Fiji feedback

An idyllic vacation spot--tropical, sunny, and beautiful. A beachside vacation in Fiji was the decided destination for our Christmas holidays this year. With rain forecasted in Sydney for the length of the holiday period, we were very excited about the trip and the prospect of sun, ocean, and books.

We woke up early on Monday morning before the crack of dawn and slowly got ourselves up the stairs to await our taxi pick-up. After paying double the normal cost (thieves!) we grumblingly made our way into the airport to waste two hours before our flight.


The flight itself gets mixed reviews. It wasn't a long flight, only three and a half hours long, but unfortunately we were seated in the worst part of the plane--the child section. Oy! Kids screaming and running amok the entire time! There may have been a few well-behaved children in the mix, but it was hard to see them through the chaos. (It's the best birth control I can recommend.) ;) Rude parents, too. One lady, instead of telling Marcus that he was in the "women's bathroom" line while he was waiting to use it, she shoved her little daughter into the bathroom ahead of him and then pointed out that he couldn't use the bathroom because it was for girls. Not for any particular reason, it looked like any other airplane bathroom to me. (Aside from the easily missed sign indicating that it was for ladies.) However, our plane was awesome with individual screens outfitted on the back of each seat. I spent my first hour on the plane learning French. And for those of my French-speaking friends, riddle me this--why does the number ninety translate as three numbers? Four, twenty, ten. That is the longest way of saying ninety I can possibly think of!

Anyhow, Marcus and I went our separate ways, playing our own games and watching our own movies. It's the best thing ever, we got to sit right next to each other and I got to watch "Adam" while Marcus watched "Inglorious Basterds". Ingenius!

We got to the Nadi (Nandi) airport, shuffled through customs, and hopped onto a bus for yet another three and a half hours of transit. By the time we finally got to our hotel, we were definitely ready to relax. The owner of our hotel was conveniently at the front desk when we arrived and the "meet and greet" that we were required to pay for consisted of us sitting out on the balcony and getting served juice. Which is alright and everything, but we were told a lei and a cocktail. The lady who brought out our virgin cocktails seemed very put out at having to bring out our drinks. This was an attitude that would define our entire stay at "the best kept secret in Fiji" as our hotel liked to call itself. It was certainly a secret--it was located 6km off the main road (all of the other resorts were literally right off the highway) and about a 45 minute drive from the closest "city", Sigatoka.


After our juice, we were shown to our "bure" (that's Fijian for hut) and we admired our ocean view before promptly passing out.

As part of our package and because the hotel was so remote, we paid for all of our meals beforehand--two course meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Marcus and I can be quite an indecisive pair as we're both afraid of making a bad decision (even when it comes down to food) so for the entirety of our trip we ordered together and went halfsies on all of food. Overall the food was decent except for lunch which used the same menu every single day. Never once did they have the "nachos" that were advertised (and they were often were out of one or two other appetizers) and the main courses for were a bit sketchy. They offered an "American hotdog" that was pink and included lettuce, cucumbers, and tomatoes. I can't say I've ever seen that in America! And if the pizzas ever did have sauce, it was ketchup. It was almost like Thailand when Annamarie ordered spaghetti and instead of sauce got ketchup on top. Yummy! But it added a bit of fun memory to the trip.

Anyhew, dinner that first night was decent, though the electricity went off twice during its course, so we guessed and stabbed our way to clean plates.

The beds and pillows were quite lovely, and picturesquely covered with mosquito netting. We slept fairly well during the week, but...well, our bure very well may have been haunted. Number 19. Is that an ominous number? Maybe it should be. That first night, we slipped into an exhausted sleep only to be awoken by the sound of foot steps. After drifting back to sleep, we were awoken yet again, but this time with a big BANG! to which I responded with a scream and Marcus responded with a forceful, "WHO'S OUT THERE?!!!" (I love this man's reflexes!) Marcus turned on the lights, got up and looked all around inside our bure to find nothing amiss. He looked out the windows. Nothing. So after a while, he turned off the lights and came back to bed (where I'd stayed the whole time, being useless) though maintained his vigilance in watching out the slitted window to see if he could see anything. He assured me that it must have just been an animal making the noise, and told me to go back to sleep, but that guise was pretty transparent. After a tense while, we both went back to sleep.

In the morning, all was fine, but that second night we kept hearing the little metal hook that kept the screen door shut jiggling, as if someone was trying to break in. Again, Marcus got up and checked the place out, finding nothing. That night he fell asleep a bit quicker in a, "Well come on, break in already if you're going to!" kind of a mood. I tried to adopt the same attitude and eventually fell back to sleep.

