Outhouse burns to the ground!

Mandy visited the outhouse this morning to discover it totally and utterly gone - burned to the ground without a trace of the frame, roof, seat remaining. It looks like it was quite an inferno.

One thing I made sure to plan for was a toilet on day one, because needs must, but I didn't think to plan for having a spare toilet. OMG. Disaster!

It's a bit of a puzzle how this happened. We do light a mosquito coil when we use the loo so it seems that might be the cause but I walked past it yesterday afternoon and it seemed fine then, and it was last used yesterday morning so would have had to have been quietly smouldering away for a long time. Judging from the red fired clay inside the hole it looks like there was a good fire going in there, so I guess it's possible it we had a case of spontaneous combustion too.

Pineapples

A couple of our pineapples have finally started fruiting:

We also harvested our first Talo (Taro) a couple of weeks ago.

We've had some pretty impressive bunches of bananas now. One bunch of bananas was "oh, my" sized; about twice as thick as the bananas you buy in NZ and half as long again. You really had to share a banana but they're not always that big...

They come from the same parent stock but it all just depends on the growing conditions at the time they fruit. You might need to eat 8 or so of these ones for a snack but they taste just fine, and thankfully being this small is the exception.

We've had 3 whale sightings from the house in as many weeks. I was awoken to a noise I thought must have been a high-velocity shot being fired and went out to find a whale tail-slapping just next to Nukulahanga Island. It's no surprise they can be heard up to 10 km away - Amazingly loud!

Until now we've only had one whale sighting in the last two years, so perhaps they are finding the lack of tourists, and the lack of being hassled by whale tour boats enough reason to start venturing into the inner bays again.