Fun in Fiji

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Rach and Ian!

We flew to Nadi, on Fiji’s main island on a modern wide bodied aircraft, and our first night was spent in the Mercure Hotel near the airport, so initially we had little feel for arriving in a ‘different world’. Having said that, a group of smiling local musicians played something agreeably lilting to us as we queued in the arrivals hall at Nadi, and Ian and I noted quite a contrast to the snarling welcome you get when you touch down in Frankfurt.

Nadi, or at least the arterial road to it where the Mercure stood, seemed like a working town. Less pretty than normal, no doubt, as recent heavy rains had made pot holes and muddied the roads. However, our hotel was nice, full of flowers, and I had a lovely swim in the pool the following morning before catching the hour’s flight across the straights to the thinly inhabited island of Taveuni.

Maximum luggage allowances for these domestic flights is meagre, so our first job at the airport was to dispose of a case full of non essentials at the left luggage department. Next it was check in time. To my gratification, they weighted not only our hold and hand luggage, but us as well! (I’m often annoyed at having to travel with a cruelly spartan shoe collection whilst great American lard-arses take up vast amounts of payload without reproach.) The check-in girl raised her tropical little eyebrow when I asked if there would be in-flight snacks, and if there was were shops after the boarding gate. She said, “There is just the outside after the boarding gate,” and I realised we were now probably entering the ‘different world’.

Our flight was called, and Ian and I, plus three other passengers, stepped out onto the tarmac. Awaiting us, as I shortly learned from the safety card in the seat pocket in front of me, was a Dehavilland DHC6 Twin Otters. It was old, had propellers of course, yet was sturdy looking. Ian was full of glee - it was his first flight in plane where the wheels did not retract, and he had acquired that same gung ho look which he had had on the Jet Boats in Queenstown. Admittedly there is a certain romance and adventure which comes when you just say ‘Dehavilland’. It gets me feeling like Lauren Bacall and gets Ian humming the theme from Indiana Jones. There was no airhostess, so the first officer, all shy and embarrassed - which was natural as he was only about seventeen - delivered the emergency procedure briefing. It didn’t last long.

Well, I have no complaints as it was a lovely, smooth flight, and we touched down in the ‘garden island’ of Taveuni safely and ahead of time. We pretty much unloaded our own bags, and our welcoming party made himself known to us across the terminal shed. William was, as all islanders here have been, extremely warm and friendly. He loaded us into his old taxi with its laminated floral seat covers and took us down the nice tarmaced road along the coast. Within five minutes drive from the airport you pass the three grocers, the cake shop, dive centres, and a very small scattering of hotels and guest houses. This is basically Matei, our town, and several miles further down the coast road are further villages with shops and schools, but most tourists stay here near the airstrip.

We saw a sign for ‘Makiera By the Sea’ and turned up a steep, verdant drive to our accommodation: We had rented a bure, which in this part of the world seems to mean anything from a hut on stilts over water to a lavishly appointed tropical villa. In our case it meant a wooden bungalow with a good size bathroom and a wide deck with a sink, gas burner and a fridge. We have large doors with insect netting which open out onto our deck, and inside the styling is kitsch, but quite nice really. We had booked the much smaller of the two bures here at Makaira, but our hostess, Roberta, had upgraded us to the big one. What joy! Roberta, who is originally from Hawaii and is, I am convinced, quite the hula-hippy chick, lives way up the garden behind us in her bure together with John, a champion fisherman. He is also from Hawaii, though his racial mix makes him one of the most exotic looking people I have ever met. Needless to say, this pair, plus the staff who support them - the amiable Baba, who machetes coconuts for us to eat daily, and the young and pretty chambermaid, Sau, are all thoroughly laid back and friendly.

On our first day John took Ian, me, Roberta and her friend out in his boat a short way, and there, just a few meters from our stretch of beach, we snorkelled above coral reef and amongst shimmering, busy, colourful and often comical fish in such great numbers that my mind reeled, and my mask let in water because I couldn’t help smiling. Roberta has studied marine biology - what luck - and so knew a thing or two about what you can touch down there and what you can’t. Before the day was out, we had grasped and inspected vivid purple starfish, slimy black sea cucumbers and all sorts. That evening in the bure we flicked though Roberta’s aquatic books and identified many of the forms we’d seen that day. We learned that inside most sea cucumbers lives a symbiotic little fish who, in aquarium conditions, can be induced to pop out through the cucumber’s anus for a quick look around, but otherwise, one concludes, must want for nothing in there. Must be a funny old life…

