After three hours in the plane, we landed in Nadi, Fiji and were finally back in summer! We found a local couchsurfer, Lawrence, who wanted to pick us up from the airport, why we didn’t have an address of him. Unfortunately, the police at the customs wanted to know the address of our first night. He didn’t really accept the answer “we stay with a friend who picks us up”, so he took us in a little office and another policemen took care of us. Hi read our conversation with Lawrence and tried to call him, but without success. After a while he stopped trying and just wrote something weird on the immigration paper and we could continue. Lawrence was already there with a little sign, he took us out of the airport. There we found out that he didn’t have his own car (which is obviously very uncommon in Fiji) because suddenly a white minivan showed up and we were asked to enter. Of course we did, but we didn’t have much more choices…
That’s why we drove in the middle of night in a white van with two totally strangers in an unknown country. Sounds a bit scary? That’s what we thought as well. The driver of the van said “no worries, all people in Fiji are very friendly”. It didn’t really help to build up the trust 🙂 We tried to relax, as Lawrence had some good references and just followed the way on the GPS. Finally we arrived at a huge door to a quite big house and Lawrence showed us our room and directly wanted to welcome us with a traditional Kava ceremony. We heard something about this drink before, but the whole situation was still a bit suspect. First the slightly scary drive and then we should drink a completely unknown alcoholic drink? But then all clouds disappeared. Kava is no alcohol. It’s the crashed root of the Kava plant which is just added to water. Then everyone sits around a wooden bowl and one after the other drinks out of a small bowl out of the shell of a coconut. If you drink two of them, your tongue gets deaf, but besides that we couldn’t figure out another effect. It’s assumed to have a relaxing effect and makes you sleepy. Well we just did it and drunk a bit, of course we didn’t want to be rude or give them a reason to kick us out directly 🙂 It literally tastes like mud water, but Fijians love it anyway and many of them are kind of addicted to it. Other countries other ways..
During the evening we found out, that the house is actually owned by an Irish woman called Dee, who is married to a Fijian and lives there since 17 years. She rents out rooms of her house to Korean and Japanese students, who are in Fiji to improve in English. Additionally, Lawrence and a lot of his relatives live there, brothers, cousins etc. That’s why we got in contact with at least 20 other people while drinking Kava. Most of them work in one of the backpacker hostels on Mana Island, just coming to the main land every few days or weeks. You see it became quite late until we finally went to bed, but all sceptic was gone due to all the nice chats!
The next day, Lawrence showed us around in Nadi. We went to the handicraft market, the Hindu temple and purchased a SIM card (WiFi is incredible expensive here so nobody has it, but we had to do some organisational things…). Afterwards we went to the local market in order to buy some fish, vegetables and fruits. Lawrence wanted to make a traditional Fijian dish for us, and we needed some fresh fish for it. Let’s say it like that, in Europe you wouldn’t be able to call this fish fresh, because the storage was not really cooled… When we saw it we were a bit afraid that we’d get some problems with our stomach, but we can spoil a bit, nothing happened 🙂
Back at home we helped Lawrence preparing, which started with removing the hovel from the fish with a knife. We heard that it’s not very delicious to eat them… Fortunately the bowels were already removed 🙂 So we continued preparing the coconuts, which are essential for the coconut milk. We should grate three coconuts, obviously without the wooden shell. In order to make it the Fijian way, you sit on a wooden board with a small greater at one end. Then you take half of a coconut and rasp it into a bowl underneath. Quite primitive for European thinking, but a very interesting experience to do it by yourself. While Lawrence’s sister in law finished the fish in the oven, Lawrence showed us his hobby: He goes to competitions in coconut climbing, which includes harvesting them. He demonstrated us the technique and we could eat/drink the harvest 🙂 The fish came with a local kind of potato and we ate it typical Fijian with the fingers. Very delicious, maybe we can try that by ourselves one day.
We also planned our trip to one of the islands that day. We asked for one in Auckland at STA Travel, but they didn’t have anything for a good price, why we didn’t go on with this idea. We thought, it’s Fiji, it couldn’t be that bad on the main island. Unfortunately it is. There is nothing to do on the main island and the water there is grey and muddy. All postcard pictures are taken from the islands. So Dee made us an offer that we couldn’t resist. There is a hostel on Mana Island, which costs 55 Fijian $ per night, including three meals a day. After staying three nights, the fourth is even for free. That sounded pretty fair, but the next question was the transfer to the island, because we already knew that the regular ferry is 120$ per person one-way. But Dee had an answer on that as well. There is a local kind of speedboat, which takes up to 12 people for only 75$ per person. So we just did it and after a few phone calls Dee organized everything for us and the next morning we went off to the paradise for 4 days. But that’s a different story…