12.12.2010 – “The Old Backbackers Room” – Agnes Lodge, Munda, Solomon Islands
Hello reading audience! I miss you all! Aimee and I have passed the one-month mark in our travels this week, and I’m happy to say we’re still a couple! That’s not to say we haven’t wanted to throw things at each other from time to time, but on average things are going swimmingly! After waiting at the lagoon-view “Bamboo Bar” in Gizo for our boat to arrive, we threw back our cans of SolBrew (the local lager that, in my newest, yet rather crude quote, can be described as such: “it’s like sex in a canoe – fucking close to water”) and headed to the docks. After waiting for 10 minutes or so (the boat was supposed to leave sometime between 12:00pm and 4:00pm…), we asked a bloke sitting behind a bar-looking structure if the boat to Munda had shown up yet, at which point he became rather frantic, pointed to the next wharf down where a tiny “banana boat” was loading, and said “hurry – the boat is leaving!” ‘Nuff said. Our sandels had a hard time keeping up as we scurried our backpack-haulin’ arses over to the wooden bench-seat equipped boat. Phew, all hands on board! The local kids jumped on and filled the remaining seats, and the gasoline outboard cranked over. And over. And oooovvvvvvvveeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, again and again, sometimes non-stop for over ten seconds, relentlessly. Dirk and I craned our necks, along with everyone, and started exchanging grones and sarcastic remarks. When the cranking didn’t help, one of the now half-dozen men circling the engine had the idea that perhaps drowning the poor Yamaha 2-stroke with starting fluid would be a good idea, and it wasn’t. It was a tinny cranking – like a cylinder without compression…or spark. No catching, no stumbling – nothing. Almost, almost, as if the stupid “I fell overboard but thank-God I had this kill-switch key attached to my wrist” jobber had been pulled out and not replaced (not that say, I personally have ever done such a thing…twice : ). So whitey crawled over his girlfriend and a local girl, down the outside of the boat, and pointed at the spot where the key should have been… and I quickly retreated to my seat, not wanting to make it any worse for the poor guy. But while the ignition issue was now resolved, the minutes of cranking (and addition of fuel and starting fluid) was keeping us against the dock. So they pulled the plugs, cleaned them, cranked it over, and put them back in. Then more cranking, followed by more starting fluid, followed by more cranking. Whitey again moves to the stern – “pardon me, excuse me, doh!” followed by “choke, but no starting fluid.” Vrrrrooooooooooommm goes 115hp of Japanese precision! So we were finally on our way, heading to Munda, on the southern end of New Georgia Island. Since the boat was laden quite heavily with goods from Gizo (Munda is less of an established “city” than Gizo, and therefore has less access to produce, stores, etc), the driver asked for the heaviest people to move to the bow of the boat in order to make it easier for the boat to get up to speed. Since most of the passengers were children heading home for Christmas, the four heavy white folks ended up at the front of the boat – and Dirk couldn’t help making a statement about Rosa Parks that made us all groan with embarrassment over the unintentional arrangement… But moving on – when we arrived in Munda after just under 3 hours, the local Friday market was just wrapping up, and instead of rush for provisions, we settled into our “cheap” accommodations at the Agnes Lodge. For $450SBD each couple got a 4-bed “Backpackers” room in the wing of the lodge that had been around since the pre-WWII British occupation (unless I’m off on my history, which I could be), and they have an adjoining, shared bathroom/shower. The interesting bit about a bathroom with two doors is that unless you lock your neighbor out (there are two locks per door – one on the inside, and one on the outside) upon entering said bathroom, they could easily waltz right in and start brushing their teeth while you’re sudzing up! So, being the decent folks that we are, we’re in a good habbit of locking the door, but also being selfish Americans, we also forget to unlock it on occasion! In such a case, the people being locked out no longer have access to a bathroom or shower unless the other couple can be yelled at through the wall and convinced to unlock the door (and we’re all guilty of this, as of this morning). But more on Munda: the town consists of a concrete pier for unloading barges/landing craft, four Chinese-run supermakets (all carrying the same items, give or take), an airstrip for the Dash-8 that comes in from Gizo…once a day, a police station, a bakery, the rather large (area-wise) Agnes Lodge, and then scattered local residences that carry on out of town on a coral road. Unbeknownst to us, the Friday market in Munda is much better than say, the Saturday market, as the Saturday-Thrusday markets don’t in fact, exist… So get your betelnuts, potatos, fish, and pineapple when you can, or you’ll have to wait another week! That said, Aimee and I picked up a decently-sized fish, a Rainbow Runner, from a guy selling them under a tree for $20SBD, which is about $3USD. We cooked all of it and ate what we could, then used the rest to make sandwiches the next day when we rented dugout canoes and made a 1-mile paddle out to Hopi Island, where we spent the afternoon snorkeling, getting sunburned asses, collecting shells, and racing hermit crabs (in that order). Paddling a dugout canoe isn’t too different from paddling a canoe you might find at home, but staying afloat is much, much harder! First off, they are extremely heavy, have hardly any freeboard, and their hull shape is so round you might think they used a basketball, or perhaps a compressed gas cylinder, to shape the hull. That said, even during the torrential downpour that followed us home from the island, we managed to keep our heads above water, and returned the canoes safely back to their owner. Speaking of the owner, this place was originally a resthouse of sorts for the British in the (I think) pre-WWII days, but when they abandoned/left their post in the Solomons, they gave it to the cook, Agnes, who had been working there for over 30 years. She then ran the lodge for the remainder of her life, and then it was passed on to her children to run. Today, one of her daughters is the majority shareholder in the private company that owns the lodge, and is married to a Kiwi by the name of Don, who has managed the place for a good portion of his considerable life! So it’s a heart-felt endeavor, keeping this place up, but it’s quite nice and in my opinion reasonably priced considering it’s remoteness. That said, the guy that runs their dive shop was a bit of a dick, and I wouldn’t recommend diving with him if you ever end up out here – but that’s just me. I had heard that there was a sink-hole dive that tunneled underground for quite a ways, then under a reef, then finally out into the lagoon. But Richard (I didn’t get his name, and calling him Mr. Dick seems to bee too over-the-top, even form me) said with a discouraging tone that it was sooooo far away, cost him too much in fuel, he only would do it if three divers or more went, he wouldn’t be open Monday-Wednesday (when we left), he wouldn’t send “the boys” out on a Sunday, and he required 50+ logged dives before he’d let you go. And their boats were all broken, their dive compressor was on fire, the ants ate through all the regulator hoses, the local dogs had stolen the tanks, the moon wasn’t aligned with Polaris quite right, he had an odd rash from an encounter with a rooster, and his invisible friend thought we looked “shifty.” So all in all, no diving, nor even a trip to go snorkeling – hence, our dugout rentals, which turned out to be quite a hoot! We saw Red Lionfish, octopus, clownfish, lots of various soft and hard corals, sea-cucumbers, hermit crabs, Cowrie shells (alive, big, and shiny!), big pufferfish, and tons of different little reef fish. We had our leftover fish on local bread, drank our water, and soaked in the glorious sun. Life is good.
