cyclones that I keep harping on about!) in which he had the phone number for a chap called Foki who lived in Lalomanu, had a boat, and had taken Lorand across to Nu’utele where he *thinks* he probably saw what was possibly a manumea maybe. I got the owner of the fales, Tai, to ring up Foki and we arranged a meeting for the next afternoon to discuss prices and so forth, and then we would go across to the island on Wednesday (fingers crossed for weather permitting!).
And then I did nothing for the rest of the day. It wasn’t fun. The next morning I got up at 6am as I do, and did nothing. That also was not fun. The price of the stay at Taufua (90 Tala per night) includes breakfast and dinner so it’s a very good deal, especially considering the quality and quantity of the food! At the dinners I was like Homer Simpson at the eating competition in The Slaughterhouse restaurant in
Maximum Homerdrive: “What’s happening to me? There’s still food but I don’t wanna eat it! I’ve become everything I’ve ever hated!” Anyway, breakfast is at the ridiculously late hour of 9am. So I sit on the porch of my fale looking at the sea, watching the bulbuls bopping about on the sand, and I do this for a couple of hours until it must be near breakfast time. But when I look at my watch it’s only been twenty minutes! And there’s another twelve hours in the day to go!! If there’s a choice between slogging through the wilderness risking fatal heat stroke or relaxing by the beach, I’d take the slog any day. But balancing that is I did want to be rested for tomorrow’s visit to Nu’utele because it was bound to be tough, so I forced myself to stay where I was. Sigh. It’s a hard life.
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