Ahoy and other nautica

This morning a couple of hundred yachts left Auckland in perfect conditions on the Coastal Classic race to Russell in the Bay of Islands, and I - and a hillful of people - watched them go from North Head. They were a grand sight on the sparkling water with the wind filling their spinnakers (possibly gennakers - I'm no mariner) as they jostled for position rounding the point and skimmed past Rangitoto heading north. I was thinking they would be arriving tomorrow, and some of the smaller ones may, but astonishingly the race was over for the front-runners in less than six hours: pretty good for 119 nautical miles.

Auckland is known as the City of Sails, and a harbour full of yachts is a fairly regular sight, but it was a particularly lovely one today after a week of rain, especially with a holiday weekend ahead. Before I lived here, the only time I saw a yacht race was years ago from the Isle of Wight, when the Whitbread Round the World boats set off along the Solent. They were big, big yachts, and what astonished me was how the water, which had been relatively calm, was churned up like a washing machine by their wake as they swept past - and that there were spectators out there amongst it in spindly little kayaks and even someone on a windsurfer.

Speaking of which, I had a go on one of those in Fiji and had lots of fun right up until the point that I had to be rescued by the resort staff when I couldn't work out how to sail back up the lagoon against the wind. As I said, not a mariner.

Coco loco

I can see the signs as well as anybody: two coconut references in the last post, and then I just read a warning about coconuts in my Mauritius guidebook. So coconuts it is today, then.

The warning was not to lie underneath one. Well, duh! I've been cautious about falling coconuts ever since I saw one in Tahiti drop out of a tree into a shallow pond at the base with the most spectacular splash. It was like a scene from The Dambusters. Noise, white water, small tsunami: the thought of my delicate noggin being underneath something like that has left me terminally cautious about the potential irony of the Tree of Life actually being an Instrument of Death.

That's what they call it all through the tropic zones, you know, because they use every bit of it. I have, myself, sat on a coconut palm stump on Atiu in the Cook Islands, drinking from a small polished coconut shell cup bush beer brewed from fermented orange juice and hops - a tradition since the early missionaries took a dim view of the original tipple of choice, kava. (Bush beer is so much nicer than that muddy, mouth-numbing disgusting drink anyway.) Custom is, to have it with a coconut milk chaser.

I've also drunk fizzy fresh green coconut milk there ("Tastes just like Sprite!" said Birdman George, who shinned up the tree to pick one for me - and so it was, sort of). The he cut a spoon from the outside with one slash of his machete and I used it to scoop out the soft, delicately-flavoured meat from inside ("Baby food," said George). Then he cut some fronds and plaited them into plates to serve our fruity lunch on at the beach, where freshly-grated coconut and a squeeze of lime juice made pawpaw and starfruit into something memorable.

I've been given a polished bit of shell with holes in it to keep my sarong secure, and a woven-frond hat to keep the sun off. I've eaten fish cooked in coconut milk in the Loyalty Islands near New Caledonia; as well as coconut crab which looked hideous, but tasted divine, thanks to its exclusively coconut diet.

I've sheltered in Thailand under a cococut palm leaf-roofed hut, on a coconut palm leaf mat and watched a trained monkey romp up a coconut palm tree to twist a nut free, and seen the meat boiled up in a vast wok to extract the oil - and then tasted the glorious caramel-y residue that's left afterwards. I've made a pig of myself on Aitutaki with rukau - tender green taro shoots baked in coconut cream. In fact, I've eaten a whole swag of foods cooked in or with coconut, and loved them all, ruinous though they are to the waistline.

And none of this is to mention how coconut trees are used in building, for roofing, for drums, for clothing (including the infamous coconut shell bra, all sizes) ... It's a marvellous plant. Just don't sit underneath one.

Sailing

Unlike what seems these days to be the rest of the population of the western world, I've only been on two cruises - oh, hang on, three: I was forgetting the fancy catamaran up the Gordon River in Tasmania for a couple of nights. But that's in another class entirely from what most people think of as a cruise these days - and so was my first time really, on a small ship through a few of the Fiji Islands, which was pleasant and comfortable, but, you know, small.

