Fiji Travel Guide

Tonight, I wanted to see The Magic of the South Seas, a show which takes place twice weekly at the Sheraton Fiji. It is hosted by a local witchdoctor by the name of Tupa'I Bruno, and as the in-flight magazine on the plane had given over nearly five pages to the show I thought it must be worth seeing. The Sheraton resort is bloody huge, as you would expect from an international chain like themselves, and just a tad on the lavish side. I was treated like a visiting dignitary by the staff from the moment I got out of the taxi, which had entered the resort across a bridge which I took to indicate that the resort was on its own island. As it was a while before the show started, I decided to have dinner in the Foyer restaurant, if for no other reason than that I would be able to tell people I had dined at the Sheraton. There were a lot of designer shops dotted around the lobby of the hotel, selling the most expensive jewellery and watches you can imagine. Out of interest, I enquired as to how much the rooms were. The receptionist handed me the current price list, looking me carefully up and down and mentioning that they could probably do something to cut the prices down if I was on a budget. I didn't quite know how to take this. The least expensive rooms in the place started at F$495 a night - about £180, and went up to more lavish rooms at a mere £400 a night. I told them I would have to think it over, and went outside to laugh loudly into the night. The show started at 8.00PM in the Sheraton Pavilion, a huge circus tent that had been erected behind the hotel. Tupa'I Bruno apparently used to work in the circus before going on to spend many years manufacturing tents for travelling shows. He has, in recent years, become an official Witchdoctor in Samoa and travelled the Polynesian Triangle performing his unique blend of magic and dance. On his travels, he has even been thrown out of countries for practising "The Black Arts", and for the time being it seems he has got fed up travelling and taken root at the Sheraton Fiji Resort. Like all showmen, I don't think it'll be too long before he moves on elsewhere. Bruno is a funny little man, totally different on stage from what you might expect of a witchdoctor and world class magician. From the fliers and other advertising material, I had been rather under the impression that he was a big menacing character with fire coming out of his nose and a bone through his neck. The photos show him standing over the charred remains of human bodies, waving magic wands around in the air and dancing about in the middle of burning buildings - more or less what you would expect from a witchdoctor, in fact! In reality, however, Bruno is difficult to describe. He is a small, chunky man with a bald head and squinty little eyes. Actually, he's quite easy to describe, isn't he? Bruno rushes around the stage in more the manner of a clown or a dandy than a serious entertainer, making camp Carry On Matron style oooh sounds at everything - whether its a female dancer appearing on stage with a grass skirt hanging suggestively from her waist, or a member of the audience being cut in half with a chainsaw. Perhaps this is his circus background showing through. Only about 50% of the show was actually what I would term magic. There was plenty of juggling and fire-walking, and the rest of the show was really more about beautiful Polynesian dancing girls with very little on and tattooed men performing tribal dancing displays. He also had a sixteen year old girl called Princess Zula as part of the act, supposedly from the entirely fictitious island of Bula-Bula - "Hello Hello" in Fijian. She climbed to the top of a high rope and performed incredible acrobatics on tight-ropes and high gantries as the audience covered their eyes and hoped she didn't fall to her death. It was every bit as entertaining as any other circus act and there's no denying Princess Zula probably has a future in the business, but it really wasn't magic - and what magic we did get was pretty second rate. There were no big illusions as such, just a lot of Bruno inviting people from the audience to pick cards or have knives thrown at them. A couple of the Hawaiian Hula-girls got levitated or cut in half in novel ways, but Bruno was largely let down by his equipment and the audience was badly positioned so that we kept catching glimpses of how the tricks were being done as he darted around the back. It's a shame. The show has a lot of potential, but I have to say I spent most of my time watching a half hearted attempt at an obvious trick and wondering when the girls in the grass skirts were coming back on! The taxi driver spent most of the journey back to the Naviti trying to persuade me to pay him to take me to a local nightclub where presumably he was getting a commission. He attempted to sell me on the idea with the promise "Fiji girls, they like western men. You'll have a very happy night, I promise."

