2 posts tagged “fiji”

Just after this village we ran into a bunch of young kids carreening down the mountain (shoeless) with plastic shopping bags tied to strings trailing above and behind them. Kites! They were having a blast. They were much to quick for my camera, but I did manage to get these kids playing in a tree. There are three kids in this picture... can you spot them?

Now we're onto the real hike. Serious up-hill. But the kids from this village came running after us and asked if they could join us! Why not? So here's our rag-tag band of hikers:

They like being in photos a lot. I'm the head poking out in the way back. About an hour into the hike the kids took us to a "water stop". Which was somebody's uncle's house that had rain water coming out of a pipe and into a drinking trough. Not wanting to seem rude, I splashed some on my face when offered. Here are the kids taking break:

Our next rest-stop was another hour uphill. Apparently some Indians live way the heck up the hill and are smoothing out the road with this:

It gets colder and steeper and harder as we go on. The kids are kicking a soccer ball around. Many of them are barefoot and a couple are one-shoed. Periodically, the one-shoers would trade (or steal) each others shoes. Nobody seemed to mind the rocks but Angela and I.

By the time this picture was taken, I was getting a little tired. We asked the kids if we were almost there yet and they argued for a few minutes in Fijian before telling us, no, we were not even close. We trudged on as long as we could, up into thicker jungle and colder mist. Three hours into it, we realized we weren't going to make it without turning it into a death-march kind of adventure. The trek down was fast, but a little dangerous. Here I am cooling off:

As we came back to the village at the bottom of the trail, we spotted these kids playing a game with tires. As far as I can tell, there's an offense and a defense. The offense rolls the tires down the hill--pushing them with sticks--towards the defense. The defense tries to stop the tires before the careen way, way, way down the hill.

When we got back to the bikes we found a group of kids who got very quiet once they saw us. They'd been trying to figure out how to undo the lock! When I went to put in the combination, they all crowded around to see what I was doing. It wouldn't be cute here in the states, but something about these would-be unauthorized-borrowers was fun.

When we finally got back, we were pooped. Awesome day!

Next we headed to the resort and got settled. For us that meant "dropping of the stuff and hopping on the complimentary mountain bikes". Here we go!

Our first round of tasks were to get some Fijian currency, stock our mini-fridge and feed ourselves. So we rode into Somosomo (hereafter: "town") to visit the bank. I could write a whole series of blog posts about the Somosomo bank. Picture a middle-aged teller carefully drawing vertical lines on a fresh sheet of college ruled notebook paper. They have to make their own ledger! When she reaches the end of a page, she flips it over, draws the lines, draws the column headers and begins recording transactions on the new sheet. Awesome! Everything is done by handed, signed by a manager and stamped at least twice.

An hour later we were ready for lunch. We stopped at one of the (two) restaurants in town. We called it the "blue shack place". This picture is the entire restaurant :-) When I asked for a spoon, the proprietor politely explained that Angela had the spoon. Thinking that there was a language barrier, I asked again. One of the owners friends quickly ran out and got me a spoon from his place repeating that Angela had their spoon (note singular). Very cute!

 

Like all good Americans in a foreign country, our next job was shopping! Angela thought we might be able to pick up a movie to watch for the evening at the local video store. The local video store was an MPAA nightmare :-) In a non-sequitor way there was ganster rap blaring from the in-store speakers. I don't think they could understand the words.


One the way back to the resort, we heard some weird tribal drumming. They don't mention it in their travel brochures, but in centuries past, the Fijians were known for acts of cannibalism. These drums turned out to be coming from some village ladies were were pounding cloth out of soaked sections of tree-bark. We sat down with them and learned about the process where in they peel the bark from a local tree, soak it in water, pound it into thin sheets and then do a whole lot of manual labor to eventually make cloth.

This example of meeting people and talking to them is typical of Fijians. They are genuinely a friendly bunch.

We finally went back to the resort for a little napping (phew) and then headed off to the Tovu-tovu resort for their once-a-week Friday night music, kava and buffet dinner. A bunch of local guys sit around with stringed instruments drinking kava and sing a combination of Fijian and American music. My ears perked when I heard "Knock'n on Heaven's Door". I could write another whole post about kava (a mildly narcotic root that they locals make into a drink). We stayed away from the kava, but we did enjoy the delicous buffet!

Finally, off to bed!

(Note this post is retrospective, we've been back for a few days now. My ambition is to blog about the whole series of adventures we had there over the coming weeks)