Roulottes

We finally made the evening trek to town last night to try out the Roulotte Chez Germain. There are three roulottes here, which are basically what we'd call roach coaches at home, but these are regular van sized instead of the big fancy trucks at home. The first one, right at the dinghy dock is a creperie and soft ice cream place (250 for a single and 350 for a double; we haven't tried the crepes). During the day there's a hamburger and sandwich van outside Magasin Kamake by the basketball court, right on the water. They have a few little stools to sit on and for 700 CFP you can get quite a good hamburger and a generous portion of French fries, or various kinds of sandwiches on baguettes of course. At around 5 PM, when the hamburger van is shutting down, the "Chinese" van starts up a BBQ on a small half-of-a-metal-drum, and the traffic begins to pour in. Since it's always busy, we thought it must be something special. Well we came away with our curiosity satisfied, but not our appetites. The chow mein was okay but not a bargain at 900 CFP. John ordered canard laque (1000 CFP; the other choice was canard tamarin, which we figured had something to do with the tamarind fruit) which I knew was duck, and laque turned out to be Teriyaki. Duck is a pungent fowl and this one had been hacked into small pieces with the resulting small bits of bone throughout the dish, served over rice. Everyone else was getting theirs to go (mostly the steak frite which looked tough and gristly over fries), and piling back into their big Toyota Hilux trucks to take their dinners home. We should have gone in earlier and gotten hamburgers...

After running errands this morning we're heading back to Daniel's bay for water and more fruit before we leave for the Tuamotus.

Linda