Right, I’m back near civilisation again (near enough for there to be an internet cafe anyway). Just got off the boat from Taveuni where we’ve been for the last week. I can’t believe how much travelling we’ve had to do to get around a place that looks so small on the map! Taveuni’s only a couple of hundred miles away but the only way to get there is by ferry and that takes 20 hours Fiji time (anywhere between 20 and 24 hours actual time)… Anyway, Taveuni was absolutely incredible. It’s also exactly the other side of the world from the U.K. as the 180 degree line passes right through it. Technically, while it’s Friday on most of the island, it’s Saturday on some of it. There’s one shop that stays open 7 days a week by having a door on either side of the line so when it’s Sunday on one side it’s Monday on the other!
We spent 4 days diving some of the best sites in the world, saw a bunch of sharks - apparently they were pretty small at 2 meters but I kept a close eye on my limbs, and just chilled in a fantastic little place (Susi’s Plantation) on the south west side of the island. We got invited to play volleyball with the local village (the guys here are all enormous so we figured we’d better accept volleyball before they offered rugby) which was cool too but we were soooooo out-classed. These guys play all day every day and I’d played once in my life. Luckily they’re patient folk. In fact, the people on Taveuni are about the friendliest people I’ve ever met. Everyone says hello and everyone seems genuinely interested in talking to you. London’s gonna be a bit of a shock!
After the diving we headed round to the other side to take a look at the rainforest and some of the waterfalls round that way. The best of the waterfalls was a 4.5 km hike and a short swim away from the village we were staying in so it was a proper mission to get out there! It wasn’t that big (maybe 20m high) with a smaller fall right next to it but the location was awesome. We figured it’d be kinda cool to jump off it so being the idjuts that we are we figured we’d just climb through the jungle, skirt the cliffs and hop off. Um. Well. Rainforest and all. We got bitten and stung by every little critter with a mouth or a tail but we soldiered on and eventually we emerged about an hour later by the smaller of the falls. Encouraged by this we figured that getting up to the high one’d be a doddle. Another hour passed and we emerged back at the lower falls again with added cuts, scrapes, bruises and stings. Doh! We gave up after that and just jumped from where we were… Still very cool but we felt a touch foolish and we did get laughed at by the locals when we told them.
We’d been advised to take some Kava (traditional Fijian drink that tastes very much like dirty dish-water but on the bright side it’s a mild narcotic) for the village chief since we’d be staying on his turf. We got invited to go drink the Kava with him so we spent most of that night drinking this Kava and chatting to a real-life chief while him, his brother and his son chain-smoked ‘Fiji tobacco’ joints (the marijuana industry here is bigger than the sugar industry apparently!) while they lectured us on Fijian politics. Proper Indiana Jones stuff.
Right, we’ve gotta go catch a bus to the ferry to Ovalau (the old colonial capital) but I guess I’ll catch you all pretty soon…
Easy
Mike (still the whitest white-boy in town)