Anyway, I digress. Much of our first week in Fiji followed in a similar rhythm. The day breaks early here, so we potter and have breakfast, Ian reads, and I do my exercises and some database learning projects which I brought with me. Most of the day is spent on the porch of our bure, where the cooking facilities are. The only time we go back inside is when the bugs get to be too much. In the heat and humidity hunger doesn’t really bite at lunchtime. Ian reckons it never dips below a sauna-like 25 degrees. So, we head down to the beach and snorkel, even though I am still a bit lame because of this bloody foot of mine. We know how the tides work now, so we can get out to the deep water though gaps in the coral without scraping ourselves. (It’s amazing - the coral starts just feet from the shore.) In the afternoon, we sometimes walk to the shops and back, and Baba brings us another coconut to nibble on. Dusk barely exists. Someone turns off the sun at around 6pm and we know it’s time for dinner. We have been eating simple foods in the evenings: cheese and biscuits, pasta and a bit of salad, and we have been listening to Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads radio plays from the iPod. They really are marvellous, yet to hear those northern tones in this tropical setting is a little bit incongruous! Thankfully, wine is available to buy on the island, and embarrassingly we’ve bought out the local store’s entire stock. In our defence, they only had about four bottles in the first place, but then such is island life. Only 12000 people live on Taveuni, so it’s probably a wonder that we can buy as many different things as we can.

They call this place ‘the garden island’ because the mongoose, which by all accounts is a rotter and eats everything else, is absent from Taveuni, so all things natural are supposed to flourish without it. We are therefore frustrated that you can’t buy a tomato here for love nor money. I’ve obtained oranges once, but they were mouldy, and the only salad things available with any regularity are strangely formed cucumbers and olives in a tin. Well, it turns out that we’ve come at the wrong time of year for veg. It’s so wet and humid now, apparently, that nothing does well. We have certainly seen it rain here (and how!) but I’ll let Ian describe the big storm later…

First, I have to tell you about our big day of Scuba Diving. Given the grim, cold, aurally destructive experience that we went through to qualify for our PADI licences in Germany, we had simultaneously a complete lack of desire to ever dive again and yet a gnawing awareness that if we didn’t, Germany would have all been a complete waste of time. Roberta had given us glowing accounts of Tyrone Valentine, one of the local dive masters. Our internet research, reports in the bure’s guest book, and plain gut feeling all spoke for him. When we met him, and he turned out to be probably the coolest guy on the planet. We had booked a one-tank dive, and were joined also by Amy, the manageress of the 5 star hotel down the road, who is currently qualifying for her PADI licence. Together we boarded a little motorboat and headed offshore quite a way until we reached the dive site. Then it was the familiar kitting up, final checks, and splosh! we were in the warm water and descending down the rope line. Though the reef here was no prettier than ‘our’ reef, the quantity of wildlife was even greater. Enormous shoals of fish swam around us, and I was aware of all three dimensions of the space about me in a way that doesn’t happen on land. Tyrone, like Roberta, knows what is OK to tamper with, so before long we had made strange seafloor plants bleach from pink to white at a gentle flick of a finger, we had spooked fabulous colourful worms back into their wormholes at the wave of a hand, and at one point, Tyrone spun a spheroid lump of - well, something - on his finger, then passed it on for us to have a go too. By the time it came to me, I had realised that the big lump was in fact a big bulbous starfish, and Tyrone, whose coolness had now been thrown into question for me forever, had had his finger up its butt! I passed the lump on quickly to Ian, who, keen to demonstrate his Harlem Globe-Trotter capabilities, and ignorant of the true nature of the lump, followed suit and indecently assaulted the poor beast too. Honestly, after all those earnest PADI lesson we had to learn about PASSIVE interaction with sea creatures!!

Eventually our air pressure gage dials headed into the yellow, and it was time to rise slowly to the surface. Ian had had sinus pressures, but otherwise had cleared his mask successfully a few times, and personally, I was pleased with how my ears had faired. We had been ‘good dive buddies’ to one another, and despite the occasional momentary loss of buoyancy control, we had stayed close and known where the other was at all times. Given also that we were not dead, I declared it a very successful dive. Back in the boat, Ian, the sweet selfless idiotic tosspot that he is, got his wires crossed and erroneously concluded from my euphoria at having survived the dive that I wanted to go through it all again, and was accepting Tyrone’s suggestion of a two tank dive in the deeper straights in two days time. Agghhh!! He confessed in a family conference later that he didn’t want to do another dive much either, but thought I did because I had seemed so happy. Bless him. Well, there was nothing to be done. We were already committed.

