Albinos in Paradise

The islands of the Pacific are divided into three main groups: Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. Fiji is considered part of Melanesia, which is a group of islands positioned mostly to the south of the equator. Micronesia (e.g., Marshall Islands, Guam) lies mainly to the north of the equator. Polynesia (e.g., Hawaii, Tahiti, New Zealand) covers a vast area to the east.

Other islands in the Melanesia group include New Guinea, Vanuatu, The Solomons, New Caledonia, and many others. Melanesia literally means “islands of the black-skinned people,” and reflects the inhabitants’ origins in East Africa. They migrated to the islands via Indonesia some 35,000-50,000 years ago. They are also related to the Aboriginal Australians. This is in contrast to the Micronesians and Polynesians whose origins are in Southeast Asia, and are much more recent (less than 10,000 years ago).

The other major ethnic group in Fiji are the descendants of indentured servants who were brought here from India by the British Colonial government in the late 1800s and early 1900s. According to my Lonely Planet guidebook, indigenous Fijians make up 57% of the population and Indo-Fijians are 37%. Of the remainder, a fair number are of Chinese ancestry. Needless to say, we are very white here. Fortunately, I can say that we have only been treated with kindness and respect and never made to feel uncomfortable by our lack of skin pigmentation. Nevertheless, we are working on our tans.

(photo by Deborah)

(photo by Deborah)

Liti (who does our laundry) and her fellow Jehovah's Witness

(photo by Deborah)

Nick and Sharon

This morning our new friends Nick and Sharon and their two children stopped by on their way to the Savusavu airport. They are the ones we first met while commiserating over delayed flights at the Nadi airport, and then shared a cab with from Labassa to Savusavu. We crossed paths a few times in town during their stay and then a couple of days ago we stopped by the house they were renting with another family to say hello, talk about travelling, and share strategies for fighting mosquitoes. He is British, she is American, and they currently live in China where he has a manufacturing business.

Today they were ending their time in Fiji and were generous enough to drop off their leftover supplies for us to use (mostly magazines, mosquito repellent, beer and chips). This afternoon Deborah has been thoroughly absorbed in the newly obtained women’s magazines, sporadically blurting out loud the sort of “useful tips” such periodicals are renowned for. So now we know what sorts of house plants to put in my studio to absorb paint fumes, how to exercise the subordinate side of your brain by writing your name backward using a mirror, and how many pounds of high fructose corn syrup the average American consumes in a year (45). Thanks, Oprah.

Hopefully Nick and Sharon and family’s flight back to China (via Hong Kong) goes more smoothly than the one that brought them here. We are delighted to have met them and psyched that we now have an offer of a place to stay in China. How cool is that?

View property for sale near our house

(not sure what the price is, but I'll try to find out by the time we leave)

The Not-So-Rainy Season

All the Fiji guidebooks tell you to visit during the Fijian winter or dry season from May to October. That’s when the temperatures are milder (although only by a couple of degrees), the humidity is bit lower, and threat of cyclones is diminished. We, of course, are doing the exact opposite and have instead plunged ourselves into the Fijian summer or wet season. But really, so far, the weather has been very pleasant.

As I noted early in the blog we did just miss a tropical storm that delayed our arrival and diverted us to Samoa for a night. But the really big damaging cyclones are not at all common, although they did have one wreak havoc on the big island of Viti Levu back in January when a week of heavy downpours caused massive flooding and washed out roads and bridges. There are sheets of plywood under the house here that we are meant to install over the windows in the event of “the big one.” We’ll also turn off the power and check ourselves into a solid-looking hotel. Then we will be able to determine (from a distance) if this Japanese Pole House is indeed hurricane-proof as advertised.

