We decided to stay at Raintree Cafe, despite its problems.\u00c2\u00a0 They offered to do our laundry, the primary thing we needed lots of water for.\u00c2\u00a0 They found a way to turn on the hot water, though it takes the duration of a shower to show evidence of heat, and it’s still just a trickle.\u00c2\u00a0 However, we are at 10 degrees south of the equator.\u00c2\u00a0 Mostly, who wants to spend precious vacation hours negotiating a new hotel which is not known to be better, and crappy businesses live on that laziness.\u00c2\u00a0 Lonely Planet writes that this is the best in its price range.\u00c2\u00a0 Gee, what if they are right?<\/p>\n
We were introduced to the interesting walking tour guy.\u00c2\u00a0 We decided to go on an easy 3-hour walk to a small limestone cave instead of a difficult 5-hour walk to a larger cave filled with flying foxes and guano.\u00c2\u00a0 We were accompanied by three additional people from his village, which is about a mile down the road; a friend who seemed to be a little more familiar with the species of flora and fauna on the island; a young man who fetched a machete from his garden to clear the last half-kilometer to the cave, which hadn’t been visited recently, and another kid just along for the walk.\u00c2\u00a0 And eventually, and even littler kid, of an age for drawing on himself with a ball point pen in imitation of the elders.\u00c2\u00a0 Even the youngest of these fellas speak more languages than we do and can survive in the bush for much longer than anyone reading this could.<\/p>\n
The cave was kind of hokey.\u00c2\u00a0 Nobody was prepared to go far into it.\u00c2\u00a0 We had only a headlamp and a small flashlight given away as part of a swag bag at the Gay Film Festival by the Steamworks Baths in Oakland, which provides just enough light to guide yourself into the correct hole but not really to do serious spelunking.\u00c2\u00a0 The guides hadn’t brought any lights at all.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s a great variety of professionalism in guides in the world, from the Archaeology PhD who took us around Benares, to the kids who accost you at the temples of Siem Reap.\u00c2\u00a0 And ruling all, Pilatwe Manga of Okavango Wilderness Safaris in Maun, Botswana.<\/p>\n
But I digress.\u00c2\u00a0 The journey (about 5 km each way) was the fascinating thing, seeing the vines and spiders and the little manioc gardens out in the middle of the jungle, checking out what Christopher was playing on his mp3 player, watching Francis wield his machete against the encroaching wild ginger and vines.\u00c2\u00a0 Watch out for the Wild Taro: some kinds sting like a nettle.<\/p>\n
The walk wore me out, but I bounced back quickly enough to make it to the Telecom building to clarify the username and password which will grant me access to the Internet I still haven’t connected to yet.\u00c2\u00a0 Some PhD students from the University of Texas at Austin were there, finding out that non-AT&T SIM cards just don’t work in iPhones.\u00c2\u00a0 We asked them if they were there surfing (one wore a surfing t-shirt) but they said that they’d been in Vanuatu for a couple weeks and were here for a couple more to visit caves (and coral reefs) to collect samples which could be used to derive the rainfall history for the last several millennia — apparently some complicated scheme can be applied to a stalagmite from a cave which involves differentials in the decay of various isotopes of uranium and thorium, which yields the rainfall information.<\/p>\n
Afterwards a woman running a junk shop in a mall told us where two good Chinese restaurants were close by but we couldn’t find them.<\/p>\n
There are almost zero restaurants on the main drag of Honiara.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s just weird.\u00c2\u00a0 We walked down it for a long time and ended up eating in the Chinese restaurant of the same “Honiara Hotel” that we ate at the French restaurant of last night.\u00c2\u00a0 It was very good, as was last night’s meal.\u00c2\u00a0 We had sizzling squid which was not sizzled at the table in the American custom, and salted fish and chicken fried rice, and began with a preserved vegetable and julienned pork soup in a very nice stock.\u00c2\u00a0 Salt and water are what you need after a day in the humid sun.<\/p>\n
That’s today’s update.\u00c2\u00a0 Now I’ll type in the username and password which have been written down by someone in large enough lettering for me to read, and I’ll see if I can actually connect to the Internet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We decided to stay at Raintree Cafe, despite its problems.\u00c2\u00a0 They offered to do our laundry, the primary thing we needed lots of water for.\u00c2\u00a0 They found a way to turn on the hot water, though it takes the duration of a shower to show evidence of heat, and it’s still just a trickle.\u00c2\u00a0 However, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}