Everyone here speaks French. It is difficult to find anyone who can say more than two words of English. So we have pulled out our best recollection of school time French - and that was a long time ago! Between us, we have managed to cobble together enough of the right words to be understood, eventually, with lots of laughs along the way. This 78 sq km island has a "road" running around it, which is approx 35 km in a circuit, plus a few more internal 'secondary roads' that lead to crater lakes and plantations. We have seen more banana trees and taro plants than we ever imagined. Not really sure what they do with all the bananas and taros. There are only 9000 people living here but it looks like you could feed the whole of the south pacific with bananas from here. There are no signposts, no roadsigns, or village names. The map has village names on it, but the villages do not. So it is impossible to tell where exactly you are on the island at any time. There is water on one side and ban anas on the other, wherever you go! The buildings here are made of concrete and are far more permanent and substantial than the buildings in Tonga. There are several large Catholic churches, built of stone with white painted pointing's. Some are very elaborate, adorned with towers and balconies and ornaments. There are only a few pigs, and they are kept in pens. Lawns are mowed, gardens trimmed, hedges neatly clipped. Everyone drives around in late model cars. The usual French collection plus a lot of new Ford pickup trucks. These shiny vehicles are everywhere - we are not sure what happens to the old cars, they all look quite new. One of the highlights so far was our visit to Lac Lolololo. This is a large crater lake which has vertical cliff edges dropping a long way down, like a deep canyon but almost perfectly round. The lake at the bottom of the cliff looks deep and dark. Quite stunning. On Friday we managed to find the one and only bank on the island to get some money out. Paci fic Francs are used here, there are 78 Francs to the NZ$. From what we have worked out, prices here for groceries are pretty much the same as NZ. After the limited supplies of basics in Tonga, it was wonderful to go to a real supermarket and buy nice bread, cheese, pate, salmon, pastries and a huge selection of fruit and vegetables. Everything here is imported, quite a bit from NZ such as apples, kiwifruit, Anchor UHT milk, Tip Top ice cream, Mainland and Kapiti cheese, Cerebos salt. Surprising to find all these NZ products amongst the mainly French imports. We have seen several vehicles with All Blacks logos on them, some shops with the logo on the window and some people wearing All Blacks t-shirts. We haven't seen any other rugby team logos, but it looks like Wallisians are keen All Black supporters. The people here are very friendly, they wave as we go by on foot or in the car. Lots of smiles as they say "Bonjour!". Some locals stopped and gave us a lift to the vege market, then came back and took us to the car rental place and helped to translate what we needed. Very helpful! Our little Peugout 206 has a bit of trouble with roads designed for 4 wheel drive vehicles, but it is getting us around! Today we had 33 degrees, so fairly warm. The water is 29 degrees and feels soft and silky. We can stay in the water a long time without getting cold! On Friday we caught fish in the lagoon which fed us for two nights. After visiting the supermarket we now have chicken, pork and NZ lamb in the freezer as well. This was good timing as on Thursday we finished the meat we had in the freezer from NZ. Not bad going - we lasted 3 months before we needed to go shopping!