Almost all the rain we’ve seen during our stay has occurred at night. A couple of nights ago we had a period of very heavy wind and rain, made all the noisier by the metal roof. Still, by morning, all was calm sunshine again. I’m just guessing here, but I’d say the temperatures are usually in the 80s F (26-32 C), cooling off the low 70s F (21-22 C) at night. It was a bit humid the first couple of days but not bad since. It’s noticeably cooler up here on the ridge than it is down in the town, with the breezes working to keep us comfortable. We didn’t quite know what to expect as far as how rainy would the rainy season be, but so far so good.

Xmas and nextmas

We had a quiet, low key Christmas, which was fine with me as I tend to take perverse pleasure in ignoring the holidays that everyone else feels compelled to celebrate. Plus I had the opportunity to paint all day. Deborah, however, was feeling less than festive. My failure to remember to give her a Christmas card (for the second year in a row) didn’t help her mood, nor did the fact that I’m overdue in completing a painting for her as an annual gift to keep for our own collection. With just the two of us staying up here on our verdant ridge all day while I sat mute before my easel didn’t exactly fill her with a warm Christmassy glow.

I tried to make it up to her the next day as we went into town and, after dropping off our laundry and shopping for various items we needed, we had a nice lunch at an Indian restaurant. This was followed by a walk along the bay and, for Deborah, a massage. Nothing gets me back in Deborah’s good graces faster than treating her to a massage. While she was getting her rub down I walked up into the neighborhood above town where cute little houses come with stunning views, as the photos below will attest.

I’m happy to report that Deborah is smiling again.

Christmas Eve

We spent Christmas Eve at the home of neighbors Steve and Iretta, the couple who greeted us when we first arrived in town, and with neighbor Paul, whom we also met that first day. Steve and Iretta have a stunning 1.7 acre view property not far from Tobi’s house as the fruit bat flies, but a bit further via roller coaster dirt roads. Their enthusiastic dog Chacho kept us entertained by playing fetch with a coconut and begging for attention by persistently placing his snout in awkward locations. We enjoyed beer and wine, as did the various insects who kept diving into them with fatal consequences. Steve says that is why in Fiji we place the coasters on top of the glass instead of underneath. We had a fine meal and learned much about expat life in Savusavu.

Look at that view! Although it doesn't show up in the picture, the waters of Savusavu Bay are in the distance.

Called a "bure" this traditional structure shelters the bbq

and outdoor dining area

It's all about outdoor living here


Steve and Paul at the grill
(photo by Deborah)

Blake and Deb (here with my right hand I am trying to

restrain Chaco the dog who is nuzzling my butt)

(photo by Paul)

Iretta, Paul, Steve, Blake (left to right)

(photo by Deborah)

Signs

Here’s an interesting collection of hand-painted signs within the town of Savusavu. Our favorites are the ones for the beauty salons or, as they are sometimes advertised, beauty “saloons”.

This is where we got our laundry done

Yes, you too could look like this.

Not alcohol, "grog"

Savusavu

The town of Savusavu surprised me in both good and bad ways. For a town of less than 5000 people with only one main street, it’s not nearly as sleepy as I expected. In fact it is downright bustling with activity. There is a dense conglomeration of shops, most of which fall in the category of “variety” where you can get your toothpaste, frying pan, bag of rice, tee shirt and screwdriver within a single establishment. There must be a dozen of these on the street, each with only a slight variation in available items. There are three businesses that are more properly grocery stores, three banks with ATMs, a post office, a few restaurants, modest hotels, a bus station, a couple of marinas, a small yacht club, and a variety of other business and government offices. There is also a great produce market that is open 6 days a week where we do the bulk of our food shopping. The town has pretty much everything you’d need with the glaring exception of a good (or even a bad) art supply store.

Savusavu isn’t quite as picturesque as the tourist web site suggested (surprise, surprise) – in fact it is a bit shabby and dusty, although in a cute sort of way. Paint is probably expensive here. But I am impressed that you see virtually no litter and no graffiti. And everyone is exceptionally friendly. So overall it should suit our needs just fine for our 5-month stay.

