Thu, 2 Oct 2003
We enjoyed the pleasures of the big city of Suva. We appreciated the great abundance of Indian food, sampling curry between several roti stands and the Hare Krishna vegetarian take out restaurant. We found a place that made U.S. style milkshakes and saw a film in a modern cinema for the first time in ages. We visited the unchanged house where Garth had lived back in 1974 while they rebuilt their reef torn boat and walked by the yard where they did the work. We visited the Fiji museum and learned of the great seafaring traditions of Fiji that appear to be lost in recent times. Huge ocean going catamarans that could carry large numbers of people have gone by the wayside with the emergence of 20 foot fiberglass open boats (just like the pangas from Mexico) with outboards. We noticed an intense focus on sports with significant attention paid to football (soccer) and rugby matches. Healthcare funding is notably shortchanged in comparison and friends visiting the hospital said the facilities are in poor shape.
The Royal Suva Yacht Club provided a convenient place to leave the dinghy and to convene. The weekly fee was pricey, although the hot showers were a treat and the ping pong, pool tables, restaurant and bar offered endless temptation, since the drinks were so reasonably priced (around $.50 for a large coke or $.75 for a beer or mixed drink) and cold after a long hot day of running errands.
We found the food selection in Fiji to be quite good, with a great variety of Indian ingredients as well as other western foods, and top quality fruits and vegetables at the best fresh produce markets we’ve seen. We found high quality fresh and frozen meats at Fiji meats; Unfortunately, the dairy selection is limited to a local producer with unreliable quality and we found ourselves missing the great New Zealand dairy products we’d developed a taste for. We enjoyed wandering around the market to see all the products for sale that were unfamiliar to us. While we’ve learned to recognize kava, taro, breadfruit, cassava, we also see a number of new vegetable and seafood items that are a wonder to us, such as seaweed shaped like bunches of miniature grapes.
While not an especially large city, traffic in Suva was pretty overwhelming, with chaos each afternoon as buses and taxis fought for space on the roads and blared their horns to urge traffic ahead to move on. We found crossing the street to be a challenge and the streets busy with far more pedestrians that we find in a much larger city like Seattle or Auckland. Too keep cool, the buses have no glass in the windows, but instead a vinyl flap that can unroll to provide protection in a rain squall.
From Suva, we sailed 60 miles south to the Kadavu (Kandavu) Island group. This provided us with an opportunity to see Fijians in more traditional villages. The area is made up of several islands with a village in each bay. All land in Fiji belongs to someone and they are very aware of your presence on it, so there is no such thing as seeking solitude by exploring uninhabited areas.
Fijians are notably outgoing. They are not quiet retiring kind of people. They cannot comprehend our search for solitude. They tend to be jovial and seek out others. We yachts provide the entertainment for the village. When we arrive, the village is immediately aware of us and they can barely wait to come visit. They often just stop by to say hello. We have had children stand on the beach a scream “Bula” at the top of their lungs for hours and waving, beaconing us into shore one stormy day. Often, though, after a long day’s sail, all we want to do is eat and take a nap, but we often have visitors upon our arrival. Some are good conversationalists, but sometimes we struggle to keep a conversation going for as long as they want to stay. Many cruisers have made great connections with locals, but perhaps we are a little shy and keep a little more to ourselves.
Once we were visited after dark by a large group of males during the dinner hour and found ourselves very uncomfortable when one came aboard uninvited: While we knew and had been friendly with him and no harm was intended, we felt that they had crossed a line, bordering on impoliteness: None had ever visited after dark before and none had ever stepped onto the boat without an invitation each visit. We tried not to take offense since none was intended and find a way to politely end the conversation so we could finish making and eating dinner - we were starving.
On Sundays, we yachts are completely left to ourselves, since the Fijians tend to focus on church and family on those days and the community is deathly quiet. The church provides a significant anchor to the community, although we have often encountered the divisiveness of 2 churches, land disputes and related village politics in a tiny village. Our neutrality as outsiders is jeopardized when we mistakenly become friendly with unpopular villagers or mistakenly give things to the wrong people. Once a villager claimed that cruisers had presented Sevusevu to the wrong person who wasn’t the chief but was easily satisfied. We became friendly with one family we later found out was associated with a splinter religion and felt the warmth of the community cool notably. Some expatriates living nearby told us later that this minister was a pedophile, and that this one village was considered to be full of thieves by other nearby villages. We didn’t really know what to believe, but we do our best to avoid getting drawn into village politics. Trading presents another set of potential landmines, trying to figure out what is fair and appropriate. We try to impact the community as little as possible, but hope that our presence is at least positive. We like to trade for items that they need that seem in keeping with the existing village lifestyle.
