Day 30, Year 2: Living the Good Life
Date: Thursday, May 24, 2007
Weather Today: Yet Another Beautiful Sunny Day
Location: Suva, Fiji

I often think of Helen and Scott Nearing. They once wrote a book called, “Living the Good Life.” Scott was a professor at Columbia early on and I think Helen was from France. In the 1940’s, maybe late 1930’s, they built their first home in Vermont. They later built a home in Maine, always living as self-sufficiently as possible. The point here is that they wrote about the good life. But I think they had it wrong. I think the good life is out here in the South Pacific. Or maybe they had it right and we’ve got it right. Maybe the “good life” is living your dream. I have to admit that it was never my dream to sail around the world, but I also have to admit that I am really enjoying the journey. Today was just a very simple day, but I enjoyed every minute of it. I really felt like I was living the good life. We spent this morning trying to figure out where it is we want to visit in Fiji. Once we had a rough plan, we wrote our letter to the Lau Group asking for permission to visit there, and then we headed into town.

The Lau Group Provicial Office wouldn’t take our letter because they still have not received police clearance for our visit. They suggested that we go back to the police station to check on the clearance process. We will do that tomorrow morning. So we left there and went on to our next task. We spent part of the afternoon in an internet cafe–not our favorite Connect Internet as their connection was down. We spent $6 Fijian for a couple of hours online and had a great time. Such simple things thrill us out here. We finished getting our pictures uploaded to our website. If you want to see those pictures, you simply go to the travel log for a particular date. If there is a picture at the end of the log, then you double click on it. That will open the whole album for that day. We also paid a couple of bills online, checked on flight possibilities for Mark’s brother Steve who is planning to come visit us here, and checked on renewing Mark’s New Hampshire driver’s license online (not possible). We then walked back to the Yacht Club and celebrated our day with a pitcher of beer. Beer is actually cheaper by the pitcher, so why not. We met a couple who came in today–Wolfgang and Margaret on Contessa. They spent last season in Fiji and visited the Lau Group for six weeks. They said it is phenomenal and that we should persist in our attempts to get our permit for that group. So tomorrow morning we will head in to the police station to check on the status of our clearance.

None of what I have described here sounds very exciting but somehow doing it here does seem a little exotic and special. I think I just enjoy being in a totally different culture. It feels good and therefore, life is good. We are coming near to the end of our stay here in Suva, however, and tomorrow we need to get a move on. After checking in at the police station, we plan to go around the end of the peninsula to the University of the South Pacific. We just want to see the campus and visit the Cost-U-Less store across from the campus. I’m out of Zip-Loc quart bags and they are the one place out here other than in American Samoa that will have those. We also plan to visit the market in town tomorrow to buy kava root (yaqona). We need a half kilo to present as a sevusevu (gift) for every village we plan to visit. This gets expensive as a kilo costs about $40 Fiji. This is the cost of the good life.