Cruise ships are getting bigger and bigger: 'floating cities' may be a cliche of ad-speak, but it's also totally accurate. And they're already past the point where the destinations are the main focus - really, they could just be moored in some immense swimming pool and most of the passengers would be so caught up in the eating and shopping and entertainment on board that they wouldn't even notice. The latest Disney cruise ship has virtual portholes in the inner suites that are more in demand than those with real views over the real sea, because these ones come with interactive Nemos.

I'm thinking about cruising because my sister's just returned from 10 days in the Pacific with P&O, with what I think are horror stories: a punch-up in the guest laundry over a dryer, with one woman laid out cold; someone stealing an evening gown, wearing it, and challenging the gobsmacked rightful owner to prove it was hers; a family off-loaded in Port Vila after a noisy domestic; teenage lads ditto after tomfoolery in the life-boats and giving the captain an earful. Plus obese passengers super-loading plates at the buffet; and having to miss a port because the swell was a bit too big to risk these top-heavy passengers transferring into the launches. Sounds like hell to me. (And P&O is still struggling to shake off that murder on board a few years ago.)

I've been on board the Cunard liners - not, alas for a cruise, but for a tour and a fancy lunch, and they are very classy, if slightly absurd (waiters with white gloves - how impractical!) Even the new ones, like the Queen Mary, are designed to have an aura of mid-20th century elegance and exclusivity that hopefully discourages inelegant behaviour amongst the guests. (Probably most of them are too old to do more than clash Zimmer frames anyway.) The ships are certainly beautiful to look at, inside and especially out, with those classically raked bows - nothing like the glaring white bricks of the modern jobs.

The only proper cruise I've been on was on Silversea's Silver Whisper, a small ship (maximum 380 passengers, and it was only 2/3 full) and even though I'm still not a convert to cruising per se (too much about the journey, not enough destination, so not very productive for stories - also, very fattening), this was a great experience. Again, there were absurdities - ranks of waiters hovering to seize our filled plates from us at the breakfast buffet to carry for us to our tables, the whole dining room seething with these mini-parades - but besides being very luxurious, it was friendly too. And the bed! Twelve centimetres of pillow-top plus gentle rocking from the ship = best sleeps ever.

Perhaps though what made it seem so very welcoming and comfortable was that the cruise was along the coast of China, and the ports we called at delivered such an overwhelming dose of foreignness that it was a huge relief to return each time to familiar surroundings and cheerful staff who knew our names.

UPDATE: At the risk of discrediting this whole post, I've just remembered the fabulous cruise I went on through the Galapagos Islands - but again, it was a small ship, and it was all about the destination, rather than the on-board facilities (which were great).

Doubtful about Tomas

More cyclones. This time Tomas is pummelling Fiji with even more force than Katrina in New Orleans: they were forecasting 250kmh winds. Having seen what around 180kmh gales did to Aitutaki, it's pretty chilling to think what could have happened to places like this village in the Yasawas, where the people live in simple huts right beside the beach.

We visited on a Captain Cook cruise, in a small ship that even so looked huge and other-worldly, gleaming white and modern in the bay, as out of place as the USS Enterprise. We were made very welcome everywhere we called in - Fijian people are so friendly - and a highlight of our week was, as elsewhere in the Pacific, going to a church service where the windows were open, the air was scented, chickens scratched around outside, and the unaccompanied singing was so loud and forceful that it sent shivers down your spine. We went to a school, too...

>>> ...Captivating though it was, the snorkelling was for me the supporting act of the cruise’s features: the best part was visiting the villages and seeing close-up how the Fijian people live. It's a laid-back life: temperatures of 30+ degrees don't encourage industriousness, and the main impression is one of languour. With a sea full of fish out the front, coconut palms fringing the beach and chickens scratching under the breadfruit trees in the village, it might seem that most needs are met without effort: but as our hospitality manager Trevor explained, a diet rich in starch and fat has serious health consequences that reduce the average life expectancy considerably. So it's a short life – but on the face of it a happy one, where the priority is on family and friends, and where it is not a twee homily that a stranger is a friend you haven’t met, but a fact. There can be few other places where visitors are made to feel so welcome.