In our travels in Fiji, we tried to see some of the less visited areas in the east. These areas tend to be rainier. This combined with a season of poor weather throughout this area of the Pacific left us with quite a few days of rain and overcast weather. It seemed like we had lots of lost days when we were waiting out some weather system and encountered lots of rolly anchorages. The winds seemed to clock around once every week and a half, making for a few days when no anchorage seemed ideal, since it was difficult to know exactly when the wind would change and inevitably there was swell to contend with from both the old and new wind directions. (When anchored near a village, it is customary to present Kava to tribal chiefs and thereby become part of the village, however this custom presents challenges for cruisers sometimes when weather shifts demand that we change anchorages on short notice.)
We found the water in Fiji to be somewhat murky and the reefs offered less protection from the swell than we had grown accustomed to in the Eastern Pacific, so we were disappointed in the amount of snorkeling we were able to do, and with how rolly some anchorages were. We found some great snorkeling with great underwater caves on the west side of Ono island in the Kandavu Island group.
In each village on Kandavu, we had the opportunity to watch a ferry unload goods from Suva. The ferry anchored briefly off of the village while open outboard motorized boats ferried goods and people back and forth.
Fijians have few if any pretensions. The houses in the villages are a practical mix of traditional bure (thatched huts) and wood with corrugated metal, without paint and showing signs of rust. Sometimes in the more prosperous areas, the houses are painted brightly in turquoises, reds, yellows and blues – colors we’d never see in most of the U.S. Little effort is made to beautify an area with a garden or flowers as we saw in French Polynesia, the Cook Islands and Nuie. One village we saw reminded me of a slum, with no foliage of any kind left in the vicinity of the houses. Inside, the homes we saw were empty shells with woven mats covering the floor and a few decorations hanging on the walls. Often the wall hangings are just pages from magazines. It always surprises us to see remnants of current popular culture from the outside world featured in these primitive surroundings, like Disney characters, shirts from U.S. sports teams and the like.
We noticed and found it odd that all master carving we saw comes from a single island in the Lau group that is inhabited by people of Tongan descent. Boat building seems to be a skill in which the Fijians have little interest and Tongans living in Fiji, mostly in the Lau group, do most of that work as well.
On the west side of Fiji, Musket Cove and Plantation Island Resorts on Malolo Lailai ensnare unsuspecting sailors with their beauty, convenience and schedule of fun activities and one can easily lose several weeks or a month there. The Musket Cove regatta in mid September offers a form of adult summer camp, with sailboat racing and a variety of sport and fun competitions that stretch us in new ways and make us laugh. One night at dinner we looked around the table and marveled how many countries were represented.
While we despised Nadi, a town filled with hawkers and tourist traps, we found Lautoka, a clearance port, to have its charms. Lautoka offers a center where we could provision, shop for ridiculously inexpensive clothes (including resale shops featuring everything for $1-2 Fijian on sale days), find a good variety of places to eat and cheap Internet cafes. The area is a sugar cane growing region and a center for cane processing, so we would see trucks and railcars everywhere loaded with the bamboo like sticks of cane heading for the processing plant. In the anchorage off of Lautoka wharf which lies next to the sugar mill and the sewage outflow, we would awaken to find the boat dusted with a light coating of black snow- soot from the stack’s night cleaning. Needless to say, we tried to minimize our time anchored there to keep the black dust off of our white dodger and decks. Fortunately, Saweni Bay lies only an hour motor south and offers a cleaner and quieter alternative.
At Saweni Bay, we met an Indian woman (Sumitra) and her daughter (Alicia) on the beach and within only a few minutes, she invited us to dinner. A few days later, she met us on the beach at the prearranged time and took us to her home a few minutes away where we met her husband (Victor) and other two children (Alfred and Edwin). We brought kava with us, much as we might a bottle of wine, and her husband showed us how the kava is prepared, while Sumitra began preparations for dinner out in the yard. She began cleaning tiny 3 inch long fish that we might typically throw back, giving the guts to a kitten. We took many photos and the children were captivated by their images on the digital camera monitor. They posed with newborn chicks and larger chickens that freely roamed the yard, along with several cows. Victor gathered and shucked a few coconuts for us to drink and also some to take home with us.
Eventually we went inside the 3 room simple house and they turned on the TV for the evening news, which was preceded by the last few minutes of the old sitcom “Happy Days”. (That sure took us back to a different place and time!) We sat on a woven mat in an empty room (except for the TV) and shared bowls of Kava during the evening Fiji and BBC news program while the children played and proudly showed us various items from around the house, like photos, books, and toys. When we ate, we each were served a platter with 2 roti (flat, tortilla like bread) along with white rice, the tiny fried fish and a tasty dhal soup in a metal cup that we scooped up with pieces of the roti. At the end of the evening they asked us to return for another evening with them when we returned to Saweni Bay the following week, gave us coconuts and fresh garden grown cilantro, and the whole family walked us back partway to the beach where we had left our dinghy. What a priceless evening we had shared with them.
There is so much of Fiji that we haven’t seen. One could spend many years cruising in Fiji, although the reefs and weather make it one of the more challenging places we’ve cruised.
Cheers,
Wendy Hinman and Garth Wilcox
S/V Velella (Wylie 31)