Good Friday Celebrations

Chris woke me at 9am this morning as Leila the owner of Mary’s Lodge said we were welcome to go up and visit the church here in Levuka to join in with the Good Friday celebrations especially as many of the local children were doing performances.

So we woke Abbe, Andy and Julian and then ate some tasty brekkie before taking a walk to the church. The children were really sweet and tried really hard and although re-inacting some pretty gruesome historic events in Fiji involving one about cannibalism and another about Jesus before and during his crucifixion, it was light-hearted and entertaining.

The Priest and other adults in the church were really happy that we came down to join in with the celebrations and kindly translated everything into English for us after first spoken in Fijian, but this also meant that the service went on for 2 hours and we were boiling in there.

The Priest also gave us some further information on Fiji history and the relationship the country has with England, which seems to be a close friendly one. But it was also sad as he spoke of how the Fijians felt very sorry and prayed for the Australians during the recent bush fires and yet news of the

flooding that happened just last week hasn’t even reached news in other countries regardless of the lives that were lost, implying that Fiji isn’t important enough to hit the headlines. At midday we came back, Chris and Andy raced to the shops to buy some fishing line before they closed at 1pm and after untangling the line for over an hour and eating some lunch we walked down to the wharf.

The sun was yet again out in full force and was almost suffocating it was that hot (not that I am complaining of course). A couple of locals also fishing at the end kindly gave the boys some super-smelly fish eggs to us for bait as the bread they brought with them was simply laughed at.

Andy was the first to catch a fish closely followed by an almost identical one by Chris and although they were both small, they saved them both to use as back-up bait once the fish eggs ran out.

An hour or so later Chris felt a hard tug on the line and excitedly reeled in and we were amazed to see a big octopus hanging on! It was amazing! A local guy with his two children had just walked past and we exchanged some friendly ‘Bulas!’ (a bit like ‘Hello’)

with them and we called them back to show them his catch and too check if the octopus was good to eat and not poisonous. But just as they arrived the octopus let go of the line and crawled back into the water, too fast for me to get a quick photo. We were all very upset, especially when it was explained to us that the octopus is “good eating”.

Never mind. I then walked back to ‘Mary’s Lodge’ having had enough sun for the day and left the boys behind to continue fishing and a couple of hours later they returned with a big fish (can’t remember the name of it though) which we took down to ‘Kim’s restaurant’ later to get fried up and accompany our dinner. It was delicious!

Good Friday Celebrations

Levuka, Fiji