So where've you been? 2 Ovalau
After a journey that lasted three days with only six hours of sleep time, I felt like a plague carrier trying to bury myself. The difference between big touristy pacific islands and quiet isolated atolls where people greet you warmly though they've not seen a new face in some time is marked.
I ditched the idea of island hopping in Fiji. I needed peace, I needed stillness, I needed not to lift a backpack. I needed some semblance of rationality and health to be restored.
I hid in the middle of nowhere.
At first it was great; the loud stillness of the rainforest, the weekly half day trips into the island's small seven shop town, Levuka, to get pissed with the expats and the mayor. The novelty value of drinking rainwater with worms in, of bathing with fish in the creek. Of kerosene lamps that send you to sleep soon after sundown. The that was all caught or grown on the farm. The way Fijians yell across the volcano to greet the slightest movement in the distance; don't allow anyone to remain a stranger; call out a loud "Io" and rope everybody in. The warmth of the farmer who declared this to be where I could rely upon 'my Fijian family' to restore me to health.
But Fiji the white beach blue sand paradise is an illusion. Life in the bush is hard. Even in the cities the average wage is $50 a week. A farmer with ancestral land grows dalo and kava and dreams of leaving. Any stranger is a chance, a possible opportunity to change the world they're trapped by. Something different. Something they can take.
The grins in the traditional villages mark out duty, mark out control, mark out a perimeter of territorial obligation. Cross into that world, and eventually, that world claims you: the good and the bad dissolve together in a soup of roles and expectations that encroach and gather and limit you.
"I guess you're seeing the real Fiji, in these places, eh?" a Tongan overstayer, Stanley comments, as he passes round the kava bowl, and Sammy plays the ukulele. I guess I did. It was striking, bucolic, and wistful. It was unexpected, scary, and hard.
I ditched the idea of island hopping in Fiji. I needed peace, I needed stillness, I needed not to lift a backpack. I needed some semblance of rationality and health to be restored.
I hid in the middle of nowhere.
At first it was great; the loud stillness of the rainforest, the weekly half day trips into the island's small seven shop town, Levuka, to get pissed with the expats and the mayor. The novelty value of drinking rainwater with worms in, of bathing with fish in the creek. Of kerosene lamps that send you to sleep soon after sundown. The that was all caught or grown on the farm. The way Fijians yell across the volcano to greet the slightest movement in the distance; don't allow anyone to remain a stranger; call out a loud "Io" and rope everybody in. The warmth of the farmer who declared this to be where I could rely upon 'my Fijian family' to restore me to health.
But Fiji the white beach blue sand paradise is an illusion. Life in the bush is hard. Even in the cities the average wage is $50 a week. A farmer with ancestral land grows dalo and kava and dreams of leaving. Any stranger is a chance, a possible opportunity to change the world they're trapped by. Something different. Something they can take.
The grins in the traditional villages mark out duty, mark out control, mark out a perimeter of territorial obligation. Cross into that world, and eventually, that world claims you: the good and the bad dissolve together in a soup of roles and expectations that encroach and gather and limit you.
"I guess you're seeing the real Fiji, in these places, eh?" a Tongan overstayer, Stanley comments, as he passes round the kava bowl, and Sammy plays the ukulele. I guess I did. It was striking, bucolic, and wistful. It was unexpected, scary, and hard.
posted by Lectrice at jueves, octubre 06, 2005
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