File this under 'The World Is A Very Small Place'! Last night we were invited to a bar-b-que for all the dive industry staff and professionals on the island. It was organized by Steve at Pacific Divers. He is hopng to get the local operators to be more cooperative in their promotion of the dive industry on the island. A noble effort and we truly wish him luck with this.

When we arived we were introduced to several of the guests and of course I wandered over to the bar to grab a drink! After getting drinks, I kept looking at a guy sitting in the corner and finally whispered into Val's ear "Val, isn't that guy a dead ringer for Graham? You remember, the Kiwi we met on Fiji on our last trip." Well she agreed and we went on with our conversation. A while later when I was at the bar grabbing a few more drinks I hear one of the guests say "that drinks for Graham." I asked him which person the drink was for and he pointed out the fellow we had been looking at. Well, as you might have guessed, it was the Graham we know/knew.

Seems he's bought a boat here on the island and is running organized excursions to remote islands in the south pacific. He has two compressors on the boat so many of the trips include SCUBA diving in very remote locations. Graham has a PHD from Oxford and is very interested in birds, ecosystems, and the environment in general. When we last saw him, he was doing research in Brisbane, but he always had an itching to be on the water, so it seems he has found his niche.

To really drive home how great this is to reconnect with Graham, you need to know a little background from our last trip to this part of the world. We met Graham with a group a folks traveling from Alaska to Vanua Balavu (the island in Fiji we're heading back to in a few weeks). He was working on a fishing boat in Alaska at the time and was traveling with his girlfriend on his way to Australia where she was going to start a new job. During the time we were there, we discussed our travels and he suggested that we contact his family in New Zealand and tell them that he had offered us their beach house on the South Island in a small town called Okarito. For any avid readers, you may recognize this as the home of Keri Hulme, the author of the book 'The Bone People'. Anyway, we felt kind of sheepish, but we took him up on the offer and contacted his brother who was more than happy to give us directions and tell us where the 'secret' key was hidden. We spend three incredible days there and later went to meet his brother Ken and his wife in Ashburton. Later on the same trip, we visited Graham and Carrie in Brisbane, Australia. We eventually lost touch with them when they changed email addresses. We did manage to stay in touch with a couple of the folks from Alaska who had told us that Graham had left Australia, but after that we completely lost touch with him.

Last night, Graham suggested we get in touch with his brother again when we get back to New Zealand. We'll have to be sure we still have the correct address, but we definitely do plan to follow this new 'thread' all the way to it's natural conclusion. It's kind of fun having things like this happen. I'm sure this won't be the last one on this trip. The world is an incredibly large little place:)

That's about it for now

Until next time, Happy Trails,

E