They Sip Sundowners and Nostalge

It’s a good thing when a wife admires her husband’s achievements as much as Susan Dairy mple-Hay. And it’s obvious that she does from the 1,500 word eulogy of Ken Dalrymple-Hay’s Mendana Hotel, Honiara, BSIP, in the newly face-lifted Australian “Woman’s Mirror” (which was taken over with the “Bulletin” recently by Australian Consolidated Press).

The new Mendana, she says, is a tourist dream of a, tropical hotel . . . “from the immaculate barboys in white sarongs to giant baskets of hibiscus decorating the verandahs and bars”.

As well as the immaculate barboys there are also two immaculate chefs from Hongkong “who cook almost up to Cordon Bleu standard'’, refrigerator, deep freeze , a sprung dance floor, a juke box, real soda water (the kind you drink, not Pidgin English kind) and a “plentiful supply of crushed ice”.

So far, so good—we can really see these tourists beating a track to the BSIP. But then she spoils the dream by saying that the old hotel, under a full moon, was almost “unbearably romantic” and that even as they sit in the big luxurious verandah of the new hotel, many a planter and Government official, sipping sundowners, speaks nostalgically of the atmosphere of the old hotel.

Come, come, Susan. As a one-time tourist who spent five days and four nights (repeat, four nights) in the old pub, all I can say is that if those boys really feel that, then they are around the bend, up the wall, not right in the head-piece and have been far too long in the

big Solomons bush!

JT.