Sunday 29 August 2010

Seraghi village visit

Despite all these interesting posts of trips and activities, I have actually been doing work at the hospital, its just that for non-medical minds, the majority of my hospital stories are pretty boring!
Sooo I'll just carry on with stories of my other adventures...
Seraghi is a beautiful village in a really remote part of Gizo island. We made friends with some locals on our wonderings through Gizo market who live in Sergahi. The village was torn apart in 2007 by a tsunami (as were a lot of the pacific islands, and the 07 one is different to the boxing day tsunami of ...2004) but the family are now in the process of building a second house to use as a 'village homestay' for tourists etc to pay and come and stay for a night or several in their village and live their life for a couple of days. It's a really good way for them to generate extra income besides just selling fish. They have already had a few guests come to stay. The family is lovely and they are so genuine. I really felt so at home with them.
The sons of the family who are of similar age to us and who we get on with really well picked us up from gizo and we had a few stops along the way to look overboard at the Tao Maru ship wreck from WWII. We couldnt really see from the surface so I put on a snorkel and stuck my head over the side! ha!
Our next stop was at a set of very small islands that are all connected by strips of white sand. It was just like you'd imagine pacific islands to look. Stunning. We took lots of photos, climbed trees, collected shells.
We finally got to Seraghi and were greeted by loads of kids who were very excited to see us. The village looked like they'd had a professional landscaper in, its was incredible considering it was flattened 3 years previously. They had beautiful houses with displays along the small main road of shells and coconuts with various different plants and flowers carefully arranged. Meva (the mother) told us a pretty scary story of when the tsunami hit. It was really interesting to hear it from someone who experienced it first hand. We chatted a while with the family then headed back out with the boys to do some fishing...which was SUCH good fun! We caught loads, and its so much more exciting when each fish is crazy colours and you only have to wait 5 minutes before something bites! Ambrose said I was good at it anyway! haha! We then headed over to another island called Jarre for snorkelling - it was only on the way back to Gizo that we realised how close the island we were snorkelling pretty far off of was to a big crocodile hang out....brilliant! luckily we survived to tell the tale....
Meva had made us an amazing lunch whilst we'd been out and we sat down and had dinner with the family, it was so lovely! and there were loads of kids running around the place, such a nice atmosphere. We wanted to take loads of photos but unfortunately 3 out of 3 cameras were either broken or out of battery which was SO annoying! too many photos of the fishing!

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