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Planes crash and Muttonbirds crash too

The day started with a mountainbike around the island. It was still stormy and gusty but Tsering, Di, Mark and I cruised through the forest down to the beach and along the coast to a spot opposite the airfield, where we wanted to ask what time the next flight came in, and opted to cool off in the surf at Blinky's beach first. The surf was powerful, and so was the rip, but the water was aqua-turqouise and jets of bubbly surf rose up every time one of the waves crashed over us. It was perfect.

Mark lead the way, body-surfing the waves like a pro, using his hands to prop himself up into the middle of the tube. The salt water was crisp and clean, the beach's virginity unspoilt by footprints apart from ours.

When we walked back over the rise towards the airfield, a boy was pointing at the end: "A plane just crashed over there". Sure enough, at the end of the airfield, across a small road, a Cessna 8-seater languished with its nose firmly planted into the grass and its wheels strangely askew.

A small group of people were standing watching, looking surprised. Di, being a doctor, biked straight over to see if anyone was hurt and to help those who were in shock. Fortunately they were all fine, apart from a few small grazes and scrapes. They had been landing when a gust of wind had accelerated the plane and taken it beyond the end of the tar-sealed strip which served as a runway.

Soon after, the only policeman of the island arrived, followed by the only fire engine. They radioed with civil aviation and the next incoming flight. There was a danger that the plane might explode was there were sparks coming off the wiring and some AV fuel escaping. The area was cleared and the power disconnected to prevent the fuel igniting.

Di invited the family who had just landed in the cessna to come visit us and have a drink and we found out from the guy who was in contact with Civil Aviation that the flight with our bags wasn't coming because of the weather. So we made our back and towards the dive shop, where asked for prices for Tsering and Alex to do their PADI certification and for some dives for me. Dives were about $75 including equipment (prices dropping for several dives) and the open water certification course was about $300 pp. Both prices seemed pretty reasonable to me.

We stopped for coffee and a snack and then headed back up the hill, which was a damn good workout on the bikes. My bike seems to have pretty good gears, and it purrs along quite smoothly even going pretty steep uphill.

As a partial compensation for the delay of our bags, we were given the chance to spend $80 each at the local surf shop, which was fun. The shop owner must have been pleased having so many people go bananas in her shop and we got some cool gear.

Dinner was a barbeque at the beach (juicy steaks with salad), and I played crocodile-hunter with the kids at the beach (who were of course, the crocodiles) and looked for seashells along the beach with Sez. The water was crystal clear and the sand was soft as talcum powder.

Once we were back at our bungalows, it was almost dark so we got our torches and walked down the hill to find Muttonbirds. They fly in in droves around sunset and get suddenly afflicted with dopey sleepy feelings and kinda sail clumsily to the ground. They're so docile you can usually go right up to them and they only make feeble attempts to cover their sleepy eyes.

So we crept around in the dark in the forest finding muttonbirds, trying not to fall into hte holes they dig for nests. The eerie sound of their calls was all around us (a mixture of a baby crying and a gecko), and our torch batteries failed (except one) so it added to the whole atmosphere. Charlie grabbed my hand and pulled himself close but Loden was tough and took my camera and got some great shots of the birds, although with the almost total darkness framing a bird in the shot was pretty much impossible until the camera flashed, when it was too late...

When we came out of the forest, we were further down the beach than we thought and next to a bunch of people sitting by a small fire after their barbeque watching the dark shapes fly in from the sea.

The name of these birds - Muttonbirds - has its roots from when the Normans invaded England around 1066 and stuck around for three hundred years, effectively creating a ruling nobility who spoke French, and the peasants spoke their own mongrel mix of the dialects of the Angles, the previously invaded Saxons and the Viking hordes, with a bit of Latin thrown in from the Roman empire. This mongrel language was English.

As the nobility's language filtered into common usage, often two words for the same thing existed, one French from the ruling classes and one Anglo-Saxon from the common workers. Food is a good example, the farmers raised 'pigs', which became 'pork' (cf. French 'porque') on the nobles' dinner table. Likewise cows became 'beef' (cf. French beouf), and sheep became mutton (cf. French mouton).

When Captain cook explored the Tierra Australis, he and his crew had to make do with whatever food they found as they landed on various islands on the way. The South Pacific islands, although green and lush, lacked many of the tropical fruits and larger game that the seas of the carribean and African coast provided. Muttonbirds were pretty easy targets as they came in at night to nest, and Cook and his crew thought they tasted a lot like mutton - hence the name.

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