WALKING ACROSS FIJI

Apologies for the following:
- blog entries are becoming infrequent despite more and more happening
- the events in this entry occured about a month ago
- this blog entry has not been edited so I apologise about the errors
- this blog entry will be epic.

Before I came to Fiji, I had heard about a hike that goes through the centre of Viti Levu through villages that hardly ever see westerners. There's a group called the Fiji Rucksack Club that organises the "cross island walk" twice a year over long weekends. Of course, I had to join this club as I was very keen to embark on this journey.

I attended my first meeting and had enquired about when the next one was. Unfortunately, no one had stepped up to the role of organising the trip. Apparently it wasn't going to go ahead. I was terribly disappointed at this news. The other volunteers had already been in June and had raved about it. I wasn't going to wait until next June for it to happen again. Despite being incredibly apprehensive,
I took it upon myself to find out how I went about organising the walk. If I could help it, I was going to go on this walk and no one was going to stop me.

To cut a long story short, I suddenly found myself with the daunting task of organising a trip with complete strangers to places that I've never been, in a country that I had only been in for 2 months.

I had signed up 18 people from all corners of the world. We had our fellow Australian volunteers (and housemates Emily and Melina that I had convinced to come along for the trip), Australian expats, expats from the E.U., a couple of ladies from New Zealand, a USP student from Kenya, a Columbian lady, a local Indo-Fijian and a man from Egypt. The only representation we lacked was someone from Asia, but I suppose I was the obvious choice to fill that category.

Now, I've been a bit Fijian and have been vague on details about what the walk actually involves. As we know, there are two large islands in Fiji. The one that I currently reside on is "Viti Levu". It's shaped like a ovaloid blob and Suva is on the bottom right hand corner of the blob. The walk itinerary was as follows:

Day 1: driving around the island to the north end starting from a village called Nagatagata (pronounced "Nangatangata")

Day 2: walk to somewhere into the interior to a village called Nubutautau (pronounced "Numbutautau")

Day 3: walk along the Sigatoka river to Namoli village. From there, we would drive along dirt roads to Sigatoka at the south of Viti Levu and take a bus back to Suva.

Organising this walk was certainly stressful as it would be in any country. Normally, I'm used to organising hiking trips with a bunch of close buddies from university. And usually, I'm not the ONLY person organsing stuff. In fact, we all organise it together, mutually and without hassle. Organising it with 17 other strangers is a whole different kettle of fish. There's money to chase, people to hassle, questions to answer and a long, long trail of emails to write. Also, in Australia, you don't have to contact village chiefs and take along a mountain of gifts for them to stay in their village. I spent ages trying to get through to village chiefs on dodgy phone lines through thick Fijian accents. I think at one stage, I interpreted "Please bring bread and butter with you. 3 bread." as "please bring butter butter. 3 butter".

So here's how it went:

Part 1: Shopping for the village gifts.

When visiting a village, it is custom to bring gifts especially if you are staying the night. Gifts usually include the small luxury items that you'd only ever be able to get from town. Seeing as town is difficult and expensive to get to, the villagers in the interior appreciate the items that can't be grown and harvested. I roped Emily into helping me buying things like kindergarten supplies, 10kg of flour, 10kg of sugar, cigarettes, soap, shampoo, a massive bucket of breakfast crackers (which people in Fiji seem to go CRAZY for them), drinking chocolate, tea, photos.

We also bought water for the walkers as we had heard that draught had stripped the western part of Viti Levu of a lot of its water. As we didn't want to make a dint in their water supplies, I bought 18 litres of water. The 18 litres of water was then dragged across the street to where the market was. We had come to the last part of our shopping expedition and had to buy 2 huge bunches of kava root for the sevusevu (a kind of greeting ceremony) that occurs when you visit a village. Emily and I traipsed up to the dry market where all the kava is sold. It's the strangest feeling shopping for something that you want, but you have no idea what it looks like or what it should be. Luckily there's a man who sells kava as soon as you enter the door to the dry market upstairs. He pulled us aside into his kava stand when we raised our eyebrows in response to "sevusevu?".

Kava is sold as a massive bundle of roots that's wrapped in newspaper in an inverted cone-shaped looking thing with an extended windey tail. The whole thing is then wrapped up in raffia. The hardest thing was carrying 9 litres of water AND the kava back down through the main market and to the taxi that would eventually take us home.

