Flat Earth Society

We still, boringly, do not have our internet connection at home yet, and we’ve not had much time to hang around the marinas’s for the wi-fi, so I'm still feeling like we have fallen off the face of the earth and would dearly love to have the internet for those long evenings whilst T is working. On the plus side, Cable & Wireless have just landed a sea-cable onto the island, and are busy putting in a large fibre optic pipe up our road, so soon we are going to have excellent bandwidths and speeds – just not this week.

We had another busy week last week with Tyler starting work at Red Rock (http://www.redrockbvi.net/)%20on on Tuesday. September is the lowest of the low season, and 90% of all the restaurants are closed – which Red Rock is doing in October. So he has a couple of weeks to learn the menu and then has the month off, before they start to get busy in November again. Frustratingly all our cookery books are in the Container, but we’ve had some fun with looking at new ideas and developing Tyler’s Caribbean collection.

We’ve also bought our new cars – which takes forever. We finally decided on this huge Hyundai Terracan (not sure I’ve even seen them in SA) as it has extra seats in the boot and will be large enough for 3 growing boys and all our clobber, and Tyler has an old Nissan Pathfinder.

The boys are really settling in now, and have a routine already. William had his first playdate on Friday with his new little friend Sammy and Georgie had a sleepover at his friend Derek, who has a fabulous tree house in his garden, where the boys spent most of the night. Saturday was a hectic blur of kids birthday parties with Georgie off at a swimming party at the one end of the island (on the scariest 70˚ degree hill you’ve ever seen, which I had to drive/slide down in torrential rain) and James on a rather ill-fated camping party at the other end of island on Saturday night. He has been so badly bitten by sand fleas that we’ve had to take him to the doctor for cortisone. It all sounded a bit Lord of the Fliesish, and don’t think he will want to do that again in a hurry.

Our big news for last week was the opening of the new supermarket, which actually looks like a normal supermarket (ie clean floors, wide isles, fresh vegetables etc) which must seem so banal as news, but is really BIG here. One S. African girl said she almost cried when she walked in, she was so happy! Anyhow we are hoping that this will raise the bar.  The island is developing so rapidly, with a new bit of civilisation been added everday. This is, of course, both a good and bad thing, however hopefully the next fronteir will  be daily decent newspapers. Since we pay $7 for a loaf of bread and $6.50 for 2l fresh milk, one can only imagine howmuch they would cost, but I can see this rather flat earth existence becoming wearying unless one has hard connections to the 'outside world'.

However, we are definetly settling well into island life. Yesterday Tyler and I started our diving course. This is our wedding anniversary present to ourselves, as it is actually how we met (diving in the Maldives) and we had promised ourselves to start diving again. It was a magical day. We went off to Norman Island – passing HMS "Wave Ruler", which is currently moored out in Drakes Channel for ‘hurricane support’ and to keep a watchful eye on the British islands, which is strangely reassuring.  We did all our mask flooding and buddy-breathing in a little bay and then went off and did a ‘proper’ 15m deep dive off Angel Fish Reef and saw lots of coral and fish including a sea turtle, a sting ray and some Spiny Caribbean Lobster, which looked about the best fresh fish we’d seen since we got here!

Other news ( you can see our world is getting smaller) is that our vegetable seeds are sprouting like triffids, and we are going to have to start our vegetable patch a lot sooner than we thought. Since the whole  island is like one big greenhouse, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised, but we are not used to anything happening so quickly anymore!