This was most evident on our visit to the second village where the highlight was a concert put on by the children of the four-classroom school. A plain and unadorned building on the far side of a grassy playground where a single netball hoop stood in a circle of hard-packed dirt and a volleyball net drooped between its poles, the classrooms were straight out of the 1930s. Bare wooden walls were covered in scrawled pictures (this was a primary school – few children get the chance to take their education further) and battered desks with lift-up lids were stacked neatly to one side for the holidays. Piles of exercise books covered in brown paper awaited their owners and on the blackboard were education objectives in beautiful cursive writing. Although it was the holidays, a group of around twenty children from 5 to 12 years of age waited to entertain us with enthusiastic renditions of songs and nursery rhymes. It was odd to realise that ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ was as exotically unreal to these children as ‘Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross’.

Afterwards, my hand was seized by 5 year-old Lusi in a pink frock, who hauled me away on a tour of her school, of which she was as proud as any new entrant anywhere. Several of the passengers had brought gifts of stationery, to the delight of the teacher: "We never see pens," she gasped...

[Pub. Press 19/12/05]

This blue planet should be greener

There's nothing like a neatly-raked, freshly-planted vegetable garden for promoting smuggery: the hard digging done, the plants full of promise, the whole Good Life self-sufficiency scenario. Plus, the eco-halo from the recycling involved: the home-made compost from household scraps and the free-range hens' manure; the plastic pots filched from the return bin at the garden centre, bottoms cut off and then screwed into the soil around each tender little tomato plant, ready to contain the water when they've got big and thirsty. And the re-used bamboo canes topped with drilled champagne corks so I don't put my eye out when bending down to pick myself a sun-warmed cherry tomato.

But the old canes are fragile and likely to snap, so I've invested in steel-cored plastic-coated ones that should last much longer. They're made in China, and I hope the plastic is recycled - who knows, possibly from our own milk bottles and hummus containers that, outrageously, are sent all the way to China to be processed.

Clean, green New Zealand - yeah, right. The 100% Pure image that the tourist people are so pleased with (and that makes their Aussie equivalents so, er, green with envy) is not as accurate as it should be: quite apart from pockets of pollution from industrial processes around the country, it's a scandal that we send our used plastic halfway around the world for recycling because despite the cost, both financial and carbon, of sending it so far, the Chinese can still do it more cheaply than we can here.

It's also kind of ironic that China imports waste plastic when they have so much of their own, blowing about the streets and flapping from the branches of trees. Despite armies of people like this man? woman? here - one of the better-equipped of the cleaners we saw, compared with the guy sweeping up McDonalds wrappers with a bamboo besom - there's still a lot of litter around the cities, which is grieving to see. In Santiago I watched in horror as a street vendor threw a carton of plastic waste over the railing into the river running through the city - a tumbling, rocky mountain river straight out of the Andes, edged with plastic detritus. In the Yasawa Islands of Fiji, the warm water of the South Pacific is so clear you can see through it to the tin cans and bottles wedged into the sand on the bottom. On top of Mt Snowdon in Wales, ramblers who had spent three hours climbing up through dramatic scenery of sheep-nibbled hillsides, distant lakes and rocky summits thought nothing of dropping banana peel and drink bottles.

And my English in-laws, who live just outside a rubbish-recycling zone (although within SUV-range of bottle-banks, etc) blithely throw plastic, wine bottles and paper into the same bag as their food scraps, without a second thought - although when I recoiled in shock, some residual guilt led to a sudden spat of blame-throwing between them. It didn't, alas, lead to a change in behaviour.

The more I travel around it, the more aware I am of how lucky we are to live on such a beautiful planet. I wish everyone would try harder to keep it clean and tidy.