Did you catch the timing? Left Thursday morning, sailed for 33 hours, arrived Saturday afternoon. Huh? Answer further on.

We can't mail anything from here because the Post Office has sold all its stamps to another yacht, and who knows when there will be more. This island of about 1500 people has a "doctor", a nurse, Immigration Officer, Customs Officer, Agriculture Officer, and a Post Office. The five boats here all agree that these people don't have a clue as to what they're doing. John and Petra, the yachties who bought out all the stamps needed more, so the postmaster pulled out an envelope with about $10.00 worth of uncancelled stamps on it, addressed to some place in France, said that it had arrived on the plane that day, and gave it to John. John said that that wasn't right, somebody had mailed it - the postmaster said that it was okay, because there wasn't any letter or anything in the envelope, so there was no reason to send it on. Since the postmaster had made a gift of the envelope to John and Petra, they had to accept it, and will now have to mail it from Neiafu for the poor fellow. Since the postmaster opened it to prove there was no letter in it, they plan to include a letter explaining why the stamp collector is not getting an envelope postmarked from Niuatoputapu as he had obviously wanted, because the postmaster doesn't understand stamp collectors, just envelopes with something inside them. 

This is a dry (as in no liquor) island, but the officials all want a bottle of booze when they come aboard. When John and Petra arrived the Immigration Officer took a bottle of sour wine she used for cooking, apparently swilled it down and went bush for the next five days. Nobody could find him to check us in until a couple days after we arrived, and of course he was looking for liquor, which we wouldn't give him. 

Papaya is prepared as a fruit and as a vegetable. They rarely have wheat flour, it is imported and thus very expensive, so they use manioc (cassava) flour, which they make into a gelatinous pudding. No utensils - everything is eaten with the fingers - in fact, usually they haven't any dishes, but rather use a large round leaf as a plate. Food is prepared in a traditional oven, an Umu, which is just a fire and hot stones in a hole in the ground into which most things are placed, or sometimes in a stone oven. It's not a hard life - most food is easily obtained, except for the protein. All trash is recycled - a large garbage dump serves as the pig, dog, and chicken trough. Not unsanitary, though, because they burn the trash dump frequently. These people are very neat, raking and burning all trash several times weekly. Everything is used - old coconut husks are the basis of their cooking fires. 

For a little-visited place, there were nine boats in the anchorage the other day. Three of us had a cookout on the beach when we were able to buy some impressive fish from one of the fishermen. We walked along the beach to a cleared spot, and were accompanied by all the young boys in the village. When Nick decided to start the fire he was overwhelmed by the young boys helping - these kids know how to do things. We quickly had a good cooking fire going, as well as multiple small smoky brush fires all around the perimeter of our cookout area to keep flies and mosquitoes away, which worked perfectly. 

The kids were just fascinated by us, and were helpful and polite. They bustled around gathering palm fronds to place on the sand for us to sit on, brought us everything they thought we'd need, even tended our food cooking on the fire. Naturally, we all shared our food with them - so different from their usual food, they just gobbled it down. It was a lot of fun - everyone shared - the kids all brought their own leaf to use as a plate (pretty easy, they're all over the place). I learned how to weave palm fronds into a serving platter on which a leaf is placed for a plate. (Marketable skill in the States?). Pretty easy in some ways for the housewife, no dishwashing, just feed the plates to the pigs, burn whatever isn't consumed. That's one of the reasons that the village can be so clean - there's no plastic and very little metal, so trash disposal is quite easy. 

Although wherever we go we draw a crowd of curious children, they are polite and not at all aggressive, making them a pleasure. One day when a friend and I took a walk to the next village I popped a bag of balloons in my pocket, which I blew up and handed out to the children we met. On our walk back we stopped to rest and talk with two young girls in the village where our boats are anchored. I pulled out my balloons - suddenly every child in the village came running toward us, dragging their little sisters and brothers along, and mobbed us, all wanting a balloon but all too reserved to ask. I blew up and distributed 30 balloons that day. If I had known what a hit they'd be (and how many children there are on these islands) I would have bought cases of balloons. These kids are just so much fun. Our friend’s skill as a nurse is in great demand, and the parents are very appreciative of the smallest assistance. 

Friday, Samoa time. 

The eastern end of the island is flat and boggy - nobody really lives there, it's just banana and taro "plantations". There are no lights on at night because they've run out of lamp oil, and have no gasoline for their few generators. They have a lot of children. We went to the other island in the group, Tafahi, about eight miles away, in a local fishing boat (there is neither bay nor anchorage over there, just a narrow cut in the reef where the fishing boats run up on the sand). It's an extinct volcano - just a cone sticking up out of the water. You climb 154 steps up to the only village. 

Everything is on a slant - up and down, no level. Tiring to walk around. There are approximately 100 people living on Tafahi (or 200, depending on who you talk to, but the village is so small that 100 adults at most seems reasonable), and they have between 26 and 30 children between the ages of 5 and 10 (we know that because we visited all six classes of the primary school). It's a harder existence over there because of the difficulty in farming and fishing, but they seem to have no problem producing lots of children. We yachties figure that the best system of birth control would be television (which they don't have). 

In some ways, visiting yachts are no benefit to these people - we bring trash and liquor, neither of which they need. We look for fish and lobster, which for us is a delicacy, not the necessity it is for them. 

Okay, did you figure out the timing of our passage? Tonga is on the other side of the date line, so 4:30 Saturday, Tonga time is 4:30 Friday, Samoa time. We're in a time warp.
 

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