- Lautoka by day, not quite so bad
- Searching in vain for a hammock
- Poor Eric
Pictures:
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| Fishing boat - maybe Chinese? |
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| Harvey and the Harvey Fresh sign |
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| Yarrrrr |
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| Lautoka waterfront |
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| The market |
Lautoka by day is much more active than at night. The island's population is 40% Indian (as in, from India). The streets are full of stores, almost all of them selling trendy clothing. I search all over, but cannot find a hammock. I do, however, find a shop that sells (what turn out to be bootleg) DVDs, and I buy a low-budget flick called Ninja Zombies. There is a nice little cafe, called The Chilli Tree, where I have a delicious iced mocha. It's just like a chocolate milkshake with coffee.
Harvey has bought a phone card. There are public phones all over the city. The #2 crane is still out of commission, as is the shore crane. When we leave the ship (around 9am), the captain gives us his cell number and asks us to call in a couple of hours to see if we have been cut loose to leave. There is a post office about a mile or so from the harbor, on the main drag, and it is there that we meet.
I spend a lot of time wandering the streets, looking for a hammock. The people are friendly enough - you can't walk more than a hundred yards without someone smiling at you and greeting you with a friendly, "bula." Still, there's not much to the city. I find a market in the center of town and buy a couple souvenir wood carvings from a nice Indian woman. One is a small turtle - about the size of the palm of my hand. The other is about the length of my forearm - a neckbreaker. "God bless you, sir," she says as she hands me the bag.
There are Internet cafes here, but they are cramped and expensive, and they limit the sites you can visit, so I don't bother with them. Around 1:00, I join Harvey and Eric for lunch at the Lautoka Hotel restaurant. I have a marinara pizza, which has three or four different kinds of seafood on it. Harvey hands me the phone card and asks me to cal the captain. He says to call back at 3 - they still don't know when we are leaving. I decide there is nothing left to see in Lautoka and return to the ship anyway, stopping at a liquor store for a bottle of rum for the chief engineer and vodka for the electrician, who I imagine have had a very long day.
At dinner, Eric tells more of his sad story - he'd told his friends he was out of shape, so they didn't register him on their marathon team. His connection is going straight from New Zealand to Hong Kong, so he has to fly. "I was going to go all the way around the world in 80 days without flying, but now I cannot do that." And, just to pour salt on the wound, his wife sent him some more divorce papers. Turns out, she's Indian and broke a marriage arrangement to be with him. She makes a lot of money, ten times what he says he makes, and that has caused a lot of contention between them. He's passed up opportunities for promotions because he's not interested. I suspect he has too much wanderlust to be swayed by the prospect of a larger desk in the same office complex. It doesn't sit well with her.
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