Preparing Cassava (I think) outside the Produce Market

Deborah at the pearl company's pier



Copra Shed Marina and Yacht Club

Main Street (okay, it's the only street) Savusavu

Deborah's favorite store

Big boats in the bay

Little boats in the bay

Deborah trying to look perky on her slog uphill from town

(we walked instead of drove that day)

It's Hammock Time

Apparently, Tobi’s previous house sitters ruined his prized Mexican hammock. He asked if we could bring a replacement, for which he would reimburse us, as these are much more easily acquired in North American than in Fiji or New Zealand. So we purchased one straight from the Yucatan and stuffed it into our suitcase, and are now very much enjoying this iconic furniture of the tropics. Neither of us has much experience with hammocks and it is quite comical to see the complete lack of grace with which we attempt to enter and exit, or our undignified struggle to find a comfortable position when we are laying in it together (it is a BIG hammock).

If I were a better boy scout we might have avoided the incident on the second day when our leisure was rudely interrupted when one end gave way and we went crashing to the deck below. Fortunately it was a fall of only about 18” so Deborah will not be suing me. I’d like to blame the rope rather than my knot but I know better. I think I have it secured now, but I might get a second set of ropes to tie on as a sort of safety line just in case.

Deborah is actually taking apart Tobi’s broken hammock and attempting to fix it. It looks like a chaotic tangle of strings to me, but she seems to know what she is doing. If she is successful and we get a second hammock up and running we will never get anything done. Already Deborah says we spend half our time in the hammock and the other half trying to get out of it. I think she is right.

Where the Hell Are We?

If you are like I was a few months ago you have at best only the vaguest notion of where Fiji is. I can now tell you that it lies about 18 degrees south of the equator near 180 degrees longitude (where the international dateline is located). This puts it somewhat in the center of the South Pacific, midway between Tahiti to the east and Australia to the west. It is about 1770 km (1100 miles) north of New Zealand.


Fiji consists of 322 islands. Most of those are tiny and uninhabited. The total land area is about 18000 sq km (7000 sq mi), about the size of the state of New Jersey or half the size of Vancouver Island, B.C. The largest island is Viti Levu, which is the most populous and home to the international airport at Nadi. That’s where we spent many frustrating hours last Tuesday waiting to catch a domestic flight onto Vanua Levu, the second largest island. We are staying in Savusavu on Vanua Levu’s south coast.

The South Pacific

(click to make bigger)

Fiji Islands - we are in Savusavu on the island of Vanua Levu

Tobi's House

Much to our amazement, when we drove to the Savusavu airport today, our luggage was waiting for us. We weren’t certain it would even go to this airport (rather than Labassa) let alone arrive the next day. We are very happy. I didn’t really care about the clothes and toilet articles, which are easily replaced. But my art supplies are another story. There are absolutely no art supply stores here and five months without painting would leave me one crabby bastard.

Instead, we have all of our “stuff” and are quickly settling into Tobi’s house. Tobi is a German who lives in New Zealand but also has this house in Fiji where he spends time during the New Zealand winter. He’s an underwater photographer and has a boat with which he explores the waters of the South Pacific. During the months he is away from the Fiji house he likes to have house sitters come and look after the place: keeping the house aired out, cleaning the downspouts, hacking back the encroaching jungle, and putting plywood up over the windows when cyclones threaten. Needless to say, his insurance company likes the idea of house sitters also.

This is easy for us since there are no pets to care for. We have no rent to pay, just the electric and internet bills, each about US$15 per month, and we have to replace any gas canisters we use up. The gas is used for the cooktop and the instant hot water heater. Rainwater is collected from the roof and stored in three huge tanks under the house. An electric pump draws on the water tanks to supply the house through a filter.

The dwelling is a Japanese pole house which, reassuringly, is supposed to be hurricane-proof. The interior is about 8mx8m (26’x26’), with covered decks running continuously around all four sides, yielding a platform of about 12mx12m (40’x40’). So with the lush jungle surrounding the house and dropping steeply down below, it feels like you’re in a tree house – one with a water view. There are numerous windows on all sides and three sets of double doors that open out onto the decks.

