Restaurant Night on Toau

Thursday 14 June 2006 Last night was "restaurant night" at Anse Amyot. Gaston and Valentine make some money off the cruisers by putting on a feed at their "restaurant" which is also their kitchen and dining room right on and over the water. It is all open-air like all the building here but they decorate it really nice with flowers, drapes and stripped palm fronds. Cindy and another cruiser helped Valentine strip the palms and Gaston put them up. Gaston was busy for two days gathering fish, clams and lobsters for the meal. The lobsters were seemed huge but he said the smaller ones were actually the best. He went out the night before across the reef to another motu to get them. We had more lobster than we could eat. Gaston also went out with some other cruisers and got clams from the reef. These are small versions of the large kind that can grab a divers leg and drown him. They pressure cooked the meat and served them on the half-shell with garlic butter. Yum!! Delicious!!

There were eleven of us for dinner including Gaston and Valentine - five from S/V Lazy Bones (USA) and two from S/V Zwerver (from Holland) plus us. There were fresh beautiful flowers on the table and we each had a fragrant frangipangi white flower to put behind our ears (men too). We also had coconut-breaded grouper, which was actually my favorite of all. This was all followed by a super coconut cream pie made with fresh coconut. There was beer and wine as well. Zwever traded wine and rum for dinner as they are low on cash and there are not ATMs or banks out here. The rest of us paid $25 which was a bargain for such a feast. And, it couldn't be better than to have it on this remote motu with good friends and the family that lives out here. Each one of them could go live in Papeete on Tahiti in the city if they wanted but even the young kids don't want to go. What a life in paradise.

Oops - forgot to mention that I cut Cindy's hair on the back deck of the boat today. She and I were both nervous but it actually came out OK. But I call her Charley now since she looks so butch.

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