Last month I posted a story about our visit to the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. We visited Fiji on the same trip, a few years back. Here's a little taste of that trip from the eventual book, Common Sense and Whiskey:
The only sounds at Koro Sun, Vanua Levu island, Fiji are four: The palm fronds, the birds, the overhead fan, and if a truck rumbles by. Sixteen bures sit in a ring around a garden and the sea is across the road.
Tony and Paula, our proprietors, greeted us, Tony with that just slightly perplexed look I swear is endemic to Kiwis, and Paula, a Dutch woman with a slow, rigid manner and huge round eyes, unblinking.
Paula fixed us a vodka welcome drink, “Strong - I thought you might need it,” and we settled in to introduce ourselves. They knew we’d been traveling some 27 hours. They knew we’d be frazzled, and sunburned Tony offered again and again to arrange anything we’d like - or nothing if we’d like.
Nice folks, they set us up with bure #1 and sent a six pack of Fiji Bitter beer to the fridge, then followed that with fruit and cheese platters. We alternately sat on our porch, gazed at the sea and poured sweat, doused ourselves in the freezing shower, and napped, and that was all we did on the first day.
*****
Dew dropped from the roof, the sea lay gray and smooth as ice, and birds called from the tops of the coconut palms. The first pickup truck of the day lumbered by and color began to return to the earth as the sky lightened on the morning of the second day. The yard boys collected last night’s fallen palm fronds.
I sat with coffee (poured under the watchful eye of a gecko perched on the wall) on the front porch after I could sleep no more, and Mirja caught just the last few minutes of sleep. I had lain in bed trying to store the feeling of the pre-dawn cool, under the ceiling fan, to summon back later in the day.
A British couple who stopped to commiserate about our long flight (everybody knows everybody’s business here, apparently) said yesterday had been the hottest of their six weeks here, and indeed I took a reading of 90 degrees in the cool of our bure, in air hanging with humidity. The fan had a mighty five speeds: 1, 2, 3, 4 and on, and “on” would whip the air furiously but to little cooling effect.
*****
Vanua Levuans have the time and disposition to be open, affable and curious. And honest. We asked a waitress what she knew about Vanuatu.
“Oh, they are MUCH blacker than we are,” she told us, and laughed uproariously.
Suharto, it is said, judged fellow leaders by their ability to remain calm under pressure. In the same way, Vanua Levuans’ words are invested with gravitas by their very softness.
*****
In Malindi, on the east coast of Africa, Mirja and I have observed a funny practice. At the Malindi Deep Sea Fishing Club there, when you pull up to the bar, they issue you a “drinking cloth,” to be carried around with you as you visit throughout the bar. It’s to keep your beer, which sweats furiously in the humidity, from leaving pools all over the tables. I’ve done my bit to import the practice to Vanua Levu.
As we sat with Fiji Golds and Heinekens (Paula is Dutch, after all), a British fellow explained the difference between Aussies and Kiwis: Kiwis, it seems, have an overdeveloped left frontal lobe, resulting in overbearing caution.
This fellow runs a business in New Zealand, this British guy does, and it seems he just can’t congratulate his team on a job well done.
“Well, yes, we did okay this quarter, but we’ll have to see about the next,” he says they’ll always say. Mirja would call that a Lutheran streak.
*****
Aussies can tell if you’re a Kiwi in an instant, this fellow continued, because they have a sort of flat way of saying their “U’s.” Ut and abut, he says they say. Besides that, he winked a beer-rosy, sunburned wink, mere mortals like us can’t tell the difference.
One last gem of wisdom: Cook Islanders are, as a rule, grumpy. Thinks it must be because all the smart ones went to New Zealand and got jobs.
*****
All these isolated resorts the world over are islands unto themselves. Here the people from the traditional villages find work. It’s here the local island folks, whether Fijian or expats, can gather for billiards or for a swim in the pool.
When there are only a few guests with a staff of about a thousand, folks are eager to talk. There was Loata, 20, always smiling under her huge afro. She used words like “yummy” and “wow.” In three weeks time, on 7 February, her 21st birthday will occasion an all day ceremony in her village.
She’ll don her special grass skirt and be feted at a day-long feast. All the women and girls in the village will line up in two rows and eat beef (their family’s own cattle, she was proud to say) and the chicken and lamb she’ll be buying to help her mama, whose responsibility it is to preside. The whole village will be there.
Loata has a boyfriend, 32, who she worries is a little too old. He is a Methodist priest. Her list of evangelizing sects, disarmingly recited as if by rote, is daunting: Baptist, Methodist, 7th Day, Jehovah’s, on and on. Lutheran, no.
*****
And the Vanua Levu villagers appeared to have bought Euro-religions wholesale. Indeed, Orisi, the bartender, was himself a former missionary. Calm, understated in the village way, with oversized, toughened hands and a gentle, twinkly smile, Orisi said he used to minister to troubled young men in their late teens.
“They were in darkness, Bill,” he told me as he brought us a continuous supply of Fiji Golds and Heinekens. He put it in a way, I’d guess, that is uniquely Fijian. He said, “Their oven was wet, not hot.”
Methodist himself, Orisi, at 52, had four kids - two boys and two girls. His third, a 21-year-old boy, was in chef school over in Savu. He stood by me a long time in the afternoon to chat. The staff wasn’t allowed to sit.
