Just a quick note to tell you that Sunday morning started out with me getting chased by a pig on the way to the pool (enter the usual rescue heroes an old lady with no teeth and an umbrella to beat him back and masses of small boys under six with pebbles and pig-wrestling skills). For the record it was a Giant Pig and not the cute pink kind with the curly tail. We looked eye-to-eye and after he added some snorting and grunting to the posturing I decided he could win and bolted.
The midwife here from New Zealand and her husband took us American girls on a round-the-island tour where we sampled coffee from Tanna, saw black sand beaches, and stood in the roaring wind with our feet in the warm turquoise waters of the south pacific. The weather was stormy but we had a great day. I shouldn’t forget to mention the one beach we stopped at where some locals had trapped some bats (which I think they call flying foxes) and were prepping them for a good ole fashion BBQ. The other American midwife and I were making gagging gestures—I believe at one point she said she would rather eat a locust than one of those bats—while they explained how they grill ‘em up. Apparantly the armpit is quite succulent we were told, while he spread the wings out to show us. These creatures look like squirrels with bad-ass teeth and leather wings. They should be the mascot for a biker gang. I really can’t go on about it, it is making me a bit queasy. We ended the day with an outdoor movie down at the NumbaWan Café where they string up a screen just in front of the ocean and use a projector with DVD to show the movie. It was quite fun and I discovered that they do have ice cream here but it doesn’t taste at all like ours. There is finally sun again after a week of squalls and rain, though it is entirely blustery, which I am just trying to enjoy as the humidity has been blown away for now.
And for the record, when I went this morning to swim the pig had been thoroughly detained in the back of the property again so I called him a name and walked slowly by.
