The next few days were a blur, and definitely a busy blur, with many people moving in and out of our experience. The morning after our arrival, we took the recommendation Junior had given us and headed to the bus station to catch a bus to Sleeping Giant, the mountain whose profile looked like a giant's face turned to the sky while sleeping. Unfortunately, we had missed the bus that would take us there, so we decided instead to go to Natadola, a beach we had heard touted by locals as the best on the main island Viti Levu and one of the top in the world.
The bus took us to an intersection where we would need to catch a cab. We easily found one and were at the beach within 15 minutes, but were surprised at the condition of the beach. There was still garbage everywhere and, while the sand was a light color, it wasn't the white sand you think of when you think of Fiji. There were half-dead vines growing on the beach and trash was hidden in these vines. The swimming was warm and salty, but there was gross seaweed that would get in your suit when you caught a wave. We swam a lot and then laid out in the sun. Apparently our sunscreen was not waterproof though, and I got a nice sunburn on my shoulders.
We took the same cab back out to the intersection and took a bus going back to Nadi. There we bought fish and fruit, and on the way back to the bus, we met with Junior's wife, Donna, who invited us to come visit and eat lunch. Donna, Isaac, Shahana, and I caught a cab together.
They fed us lunch, and then we went to sit under the guava tree while George (Junior's “cousin-brother”) wrapped the fish in tin foil to cook them over the fire. We shared kava together and relaxed on the tarp for quite a long time.
We learned about the kava, the traditional Fijian drink/cultural experience. Kava is the root of a pepper plant, ground up into powder and then mixed with water in a basin so it looks like a basin of muddy water. This is scooped out with coconut shells and passed around one shell-full at a time for each person. The person claps once and accepts the shell. While the person drinks, the others sitting around the basin say "Bula," or "Welcome," and clap their hands twice. The person drinking hands the shell back and claps three times. This is repeated for every person and for multiple rounds.
The kava does not taste very good, but it is also not very bad either. The experience is more cultural than anything, as it brings people together to talk and drink and laugh. Kava is supposedly a hallucinogen, though we have never experienced that. I would say that getting a lot in you makes you feel somewhere between drunk and high, though not in a super strong way. It also makes your tongue go just a little bit numb when you drink it.
Kava apparently can be a problem because people drink it too much. People drink it all night the way people drink alcohol all night in many places in the world. We have even heard that it causes many people to lose their appetite and therefore forget about the appetites of their children. We don't know if this is true, but it does appear that almost everyone drinks kava multiple times per week. And the people who drink it do seem to exhibit perhaps an addictive need for it, though this is only a possibility. It could just be a very ingrained practice in the culture.
While we were out under the guava tree, the littlest boy Isaac found a kitten in the bush. The kitten was young, but scrawny as could be. Isaac came to show me and I asked what he was going to name the kitten and he said he didn't know. I suggested Bushy, since he came from a bush. The name stuck, but so did Isaac's attachment to the kitten. All day while we were under the guava tree drinking kava and eating the fish, Isaac was dragging that damn cat around as if it were a rag doll. I'm surprised the cat lived. Isaac would pound it down on the ground, smash it against his two puppies, and drag it around everywhere he went. As an avid cat lover, I was worried.
Eventually we needed to go home, especially since I needed to soothe the painful burns I had gotten all over my body. We said goodbye, but promised to return later in the evening for more kava.
We showered and went down to eat some dinner at the kitchen, where we met Raffaella and Dominico, the Italian couple from our dorm room. Raffaella spoke some English, but Dominico very little, so we got to throw out our really quite awful Italian, while they gave us their choppy English.
Finally we headed back to Junior's house where we met a very drunk brother-in-law of Junior and Donna. It was pretty late, since we had talked with the Italians for a while. We had several rounds of kava and eventually met two of Junior's friends, Sam and a man Junior called Jack Sparrow. They two worked on boats with Junior and they did some fishing together. Sam and Joe got into a discussion about how natural it was for men to have more than one wife, of course.
Saturday we headed to Sleeping Giant. We caught a bus toward Lautoka and got off where a sign pointed to Sleeping Giant. Less than 10 minutes later, a New Zealand family of tourists stopped and offered us a ride in their car. We were very thankful, as it was very hot and we didn't know how long the walk would be. They even had air conditioning, a luxury we would not get much of in Fiji.
The first attraction we saw at Sleeping Giant was the gardens which was a beautiful tropical paradise, with 99 varieties of orchids, and a walkway system that just screamed the stereotype of colonial British era, when the wealthy British wore their safari caps and monocles and just drank tea in the middle of tropical rain forest. It was lovely! We climbed to the top of one of the hills to get a wide, wide view of everything.
