fijian retcon
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
At this point I'll interrupt the journal with an entry written precisely twenty years later (also 4,001 journal entries later). This is the story of our trip to Fiji, which remains one of my favorites to date (2020.02.01).
Sara and I arrived in Nadi in late January. We arrived at the airport to find a fairly ramshackle little building with open architecture and a surprising number of one-man stalls offering tourist services. It was the first time I'd seen such a tiny international airport and even in the loosey-goosey pre-9/11 world I was struck by the lax security of the place. I'd already traveled to the the Dominican Republic and Mexico by that point but I was struck by just how "developing" this developing nature still was.
And it was warm without being grinding hot. I'd read a rather good guide book that warned against packing too much, but I wasn't prepared for the degree to how little clothing we were going to need here. The climate was a) vastly different from Toronto's and b) practically perfect. I was thrilled.
And it smelled nice. Twenty years later I can remember noticing the scent of flowers on the air in an international airport.
My guide book said to strip down to a minimum of what we'd actually need, and to leave everything else in the lockers in the airport. We'd already prepared Fiji bags and Australia bags but decided immediately to further reduce our load and repacked things there in the airport.
We also found someone who'd arrange for us to stay with a village-run "resort" called Wayalailai. And just like that, we were off.
We spent one night at a dormitory made from an old school house. The room was divided into separate tiny rooms with low walls that were topped up to the ceiling with chicken wire. It was comfortably because hell everything in Fiji seems to be comfortable. Memorably, there was someone in one of the tiny rooms who was too sick to get up and about and too sick in fact to get on a boat to somewhere that she could find help. Sara convinced me to not get involved, though I was concerned.
After that, one of the solo huts became available, and we moved to that. We used mosquito netting to try to keep the roaches and geckos out of the bed and tried to dry our clothes.
In fact, it was the need to constantly dry things that led to a mistake I've never repeated. I had set out my camera equipment to dry and when we went to the Blue Lagoon with some locals on one of their utility boats I grabbed my camera bag only to find that I had the lenses and film but no camera body.
There were stag beetles in the womens' washroom and breadfruit growing wild and other amazing firsts. I was stung by a 15cm centipede and before you say, surely an exaggeration I'd encourage you to go and see for yourself. I swam with reef sharks and a barracuda and a goliath grouper. The latter took my breath away when I realized (at a safe distance) just how goddamn huge it was, but it turns out that of the three the barracuda was actually the dangerous one. Naturally I'd gone out to check a dark moving patch in the water that turned out to be a ball of bait fish. I didn't know at the time that they swim like that when there's a predator around. How was a Calgary-Torontonian supposed to know!
We climbed a hill on the island, leaving before sun-up. We got to the peak right around sunrise. It was an amazing little jaunt. One of the other tourists said that as a botanist he'd seen a dozen edible species on the climb.
One of the travelers there looked like a younger version of Michael Palin. He also had a great sense of humor. We laughed about Americans, of whom we met only two on the trip: a pair of scuba divers from Chicago that I told looked like they'd stepped off the cover of a fitness magazine.
A German came to dinner one night stinking. I asked him, being an idiot, if he thought he'd need insect repellent because I'd yet to see a single mosquito. He didn't understand me and Sara tried to wave me off from retrying but I did repeat myself. He was mortified at my question and Sara explained after he huffed off that it had been cologne!
One day we told the people at the "resort" that our guide in Nadi had booked us a second jaunt at a different place. They agreed to take us but left us sitting (and burning) on the beach waiting all morning for a boat that they hadn't called. When we figured it out they just took us back to our hut and we stayed there some more days. Such is life in Fiji!
My last thought on the trip is that it remains to this day the only place that I've ever looked down and seen that my shadow was directly beneath me and that was all.
Returning to the city and the airport involved a ferry and a taxi. The taxi driver quoted us one price and tried to charge us a second, but having already gotten my back up with the absent ferry incident I wasn't too tolerant.