on Ruby Slippers on the seventh of this August. We brought Butch home on Monday. Now everyone is back at home and we are working hard to try to get our house in order. Right now, we are living in the basement and the yard needs a lot of work. We are hosting a company party here on the 23rd! It has taken us a while to get everything ready for the party, and we have been hard at work since Dad got home.
I want to thank all of the people who have been reading our additions to this site. In case we have not answered all of your questions in our previous updates, here are the answers to some of the questions that we have been asked since we got home.
My favorite place that we have been is Tonga. It was my favorite place because so many of the people that we met on the trip were there at the same time we were. Tonga has a lot of great snorkeling and diving spots, wonderful friendly people, and plenty of islands to explore. We spent three months there, but I could have stayed there for a year.
I have a couple favorite experiences because it would be impossible to choose just one. In Costa Rica, we got to feed squirrel monkeys! We got up early four days in a row and went to a hotel that was across the street from a big group of trees. We met a person that takes a big box of bananas to the monkeys every morning. It was not a tourist attraction; in fact, the man told us that if there were too many people that the monkeys were not used to, they would not even come. By the fourth day, I think that the monkeys were used to us, because we put pieces of bananas on our heads the monkeys climbed right up our backs to get them! We have a very cool picture of Molly and me with monkeys posing on top of our heads!
Another great experience we had was feeding the stingrays in Moorea. The stingrays frequented a shallow area that our cruiser’s guide described as “between the white house and the small island, and near some buoys.” As you can tell, cruising guides are wonderfully helpful! (Can anyone tell me why we buy one in every country?) Anyway, many tour boats go there, though I do not recommend using a tour boat because they give you only one piece of fish and tell you to tease the stingray with it so you can touch and pet it. I think that stingrays are very smart because they tend to stay around for only five minutes or so before they go off in search of some food that they are actually allowed to eat. It is much more fun to visit the stingrays when the tour boats are not there. We caught a couple of fish and chopped them up, and then we went to visit our new friends. The stingrays are very friendly, (a little too friendly for someone that had come to visit us) playful, and velvety soft on their undersides. They acted quite a bit like a horde of very energetic puppies that just spotted a big bag of dog treats, a horde of very flat puppies. Their mouths were sort of like bony suction cups and they would try to suck their way up your body if you did not give them the fish. Needless to say, Molly and I enjoyed it immensely. Our friend, however, did not love them as much as we did; it was very disconcerting to her, to have a suction cup with rubbery ‘wings’ try to climb up her. (That was probably an understatement, as I am not sure she enjoyed it at all.) We went there four times before we had to leave Moorea, and we were very sad to have to leave them, even though she was not.
In Tonga, we built a big tree house in a huge Banyan tree. That kind of tree sends roots down from its branches. The old ones look like a whole forest, even though it is just one big tree. Our tree house was about twenty feet up in the air, and about twelve feet square. We could have comfortably slept there if we were not afraid of either dying of a mosquito-borne disease, or falling off the edge. We started with three or four poles, and laced them to three big branches that were parallel. That gave us just enough of a base to slink carefully back and forth across the tree house while weaving smaller poles and young trees under and over the bigger ones. We had a very efficient team between the three of us, Molly, Dad, and me. First, we found some vines that were hanging down from the trees and cut them to use for rope to hold the tree house together. Next, Molly cut down the poles, Dad drug them down to the tree house and hoisted them up to me. I was up in the tree house, and my job was to weave the poles into the frame of larger branches that we had already put into place. Soon we had a very nice platform, all natural because we used vines and not rope, and Molly was getting very good with a machete. Think twice before making her mad! Then, both Molly and I tied the poles that we had in place with the vines, making sure that none of them were loose or wobbly. We worked like that for a couple of days, then we invited some friends of ours to come and see it, and we ended up with a boatload and a half of wonderful, enthusiastic helpers. One of our friends made a ladder so that the adults could climb up easier, another strung some vines between two poles to make a bench, Dad made a fire pit, and soon it turned into a very fancy campsite indeed!
Many cruisers visit that island because of its good anchorage, nice beach, and its proximity to a very colorful snorkeling spot called the Coral Gardens. Soon, from the cruisers we met while working on the tree house, we heard that there was a rumor going around that ‘there was an old tree house the natives built a long time ago’ on that island. That gave people one more reason to visit the island – there was already a burned out restaurant a short hike from our tree house that everyone liked to visit. We soon put an end to the rumors and people continued to show up just to see how work was progressing.
During the time that we were in Tonga, we hosted two or three potluck/umu dinners there. An umu is like a Tongan barbeque. You dig a pit in the ground, put hot stones and coals in it, put the food on top of that, and cover the whole thing in banana leaves. Everyone brought something wrapped in tinfoil, which we put in the pit, let it cook for about two hours, and shared the indistinct bundles of tinfoil, wondering what each person was going to get. Some of the people came up with some very tasty ideas. We put whole cloves of garlic and onions in tinfoil and let them roast longer than everything else. Who said onion rings had to be deep fried to be good? Another person cut the top off a papaya and stuffed it with a mixture of tuna fish and rice. I think that was even more popular than our coconut lemonade straight from the nut! It was wonderful being able to use everything from the island for our tree house adventure. There were coconuts and lime trees everywhere, a few papaya trees, and all the vines we could ever need growing right there.
In case you were wondering, those adventures were in chronological order. I do not have any idea which one would be better than the others.
Thank you again for reading the website. This has been the trip of a lifetime, and even though I am sad that it is over, it is great being back in the US with all of our friends and family! ~ Jessie
Rard Family Ocean Adventure 