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
You can read my full travel journals at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer and www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer2