Finally, it came. Orisi, you see, needed a patron. He had 600 acres on the west of Vanua Levu that he couldn’t afford to develop. He wanted to raise cattle but first he needed the cattle. And a fence.
It’s the dry side of the island (his brother grew cane nearby, to the north) but he knew of a special tree grown in Hawaii that he wanted to plant. It is known to cure more than ten medical problems but the American market, he has heard, buys all the Hawaiian product. He thought he could supply Europe and Asia.
*****
Just at dusk Orisi stood with Mirja and me on the veranda. Each day I’d ask the staff to arrange a big tempestuous thunderstorm. I asked Orisi again. He turned his face to the sky, put on a convincing sagacity, held his hands behind his back, rocked on the balls of his feet for a time and pronounced, “I think later in the night the rain will come, but not now.”
Within not three minutes he was standing crowded under the awning with us to escape a shower, and it was Orisi who led the laughter at himself.
*****
We asked him about the mongooses, bigger than a lizard, longer than a rat that you’d see scurry in the bush and he told us they’re easy to catch. Bend a branch, tie a string to the top, and make a lariat on the ground around a piece of toasted coconut (toasted so he’ll be sure to smell it), and you’ll have a swinging mongoose in the morning.
Did they use the skin for anything? The idea was foreign to him. That got Mirja to explaining about the Northern European way of wearing skins for warmth and he readily agreed. Once he’d gone to Auckland and was so cold, “I needed seven blankets. I only need one blanket here.”
We told him about elephants we’d seen on the Indian subcontinent and in Asia and his eyes grew wide at the idea of taming such a creature to do man’s work.
*****
I was favorably impressed in the same way by Wangi the bigman, a tall, strong Fijian (skirt or no skirt) who was one of those guys you’d introduce yourself to and in that instant feel you could trust him with your life.
He and Luata (the whole staff, really), had to work two weeks ago for the resort’s New Years Eve celebration. Luata, especially, had to laugh at the Europeans. That particular midnight, the next sunrise, meant nothing more or less to the Fijians, but they had to work until 8 a.m. because the Europeans insisted on staying up to videotape the sunrise.
“Even the wife.” Luata shook her head.
Paula exhibited just a trace of disdain, too, now and again, but about different things. Turned her nose up at the local beer. Shook her head at the condition of the road. Looked like she and the staff might be sometimes at odds, but she ran the restaurant and they turned out a menu with different choices for each meal, though Tony laughed, the chef sure likes garlic!
*****
After our lag day, the second day we rose early, set to ride the Hibiscus highway up to the Taveuni ferry. The hotel had a Suzuki jeep they’d readily agreed to loan us for the day. As we finished coffee and they brought it round front it promptly had a flat tire, and that occasioned us to set off shortly in Sam’s air-conditioned, six-seat minibus, and that temporarily left the resort without wheels. We hoped nobody would break a leg!
The highway was usually atrocious, only tarmac for a hundred meters at three or four villages, and a lot of fun. There was no traffic except the very occasional Vishnu Holdings Express Bus making the run between Lambasa, an Indian town on the north coast, and Savu Savu.
We bumped and rocked along and had a happy moment in the rain forest with Bula 100 radio playing tunes from Stevie Wonder and Loggins and Messina and Huey Lewis and other 80’s staples, then, improbably, On Top of Old Smokey.
There’s a ferry point 74 kilometers down the road at Bula Bay. The ferry goes to Taveuni Island, off the east coast of Vanua Levu, where there are no proper roads of towns, just a few villages and an airstrip. The ferry wasn’t in. There was no commerce. They told us there was a traditional bure of thatch that had a satellite dish but we couldn’t find it.
On the way back we turned up Salt Lake Road, another dirt-and-shell track (but with a proper road sign) and had lunch with Colin, who runs Lomolagi Resort, six sort of American ranch-style cabins with just a stunning view out over Natewa Bay. She claimed to have guests but nobody was around.
Just us, her and her staff, but she was laden with make-up. She kindly sold us 20 litres of diesel from a big drum and showed us around after lunch - did her sales pitch. She’s a former Seattle banker living the rest of her life her way, and when she named the resort Lomolagi she caused a stir, since Lomolagi means heaven, and a number of these devout Fijians took offence. But she really did have magnificent, heavenly panoramas from way up high across the water.
By the time we got home it was time for a swim and dinner. I asked Luata for chillies on the side and she brought “chillies from the garden” and they turned out to be habaneros. We had pork and pineapple and Paula and Tony each enjoyed steak au poivre and no one else was in the resort that night, but they laid on a traditional band anyway, Tony did, and two guitarists, one ukelele player (he only had two strings) and a singer quietly strummed and sang the high pitched traditional music of the islands.
Mirja said it sounded submissive and I thought it sounded like American slave music - two ideas that are not mutually exclusive. They sang round the kava bowl and after dinner the other four of us joined in because it was Paula and Tony’s third anniversary.
Indeed Paula wore what must have been her nicest dress. We talked of their plans and problems and drank Heinekens and kava and smoked Tony’s Dutch cigars until they mercifully sent the staff home and we continued to drink straight from the resort fridge until no one was really clear about the details the next day.
Great stuff really..!!
Posted by: Joe | 15 October 2012 at 05:55 PM
Thank you very much Joe. This didn't make it in the first book, which ended up dealing with even more off-beat locations. The next book is about Africa, and this, or something like it, will be in the third.
Bill
Posted by: Bill Murray | 15 October 2012 at 06:18 PM