Anyway, the next day we ventured further along the coast road to take a trip to the Date Line. That is the place where you can stand with one foot in today and one foot in yesterday, as it is the line of longitude exactly opposite the zero meridian that runs through Greenwich. We took the obligatory photos and then went shopping in the main town on the Island called Naquara (pronounced Nangara). Some of the houses on the edge of town were very basic wooden places with tin roofs, and of course, not as prettily maintained as our bure. However, the schools, particularly the Catholic Boarding School which we visited, stood in impressive green playing fields, with rugby posts of course, and had a delightful old chapel and whitewashed dormitory buildings. The children of all ages wore smart uniforms. Groups of little school girls waved at me, so I waved back as they shyly called “Bula!” (hello). I didn’t know whose delight was the greater, mine or theirs. Some of the older lads wore blue gingham collared shirts and long, plain navy sarongs. They were just as friendly, but had a dignity about them beyond their years. The coast road took us past some fine government buildings too. Modern as they clearly were, they were built in the Fijian style with two tall sloping sides going all the way down to the ground, like a giant Toblerone. They were quite a contrast to some of the shanty houses in town. Apparently, this is where the village chiefs meet. (Each village on the Island has a chief. I later asked one of the girls here if she knew of any women chiefs, but she said no.) Along the road we also passed horses, cattle and pigs grazing freely on the rich foliage at the side of the road. Inland, there are farms, and Roberta says that most rural Fijians work only to educate their children. If it were not for that, they would live simply on the land. Most urban Fijians probably lead quite similar lives to ours, but for some county folks the way of life must be something we visitors can only glimpse.
(Having said that, the night when the Fiji rugby team played Samoa in the finals, I swear we could hear 12000 cheering voices ring out in unison across the island. Culturally, we’re not so different perhaps..)

After our day trip, we reluctantly started preparing our kit for an 8am start the next day and Dive Number Two with Tyrone. However, an act of God was about to get us off the hook, namely Hurricane Cliff! Ian wrote this real time blog during what turned out to be one big storm…

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We received a report from Roberta, our landlady here in Taveuni, that the mainland had just warned of a tropical cyclone headed our way, and that we should, under no circumstances, venture outside. I had absolutely no intention of going out anyway as I had just seen the roof of the hammock shelter get ripped off and torn apart in the gale force winds and torrential rain that was attempting to lift our bure from it’s moorings. The storm had started just after we got back from a visit to the dateline yesterday, as a gentle pitter patter of warm rain, quite refreshing after the last few days of humidity and sun which we had been labouring under. It quickly progressed into a deafening roar that lasted throughout the night and right up until about 10 minutes ago. From the front of our bure, we can see across the normally placid ocean to the second largest island in Fiji called Vanua Levu, but all we have been able to see for the last 24 hours are the waves crashing angrily against one another as the wind whips them into a frenzy. Most of the time, we have barely been able to see beyond the bottom of our garden, and what we can see leaves us wondering if any of the shanty huts we passed yesterday are still standing. This has been nature at its most powerful. The weather has calmed down now, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to write something down - me thinking that the worst was over, but Roberta has just walked passed and told us that we are in the eye of the storm right now and that the back end will be much worse that what has gone before. She is looking for Baba to come and help her lash her roof down as she thinks it is going to blow off when the storm returns. The water in our tap is running brown now, so I am forced to drink beer and Rachael wine to quench our thirst. I just hope it doesn’t run out before the storm finishes. Rach has just pointed out that we could drink rainwater, but I am just not sure I want to risk it until all other liquid options have run out. I can see Vanua Levu disappearing behind a cloud of rain as I write which means that in about 15 minutes the gales will return and we will be forced back inside to hide behind the gauze windows that attempt to keep the bugs out, and eventually to pull the wooden shutters across to stop the horizontal rain from drowning us. This weather is really something to see. I’m just glad that the rain and winds are warm - the temperature here is still 25 degrees!

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The next day we woke up to an Island in a mess. Luckily Roberta had been wrong, and the eye of the storm turned out to be its tail end, but even so, many coconut trees were down, there had been mud slides, and when we snorkelled that afternoon we could see that the poor old reef had taken a battering. The fish were clearly disconcerted. We weaved our way down the road to the shops for provisions, and on our way back called into the posh hotel complex where Amy, from the dive, is manageress. When we had first met her, she had invited us to come to her hotel for a nose around, and naturally I needed no further persuasion. Despite the havoc of the night before, her place was pristine. Although our bure has wonderful gardens and is super value for money, Amy’s place was in another league, and certainly was not in the running as part of our travels. Unaware of her cruelty, she gave us a guided tour of several palatial bures, and then we all had coffee together on the well appointed bar deck looking out over the sea. Amy is a lovely, very well travelled lady, and I liked her very much. She regaled us with farcical tales of hotel and island life: Of love-fuddled couples’ outrageous demands on their tropical wedding day, of mad dogs on heat marauding around the complex, and of visits from religious cults with their g-string wearing gurus and bikini-clad hand maidens. (If I join a cult I’m going to join one that hangs out at prestige resort destinations.) In return, we gave the tourist’s eye view of the place. For example, five minutes internet research about Taveuni will reveal that one particular local hostess (thankfully not ours) is quite deranged and terrifies her guests and staff alike. How widely this hostess’s reputation has spread on the web has been revelation to many our new island pals. But our indiscretion has been the shibboleth which has opened up the world of Taveuni gossip to us. Ian and I agree that we have seldom on holiday scored a window on the cliquey inner circle of locals like we have here. It’s delicious.