The third night it sounded like more foot steps outside and there was more jiggling but we decided to ignore it and keep on sleeping. On New Year's, with the help of our next-door neighbors, we concluded that the loud bang (which happened again that night!) must have been a falling coconut. Our neighbors had heard our commotion that first night. ("Ha ha, that was you guys that were yelling and screaming!") On another night we were lucky enough to have a screeching bat outside our window (the huge flying fox bats) and it sounded as if it were screeching to its death, not stopping for a good two or three minutes. Its smell wafted in through the back window screen adding more poignancy to the occasion. Not pleasant.

Back to the main story, though, on our first morning we missed breakfast by some clock malfunction and after first refusing us, the waitress brought us some toast and fruit to hold us over until lunch.

We went on a tour of the village next door (literally next door to the hotel) and we visited a sarong maker, the church, and some local handicrafters. Marcus modeled the correct way for men to wear a sarong.
We also went into the local church, which is host to the seven different religions found in the village. I found a familiar face inside: It's Mormon Jesus!

Afterward we made our way to the beach where there was a constant struggle for a pair of beach chairs, so we wandered about a bit, then snagged two elusive chairs and wedged ourselves in with our books to get in some proper sunning/beaching time.

Day two, the activity for the day was learning how to husk and crack a coconut. That was pretty fun, and we got to learn of the many uses of coconut from drinking its juice and eating the insides to using the husk as a pot scrubber or fire kindling to using its milk as a moisturizer and using the shell as a cup. All I really wanted to do was crack the sucker open, drink its juice and snack on the insides. :)

The rest of the day (and the next day) consisted of sunning, swimming, reading and eating. We also explored further on down the beach and I was delighted to find beautiful sea shells all up and down the shore. Many of them were in tact and I was like a kid in a candy shop, skipping up and down the beach collecting them to create a little sea shell garden. So gorgeous!

Day three was New Year's Eve, and for dinner that night they prepared a traditional "lovo" where they cooked meat and veggies by placing them on an earthen fire and burying them.

The food was smokily delicious. And the staff went all out on decorations for the evening's festivities.




We drank kava (the traditional Fijian drink that looks and tastes like dirty water and numbs your lips and tongue) and chatted with a lovely couple from Adelaide all night who, as it turned out, were our next door neighbors (the ones who had heard our reactions to the haunted bure).

New Year's day was overcast, so we spent most of the day reading, though we did take time to walk down by the beach and found a lovely starfish. (And the little thing that looks like a plant next to it? Also a starfish!)

And the following day we spent the entire day reading as it was raining.

The next day was also pretty overcast, but we took a walk in the rain, did some sea kayaking, and, of course, read. Let's see, during the course of the week I read:

• The Slow Natives by Thea Astley, an Australian book that won several awards back in the sixties. It was one of my finds in a great second-hand bookshop in Paddington. It's about the dysfunction of a middle-class suburban family in West Australia. The parents were too liberal in raising their son, much to his chagrin, and thus resulting in classic teenage rebellion. The wife has a tepid affair while the husband throws himself into his mediocre music teaching job, where he has interactions with several Catholic clergymen (and women) who feel lost in a life without enough exposure to the world and lacking freedom to stretch their creative muscles. The writing was quite good, though often too much ruminating and not enough action for my liking. I might try another one of her books.


• Dalai Lama, My Son by Diki Tsering, the mother of the Dalai Lama. This is an autobiography of her life (what she could remember) and describes her life growing up in rural Tibet, her arranged marriage, and what life was like after giving birth to three reincarnated lamas. The spiritual beliefs and facts in this book are very interesting (the Dalai Lama as a child recognized things that had belonged to him in his previous life and had the ability to fluently speak dialects he'd never heard before). This woman lived a courageous life, and it was intriguing to read about the only woman in the Dalai Lama's life.


• Dragon Fighter by Rebiya Kadeer, a woman fighting for the rights of her people, the Uyghurs, an ancient Turkish culture whose land was overtaken by communist China, much in the same way as Tibet. She recounts the horrors inflicted on her people, from the murders of nationalists, ethnic minorities and their children, the tortures inflicted on people who disagreed with the government, the abuses, the bribery and the utter inhumanity inflicted by the Chinese. The book was so vivid and horrible that I had to stop reading it. I am still abstaining until I think I can get away with reading it and not having pictures of dead people flashing into my head while falling asleep. I've read quite a few books lately about people who have escaped communist China, and quite frankly their government is scary. I would be a bit frightened to travel in China. I know it's easier for foreigners and travelers, but they probably still don't see the full impacts of the government's evil rule. The repression, inflicted poverty and abuse is inhumane and I'm sickened by what I have read. How do we not know how bad that government is?? So many atrocities have occurred during my lifetime--and they haven't stopped. Remember the opposition to the Olympics being held in Beijing by human rights protestors? Read this book and you'll find out exactly why.
• I'm currently reading The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. A romantic story filled with bits of gothic darkness and a love of literature. I'll report more after I've finished.

Well, I think I've written enough for now, but I'll write a bit more and post more pictures soon.