The interior is very open with just a few walls, none of which rise all the way to the vaulted ceiling, thus allowing air to flow freely. What walls exist are just enough to define a bedroom area, bathroom, kitchen and living area. There is also a kind of built-in desk/table along one wall. The kitchen is decent sized with a sink, a small undercounter refrigerator, the afore-mentioned cooktop, but no oven (it’s the tropics; too hot to bake). The queen size bed is quite comfy and comes complete with an obligatory but nevertheless evocatively exotic mosquito net. The lack of interior doors or full height walls challenges one’s modesty when using the toilet, however a quick tweak of the stereo volume control can mask all sorts of dreaded “bathroom noises.”

We even have a car here for our use – a well used but functional Toyota diesel 4x4. The house sits on a ridge above town and the road is steep and unpaved, so the 4x4 comes in handy. It’s a little hard starting in the morning, but aren’t we all.

Tobi's house - front patio

Our "dining room"

Water view from the back deck


The double doors stay open all day
(with the possible exception of cyclone events)

Bedroom area - tastefully decorated like the rest of the house

Kitchen - all open shelving is a must in humid climates;

refrigerator is under counter at right

Interior walls are few and stop short of the vaulted ceiling

for maximum air flow

View from bedroom through living area toward back deck

Bathroom vanity in corner of shower room; toilet is in separate alcove

Happy to have their luggage

Samoan Side Trip

Our travel day to Fiji was full of surprises, not the least of which was that we ended up in Samoa. Tropical Cyclone Mick was hovering over Fiji on the day we were to arrive, thereby throwing all travel plans into disarray. Even before we left Honolulu we were told we’d be making an unscheduled refueling stop in Samoa on the way to Fiji (it’s a little less than 2 hours away) just in case we needed the extra fuel to circle the Nadi (Fiji) airport a few times waiting for an opportunity to land. But after arriving on the Samoan island of Apia, the captain informed us that the conditions in Fiji were worsening and we would instead be staying on Apia for the night.

That turned out to be just fine as Apia is a nice little island and the quaint hotel they put us up in was a good 30-40 minutes from the airport, so our bus transfer turned into a kind of free coach tour. We shared our bus with a friendly chap from Tonga and a group of college-age kids (including an extraordinarily perky one from Seattle) who were on their way to Vanuatu. The simple dwellings we saw from the road were mostly tidy and painted bright colors, with little pigs running around the front yards. Our airline provided accommodation at Aggie Grey’s Hotel in the town of Vaisigano. The exceptionally well-maintained resort must have been at least a hundred years old and had a kind of airy British West Indies feel to it. Very nice.

Our stay at the hotel proved to be quite brief however. We had to leave at 2am to get back to the airport for a 5am flight. By 7am we had arrived intact at the Nadi airport in Fiji. But that was not our final destination. Nadi is on Viti Levu, the largest of Fiji’s 300 plus islands. We were staying on Vanua Levu, the second largest island, in the town of Savusavu, an hour’s flight away. That last leg of the journey proved to be a considerable challenge as windy conditions at the Savusavu airport made landing precarious.

The domestic airline terminal in Nadi was mobbed by people who had been trying to get to their various destinations for two days, but were unable to because of the storm. Making up for all those cancelled flights was a challenge to the airline staff, who were nevertheless calm and courteous to everyone, however it must also be said that they seemed to have no clue what was going on. We were constantly told we would be on such and such flight after this other flight got back from Savusavu then no, no flights have been able to go into Savusavu today, then we would definitely be on the plane that was just now taxiing in, then no, that plane is going to somewhere else, then did we want to fly to Labassa, which is on the north coast of Vanua Levu and take a 2-hour bus ride to Savusavu, which is on the south coast, then no, we were scheduled to be on the 2:30 plane to Savusavu....I think they were literally making it up as they went along. They were just trying to squeeze in as many passengers as they could onto each plane. They even weighed some passengers by having them stand on the luggage scales so as not to overload the plane. Some Savusavu-bound passengers just gave up and got a hotel with plans to try again the next day. Others had already been in a hotel for two days and were determined to press on.