That night we were back at the swanky hotel for dinner with Amy and had a wonderful time once again. Only twice before on Taveuni had we dined out; once at the friendly beach bar called Tramonto’s, and once at the Coconut Grove hotel. There, the local band boys had played marvellous music on guitars, with gentle three-part harmonies. It had been a gala buffet night, and the set up was to have the band boys serenade the arrival of each party and offer up a cup of the local brew called ‘Kava’. A whiny American couple received their cups before us, and the woman had peered into the cup and rather churlishly inquired, “Does this contain stimulants?” One of the band boys lazily replied “No man,” and she took a slip. With all my heart I wished he would add, “just a little bit of ganja”. But alas he missed the moment. Later that evening there was more fun and games when a large gecko shot across the floor from the Americans’ table, up Ian’s chair and across his lap. The woman said “there’s a seven incher,” as she nodded at Ian, who replied theatrically, “I hope you mean the lizard madam!”. They cracked a smile, but I think Ian was playing with fire there. He gets so unruly sometimes.

Anyway, the sun rose on our last morning on Taveuni into a cloudless sky. We had had to set the alarm clock to make our 9am flight back to the mainland. Even at such an early hour, Roberta, John, Baba, Sau and her little brother and parents showed up to give us a flower garland and to say goodbye. Sau’s brother, no more than 10 years old, played guitar and the others sang a traditional island song of farewell to us. Sau has a lovely voice, and it was more touching than touristy, and you can’t often say that.

Back on Fiji’s mainland, we spent our final night in the Mercure hotel by the airport. Being Easter weekend, the place was full of tourists, and the atmosphere was surprisingly jovial. After a buffet dinner, the traditional ‘Meke’ dancers came out. All drums, grass skirts and spears. The singing was powerful and rhythmic, and although many of the dancers were a tad portly, some of the younger warriors were very handsomely built, and pranced around with their weapons most admirably. Ian said I shamed myself by photographing them furiously, but he doesn’t understand my interest was purely cultural. The women dancers with befitting straw cuffs and splendid headdresses did gesture based dances too, which doubtless symbolised their ancient domestic traditions. The impression, though, was a routine bearing a striking resemblance to Wigfield’s “Saturday Night”. Everyone cheered when they finished, and once again, we decided that something which might have been naff and touristy was actually rather good.

So in the final reckoning, I think that without hurricane Cliff, we would have gone fishing with John, and without my gammy foot, there would have been a nice hike to ‘the’ Blue Lagoon from the film, so our visit to Fiji was not without regrets. Some do like it hot, but even I found the temperatures and humidity challenging. I am ashamed to report that at times, we didn’t always smell fragrant. We’ve been bitten all over by insects, and come across some super-sized arachnids. On the whole, though, I am glad to have seen Fiji, glad to have seen a big tropical cyclone, and glad that we only heard about the quake in the Soloman Islands and the Tsunami alert after it was all over!

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Photos

Ian in front of the Plane
Indiana Jones anyone?

Rachy keeps her cool on the plane
She's just bitten a lemon

Ian sympathises with Rachy's nerves
But disguises his nerves with a brave smile

Day breaks in Taveuni
This is the view over our gardens from the deck of our bure. Not bad, eh?

All aboard!
Here we are setting sail with Roberta for our first snokel on the reef

A view up our garden
Roberta and John's Bure as seen before a rainshower..

Munching on curry
A local lady, Amma, offers a take-away curry service and here's Ian scoffing out on the deck at sundown

Very tasty!
As Rachy can attest

A view of Rachy and our garden and the bure in the background
I am glowing like a pig here!

Euphoria after our scuba dive
Ian and our cool dive master, Tyrone

We're still alive
Hurrah!!

Snogging over the date line
Tomorrow, tomorrow, I'll love ya, tomorrow, you're always a day ah-wayyyyy

Ian comes out from crying under the table to survey hurricane Cliff
Note the bendy coconut trees!

The traditional Meke ladies do their thing at the Mercure Hotel's gala night
Y.M.C.A....

And a well built Meke guy delivers a rousing performance
(pfwarr)

Comments

[Robin]

Fiji Fumblings
Ian, You put your finger where? All creatures great and small eh! If it's not Rach and her horses, it's you and your sea cucumbers. Looks a nice place and to see the cycone - cool. Have we been watching West Wing while away? Shibboleth!

[Ian n Rach]

I think that was Rachael trying to sound educated :-)