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The Naviti Resort has its own tour office, and I booked a trip today to the capital city of Suva on the other side of the island, leaving at 10 this morning. I figured that I may as well see the big city early in my stay, and then I can do what I came here to do - relax. They serve breakfast here until 11.00 and I can't tell you how good it is not to have to get up at the crack of dawn to eat or get on a tour bus. In Australia, they tend to finish serving breakfast at all the hotels about 8.30 to 9.00, and who the hell is up at that time on holiday? Suva was not at all what I had expected. It was a large concrete jungle of small shops, although everything was crowded together and organised around large market squares on which crowds of salesmen were sitting cross-legged with their goods arranged hap-hazardly around them in the road. Suva is a bit of a dichotomy - on the one hand there is clearly a flourishing trade in souvenirs and tourism, and yet the buildings all look as though they haven't been repaired for a hundred years and are in danger of falling down. Local trading seems to take place mainly from market stalls in the centre of town under a large tent structure, where you can buy anything from fruit and veg to cheap watches. Stray and hungry looking dogs were everywhere, even in the markets sniffing at the food, but nobody seemed to be bothered by this. Everywhere you look people are sitting around on the streets, and it's never quite obvious whether they are beggars or if that's just what you do here. Clearly, the traders will do anything to part you from your money - the wages are so low that they all depend on tourists for their money and this makes it virtually impossible to walk any distance without somebody stopping you and giving you a hard luck story. Taxi drivers will happily take you wherever you want to go, and spend the entire journey trying to convince you that you should call them for all of your travel arrangements during your stay so that they can give you a much better deal than the tour offices. In the streets, every shop has a pack of workers outside to drag tourists inside. They'll follow you around the shop telling you why you should buy everything, and then attempt to sweet-talk you into giving them a tip which is normally more than you paid for whatever you bought. In one shop, I bought a beautiful wooden carving to take home as a souvenir and the shopkeeper followed me out of the shop and all the way down the road trying to talk me into going back for more. I joined up with a bunch of other guys from the bus - Vivienne and Nora from Australia, John and Dave from New Zealand, and an older couple from Canada - and we went exploring in Suva. Nora and Vivienne went shopping for clothes in the flea market and the rest of us did a bit of browsing, bought a few things and ended up running for the nearest café with shop owners in pursuit touting for more business. The average weekly wage in Fiji is the equivalent of about £25, so it's hardly surprising that there seems to be a really startling level of confidence trickery and overcharging going on in the shops and at the street stalls. It was even an exercise in advanced negotiation to get hold of a film for my camera - the whole group chipped in and bargained for some time to try to get a fair price, and we came away thinking we'd done a pretty good job between us. Five minutes later, we found the same film in the Kodak shop down the road for about a third of the price we'd paid. The specialist handicraft shops, licensed by the government, are another matter entirely. Its like I mentioned back in Thailand, you can find things in handicraft shops that are being sold in the markets at hugely inflated prices - you just have to look for places that look as though they're run by a big company rather than a local merchant. We managed to use up our 3 hours in the city easily enough - mainly searching for souvenir shops that looked slightly respectable. In one, I was busy looking through the displays of reproduction cannibal equipment and reading the little plaques explaining how they had been used in earlier times to cut peoples heads off and scoop out their brains, when Vivienne came running down the stairs and summoned us all up to the second floor. Upstairs the walls were lined with elaborate wooden carvings, and display cases were filled with charms and pendants and shell necklaces - but Vivienne was pointing open mouthed at the centrepiece of the room, which was a life-size wooden fertility statue of a man, complete with thirty inch erect phallus. This, as you can imagine, was something of a talking point over dinner tonight for the girls. The rest of us just sat there and felt inadequate

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At 30,000 feet, the stewardess on flight FJ910 to Fiji asked me if I would like the chicken or the lamb. I have absolutely no idea why she asked me this, because what I got on my tray didn't even begin to come close to either of them. I read once that McDonalds were being considered to take over the in-flight catering on British Airways flights, but I gather that nothing came of it.It's a shame, really - I quite like the idea of being asked by a stewardess with a little red and yellow hat if I would like the Big Mac in a red wine sauce or the Chicken McNuggets Parmesan. At least you wouldn't have to concern yourself too much with whether to eat in or take away. The flight from Australia to Fiji only takes about three hours, which is a lot less than I had been expecting - it almost seemed as though we were returning to the ground before even reaching cruising altitude, but perhaps that's because I've got used to some seriously long haul flights over the last three months and anything less than twelve hours seems like heaven. After showing a ridiculously unfunny film starring Leslie Nielson, a man who these days seems to get every comedy part going, we were forced to watch a short information film on the Fiji Islands. I say "forced", although I do admit that no actual guns were used or anything - it's just that, having been given headsets so that we could choose whether to listen to the film or not, we were given no option for turning off the soundtrack to the Fiji information film. Some of the passengers had clearly had long days and were not at all happy to be woken up mid-flight, and the old lady in the seat next to me was so startled that she stuck me with a pointy elbow as she twisted around in her seat. I learnt, courtesy of the information film, that Fiji has come a long way since the days when being invited over for lunch suggested you could expect to be eaten somewhere between the fish course and desert. This is always nice to know when arriving in a new country, although I think most of us had already taken it for granted before booking that we're no longer living in the days of cannibals and head-hunters. Unsurprisingly, Fiji doesn't much like being known around the world as The Cannibal Islands, although they clearly still find the time to remind everybody on the way in just in case any of us step out of line. I would like to say that Fiji has made a lot of effort to bring themselves into the modern world and put their past behind them, but the problem is that they seem to have stopped the modernisation process somewhere in the seventies. I remember thinking that if the haircuts on the people in the information film were anything to go by, everybody in Fiji must look like a member of the Jackson Five. This was seriously funny stuff - every man, woman and child in the film was proudly sporting a microphone haircut of the first order. I assumed, at least until leaving the plane on the Fijian Island of Viti Levu, that this information film had been made some time ago and they'd been showing it ever since - but No! Upon disembarking, I was met with the sight of a lounge full of seventies throwbacks. The land that time forgot. I wanted to go up to the nearest guy and ask if he knew Huggy Bear.You can read my full travel journals at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2