We never did get a new boarding pass, the one airline employee who seemed to be in charge of flights to Savusavu just hand wrote our names on the back of some piece of paper he was carrying around. At one point he just came and found us in the waiting area and told us our plane was ready for us, even though it was 1:30 and just an hour previously he told us we would be on the 2:30 plane. Only when we were actually sitting on the little deHavilland turboprop (about 16 passengers) did they tell us we were flying to Labassa, not Savusavu. Oh, and our luggage wasn’t with us. It would come “later,” which is Fijian for “in a day or two.”

So an hour later we have at least landed on the correct island, albeit on the wrong end. The little airport in Labassa was also predictably a mob scene with a long line of people waiting to get information from the lone airline office employee about buses and flight schedules, etc. We decided to just grab a taxi to get us to Savusavu, damn the cost, and we would worry about our luggage later. The one problem we had was a complete lack of Fijian dollars. The one ATM machine back at the Nadi airport was not functioning due to a storm-related power surge. What few American dollars I had we’d already spent at the café during our 6-1/2 hours waiting at the airport. And credit cards are not an option.

Fortunately, Deborah’s gregarious nature found us chatting with a number of fellow travelers, including a British/American couple with two small children. We ended up sharing a cab with them (five of us in the back seat). And they generously offered to pay. An hour and a half later we were in Savusavu, where we finally hooked up with Steve and Iretta, a very nice retired American couple who live near where we will be staying. Tobi, the person for whom we will be housesitting, is back in New Zealand (more on that later), and therefore unable to meet us personally. Steve and Iretta gave us the keys to Tobi’s house and car and we followed them up to the house. There they showed us around our new home for the next 5 months.

Now, if only we had some luggage...

Our hotel in Apia, Samoa

Our room

View from our room

Hawaii

As we did last year on our trip to Australia, we wanted to break up the long transpacific flight with a stop in Hawaii for a couple of days, again just staying in the Waikiki area. This strategy presents us with a more endurable 6 hour flight to Fiji from Honolulu, as opposed to a 10-hour flight from L.A. Priceline gave us a reasonable rate at my parent’s favorite Waikiki lodging – the Sheraton Princess Kaiulani, fondly referred to as the “P.K.”

We really only had one full day in Hawaii and the one thing I most wanted to see was the Honolulu Academy of the Arts, which we had to rush through on our visit last year. But after taking a bus out to get there, then hanging out in a nearby park with the homeless people while we waited for the museum to open, we walked over and found a note at the front door informing us that the museum was closed in preparation of some special event. Bummer. So it was back on the bus to Waikiki where a crusty old local gave us his opinion on the best budget eating and entertainment options in the area. We ignored his restaurant suggestions and instead opted for the international market near our hotel where we ate more Thai food than we really should have.

We walked a bit on the crowded beach where Deborah managed to use the number four toe on her left foot to find a large and unyielding bolder lying partially submerged in the sand. Her afflicted toe promptly turned red and later ripened into the color of a concord grape. I should mention that she also now has a burn mark on her shoulder from an unfortunate encounter with a curling iron.

We walked (and hobbled) over to the aquarium, which, though small, is quite nice. Later we made our way over to the water’s edge at the other Sheraton in a fruitless attempt to spot some large fish nibbling on the algae, as was suggested to us by the before-mentioned bus-going local. All we saw were a couple of crabs. Never mind; we were just happy to be walking around in the warm evening wearing shorts and sandals again. It was an early night for us as our flight the next morning was at 7am.

Banyan tree in the park by the museum

(provides good shelter for the homeless dudes)


Caterpillar breakfast

Aquarium residents

Very large hermit crab



Deborah's grape toe, Day 1

(it gets MUCH worse looking than this on Days 2 and 3)