We headed out of the gardens to the mud baths, another must-see at Sleeping Giants. We walked a couple of miles and stopped at one house when we were invited over for some shade. Ten minutes later back out on the road, another car stopped for us and offered a ride. The car was a taxi, but it was a taxi hired for the day by the tourists Johannes (Hungarian) and Susan (German). They took us the rest of the way to the mud bath and we were very grateful.
The mud bath was definitely a fun time. There was a hot spring that bubbled on one side of the complex at somewhere around 75 degrees Celsius (that's hot!), and on the other side was the mud pit, where delicious mud was pulled out to rub on your body. Joe and I got mudded up and then waited in the sun to dry.
Once dry, we washed off in the first warm pool, and then finished in the hot pool, which was a nice developed big pool with a soft gravel bottom and clean water that had been pumped over from the hot spring (and allowed to cool just a little in the process!).
We got to talking with Johannes and Susan, who were very sweet and had the stereotypical German English accent. It turned out that they were quite the travelers and were staying in the hotel right next to our hostel. They invited us to ride back to Nadi with them. In fact, they invited us to join them at the Hindu temple just outside of Nadi. This was a beautiful temple, though perhaps mostly established as a tourist trap and money-maker. We put on temple appropriate clothing and had a tour around the bright colors and shrines to Vishnu, Brahma, Shiva, etc.
The taxi took us and the couple back to the fruit market area, where we said thank you and goodbye to the couple. Our experience with them had been brief, but really, really nice. It was fun to tag along with them.
That night we stayed up late talking and eating and drinking with a German man (Maximilian), an Italian man (Mateo), and a Taiwanese woman (Wendy). There was much laughter and we went to bed very happy.
We felt a little trapped the next morning when we realized the bus didn't run on Sundays, but we decided to take it a little easy since we had had such a busy first couple of days. We spent the day reading and lounging in hammocks. Joe noticed a slight rash on his feet in the morning, but it didn't stop him from playing volleyball with some of the foreigners and the hostel workers. The game was fun to watch and we got to interact a little more with the Italians Raffaella and Domenico.
That night we learned about sand flies, and boy did we learn it all very well and very quickly. The rash Joe had seen on his feet started to itch, so he figured that, like mosquito bites, scratching them a little would make the itch go away for a while.
It turns out the sand fly bites are much more itchy than mosquito bites, plus the itchiness only intensifies with scratching. Joe was up doing research by early morning Monday to figure out how to beat the bites, because he thought he might actually lose his mind. I hadn't started scratching, so mine was only minor discomfort, but it was alarming to wake up to Joe's eyes wide in panic, asking for the key to the locked cupboard that held our cash so he could go see if he could find relief at a store. He bought the stick of itch-reliever, but this barely helped.
He asked the store owner what he should do and read about what he should do and bought some antiseptic liquid to soak in. He mixed a basin with hot water and the liquid and soaked some socks in it to put on his feet. His feet looked diseased and angry, with a hundred bites all over them, but the heat and antiseptic helped just a little--at least enough that he was able to calm down and stop scratching.
We stayed home that day (Monday) so Joe could try to recuperate and take care of his feet. Poor boy had nearly gone insane and I was very, very thankful that something had finally helped him stop itching and calm the anxiety he felt. Needless to say, we took protection from insects seriously from that point on. We bought repellent that was 80% deet from the store and used shoes while on the beach and out at night. Thankfully, our bites were fewer from then on as well.
The sand flies come out mostly at night and especially like the feet and ankles and a little bit of the legs. We had been warned by someone back home before we came about the sand flies, but we neither knew how to combat them nor knew just how terrible they were. Apparently the bites are much worse than mosquito bites and can take up to several weeks to go away. Luckily though, our bodies eventually get used to the protein that the flies inject into the body at the point of the bite, meaning even if we get bitten a lot sometime down the road, we probably won't have as hard of a time as those first few days. Which is comforting when we found out New Zealand has quite the sand fly problem as well.
The next day (Tuesday) we woke up hoping to go to town, but realized the buses didn't run because it was Muhammad's birthday. We couldn't go another day cooped up in the hostel, especially when we had distracting insect bites, so we paid for a cab into town. We headed to the cheap lunch place, but found it was closed for the holiday as well. So we found a nice Chinese restaurant on the second floor and settled in for a comforting meal of Chinese to boost our moods.
We bought fruit at the market and were headed to find a cab again when we found the single Italian Mateo, who we had spent the night talking to on Saturday night. We split a cab home and then later that evening walked to Junior's house to set up the waterfall and island trips.
More to come... thank goodness I'm getting it all down... there was a lot to write! Love!
No comments:
Post a Comment