At the end of it, this is what we had:



Part 2: The Bus Trip

The day finally arrived and we were set to go. Now, I'd only been in Fiji 2 months, so I had no idea about road conditions, or even which direction we should have been going. I didn't even have a map to follow. I did have a compass, but no map...which meant that the compass was pretty much useless. Now this caused us a bit of strife. No one in the group had been on the trip before and the bus driver had no idea where we were going. The bus driver also had the temper of a Siamese fighting fish.

The first hiccup came when we ended up taking the clockwise route instead of the anti-clockwise route to Nagatagata. The clockwise route goes along the "Queens Road" which stretches along the south part of Viti Levu, around the west and up to the north. The "Kings Road" which is the road that we were meant to take is unsealed, bumpy and would have been incredibly dangerous given the heavy rain that had hit the eastern side of Viti Levu the week before. So all in all, it was probably a smart detour to take.

As we were driving, the driver kept asking me if I knew about the road we were taking up north. I had told him repeatedly that I had no idea what the roads were like. I assumed that he being the bus driver would have looked up where he was going and would know the way. As things go in Fiji, there are many communication breakdowns and this was just another one of those annoying communication breakdowns.

We reached the north after about 6 hours of driving. As we made the turn off onto the gravel road that would eventually lead us to Nagatagata, the mood of our bus driver had suddenly flipped from being jovial and pleasant to abusive, cursing and intimidating. He would yell at me saying that I had tricked him into travelling along sealed paths and that I should know the way that I'm going. He told me that it was ridiculous to drive 26km along unsealed roads becuase his precious bus would have dust all over it. He would also complain incessantly about the cost of his bus and the damage that driving on a gravel road would do to it.

He insisted that we take some locals with us on the trip to show us the way. We stopped by some ladies selling fruit on the side of the road to ask if any of them could come along. The bus driver was incredibly creepy and asked for two young unmarried girls to come with us. The Fijian ladies deliberated for a while as to who would go with us on the bus. There was a young girl standing at the doorway to their house and the bus driver kept insisting that this young girl should come with us. He kept making jokes about him not being able to take married women because he would have trouble with their husbands. I was hoping so badly that the ladies wouldn't send the young girl with us. I also think that with a cluey busload of westeners, we wouldn't have allowed it anyway. Thankfully, two women in their 50s or 60s boarded the bus and came with us to show us the way.

We started the 26km journey along the gravel roads and with each passing kilometre his anger levels would increase ten-fold. Being fearful that we wouldn't have a bus to take us back to Suva from Sigatoka, I stayed silent rather than attempting to stand up to him and creating anymore conflict than there already was. Unfortunately, I did feel intimidated by this man and decided to stop at each village to ask for a carrier to take us the rest of the way. A carrier reminds me of one of those army trucks that carry people on sideways benches in the back compartment. They're much more suited to the gravel roads that interlace through the interior of Fiji. As we'd reach each village, I kept asking the bus driver if he would take us to the next village and keep asking until we found a carrier. We kept telling him it was another 5km to each village. I felt like this disgusting, foul man deserved every bit of battering to his bus for being a creep, not bothering to look up where he was going and trying to extort more money out of us than we actually had.

We drove up windy roads with hairpin turns and along pot-holed gravel roads (which in actual fact, I'm making sound a lot worse than they actually were). I felt like we were never going to get to Nagatagata and while other people were happily snoozing away, I was incredibly frightened that this man was going to stop the bus in an angry rage and offload us all. He would also say things like "at least Jesus is on our side, he has brought the rain" and then swear and curse Jesus at every hairpin turn that he would have to make. Of course, it was completely Jesus' fault that he didn't have the capacity to know where he was going or own any road maps for that matter.

I sat at the front of the bus painfully watching each kilometre pass us and each minute ticking away on my watch, hoping that the next corner would be Nagatagata village. We were only on the bus for an hour, but it felt like an entire day.

Then, finally, as we climbed one hill and started to descend it, we saw a scattering of bures that meant we were nearing yet another village. This village had a sleepy feel to it and when I saw that children were running out to greet us, I knew that we had finally reached Nagatagata.



I have never felt such a welcoming wave of relief ripple through my body. I'm trying to think of another time when I've experienced such relief after being so incredibly stressed to my core. I don't even think that my last exam at uni was as beautiful as the feeling of reaching Nagatagata.

That is about all I can stomach for the moment. When I get around to it, I'll write about the beautiful villages and the amazing walk with lot of pictures.