Fiji Transportation

If you get the chance to get on a boat (ask sailers in the harbour...), do it and sail around Fiji- so much better then driving by car! But never forget to buy Kawa at the market before you discover a village!

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

It hadn't really occurred to me that it might be raining, but it was chucking it down. Fiji is slap in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, about as close to the equator as you can get without having to jump up and down going "Ow" on the hot ground all day - I had pretty much imagined I'd be walking around in a loin cloth for the next few days, but it looks as though it might actually be quite pleasant. I was met from the plane by a woman who stood out from the crowd straight away in that she was the only one without a seventies hairstyle, so I assumed her to be either the rep from my holiday company or a local who was trying to be dangerously unhip. She directed me to the small office of a company called Rosie Tours , where I sat in front of a small desk waiting for the bus that was to take me to my hotel and being chatted to with massive amounts of enthusiasm by somebody else with a microphone for a head. The bus, when it arrived, was empty - I had assumed it to be taking so long because they had to pick lots of other people up from somewhere on the way, but it turns out that everybody here is simply on "Island time". In other words, they'll get around to it when they feel like it. My sort of people. I fought the urge to swing myself into the vehicle through the window seventies style, and propped my tired eyes open for the duration of the journey so that I could take in what this island paradise had to offer. I know I've only just arrived, but so far I'm pretty impressed. Not only has Fiji not been motivated by the perceived need to cut down all the trees and build office blocks everywhere, but apart from the main city of Suva, 95% of the 333 islands that make up the Fiji chain are still covered in rainforest. We seemed to drive through endless countryside on the way to the resort, and the sun was setting as we drove. I've never seen anything so beautiful in my life - as the sun dropped out of sight, there was this sort of ethereal glow across the treetops. Fiji is claiming that it will be the first place in the world to witness the dawn of the next millennium, although to be honest introducing daylight savings time to the islands may have allowed them to cheat a little on this, and I can't really imagine at this moment anywhere I'd rather be on the 31st December this year. My hotel, The Naviti Beach Resort, is nestled in its own grounds one and a half hours away from the airport. It seems to be quite a relaxing place with palm trees growing everywhere and acres of gardens, beaches and forest land all to itself. There are two restaurants, and nightly entertainment such as fire-walking in the open sided Bar/Lounge. On arrival I was given a shell necklace to wear for the duration of my visit, and everybody here seems to be doing the same. Something tells me that this is going to be a very laid back week.

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

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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For lunch, the tour bus dropped us at McDonalds - there really weren't many other choices - and they were filming an advertisement for Fijian Television. The restaurant was full of equipment, and one half of the ordering area was literally covered in cables, Teleprompters and an army of producers and directors. We ordered our food and sat around watching what was going on. After an eternity of checking and rechecking equipment, reading over scripts and having women dart back and forth with buckets of makeup, the director finally shouted "Action." Behind the counter, a pretty Fijian girl took one step towards the camera and smiled. "Right, Cut" shouted the director, "That's a wrap. Print it." And thus another commercial for burgers was in the can.

There were plenty of chances to take photographs on the way to and from Suva, and the journey passed quickly enough. The scenery outside the cities is fantastic, and the old Polynesian style of living obviously still persists here as we passed many small villages consisting of nothing but a few small huts near a river with the village elder's hut dominating the view. The couple from Canada were less interested in looking at the scenery but full of suggestions for my fast approaching journey through North America, while Nora had travelled a lot and was happy to impart some knowledge of Hawaii for next week. On the way back to the Naviti we stopped off to collect a young couple, Nathalie and Chris, who had been on a rafting trip along the river while the rest of us went into Suva - for a moment I found myself feeling quite envious of the exciting day they were keen to relate to us, but then I remembered all the aches and pains I had after white-water rafting in Cairns. Tonight, I had a dinner of roast beef and sweetcorn in the hotel restaurant and sat out on the balcony where I could watch the sunset. This is such a popular activity here that the daily sunrise and sunset times are routinely posted on the events board at reception. It was, unsurprisingly, a spectacular sight. Down on the beach, children were playing in the water. A dog was splashing about in the surf and the sunset cruise was just heading out into the Pacific waters. It was like being in a postcard.

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