Blake and Deb in Fiji: Goodbyes

Today was our last full day in Fiji; we fly out tomorrow afternoon. Deborah has been living up to her domestic goddess status by giving the house a final deep cleaning – with minimal help from me – even going so far as to remove all the furniture and other large items to the deck so she could clean every nook and cranny inside the house. She went to these lengths despite the fact that we probably won’t get a good referral from the homeowner no matter how spotless he finds the house due to his unjustified blaming of us for the death of his twenty-year old car’s engine. But we still feel taking first-rate care of the house as we originally intended is the right thing to do.

These last few days we’ve been saying our goodbyes to some of the many people we’ve met during our stay here. Mariam came over for dinner Thursday, which allowed us to return the favor for hosting us and feeding us her amazing curry a couple of months ago. We also had dinner at neighbors Steve and Iretta’s again last week. And we’ve been seeing our favorite market vendors, laundry lady, and restaurant proprietors for the last time. Simoke (I just learned I’ve been misspelling his name Semoko all this time) we still see on a regular basis, along with his ill-behaved but lovable dog Bonzo. Everyone keeps asking when we’re coming back, as if it is a foregone conclusion that we will. It could happen, especially as a stopover for a trip to New Zealand, which is on our list for sometime in the next two or three years.

For our last hurrah we ate lunch at the one “fancy” restaurant in Savusavu, where the lobster and seafood salad served in a papaya shell was probably the best meal we’ve had here – even better than the much loved duck curry we had again this week at The Sea View Café. There we exchanged contact information with the friendly managers who, knowing our fondness for their duck curry, wrote as a reminder above our name and address, “Duck Man.”