Blake and Deb in Fiji: May 2010

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Top Five Lists for Fiji

Deborah and I are back home now. We are slowly, sometimes awkwardly, slipping back into our old lives. We struggle to remember where in the kitchen we kept the measuring cups, how to work the scanner, and which buttons to push on the remote to watch a DVD. Eventually it comes back to us. And, as was the case last year, I have a mountain of paperwork to go through, which makes me instantly nostalgic for the simplicity of life in Fiji.

Here now, as promised, are our top 5 likes and dislikes for Fiji as we experienced it during the last five months. Keep in mind that this is based only on our experience on our island. For different people on different Fijian islands at different times of year the lists would be very different.

TOP FIVE “LIKES”

1) Friendly People – We’ve met many friendly people in our travels, but none more warm and welcoming than the Fijians. They live simple lives in a poor country, but they are happy and it shows.

2) Fresh Food – We loved the papayas, mangoes, pineapples, and many other fresh fruits and vegetables, including many new ones to us like the various wild greens, ferns, duruka, and of course fresh squeezed coconut milk.

3) Low Cost of Living – At least for basics like fresh produce, fish, clothing, restaurant meals, utility bills, health care. Some things like automobiles and consumer electronics are expensive, but that didn’t really affect us.

4) Interesting Flora and Fauna – Everything from leaf insects to fruit bats to tree ferns and barking pigeons, with a 365 day a year growing season the place was lusciously green and bursting with life.

5) Sunshine – Even though we were there during the rainy season it seemed the rain fell mostly at night, so we had plenty of sunshine while it was dreary and cold back home. This does wonders for my mood.

TOP FIVE “DISLIKES”

1) Humidity – The drawback to going to Fiji in the rainy season is the high humidity, which drains your energy and makes everything feel and smell damp. And it didn’t do Deborah’s hair any favors either.

2) Ants and Mosquitoes – We eventually learned to minimize mosquitoes bites with timely application of repellant and closing the doors at the right time of day, but they were still a constant annoyance. The ants, though, were unstoppable. Food had to be put away promptly after each meal or they would start carrying it away. Any tiny spot missed while cleaning the kitchen counters would quickly be surrounded by dozens of tiny ants. Keeping them off my wet paint surfaces was a challenge also.

3) Limited Entertainment Options – Being culture junkies this was especially hard for us. No museums, no concerts, no theatres, no libraries, painfully slow dial-up internet. Even no television or radio at our house. We had to rely on our limited collection of CDs, pirated DVDs and the limited offerings at the local laundromat book exchange for our entertainment.

4) Crappy Consumer Goods – Quality kitchen appliances, tools, pots and pans, etc. were not to be found. Deborah called it the “dollar store island.”

5) Claustrophobia – After awhile we began to feel sequestered up at the house. The wilderness came right up to the decks so there wasn’t really any yard to hang out in. We could walk down the steep dirt road into town and then up and down its one main street, but there weren’t really many other good walking options. Even when we still had the car the lack of decent roads meant there weren’t many places to go. It felt like a small, confining world.

Despite the ups and downs, despite the humidity, despite the disagreement with the homeowner over the car repair, despite the ants and the mosquitoes, we are both glad we came to Fiji. Although we never really considered it a likely future home for us, we always wondered what it would be like to live on a tropical island. Now we know. It’s been a great adventure and we’ve learned a lot about what we do and don’t want in a place to live. So the search continues. Next year? We’re leaning toward Europe, especially around the Mediterranean. But anywhere is possible.

So that’s it for this year’s blog. Thanks for following along. I’ll add one more post just before we leave again in November or December 2010 to let everyone know our plans, and the address for the next blog.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Hawaiian Stopover

I am writing today from Maui, which makes a convenient (and warm) stopover on the way back home. We left Fiji Sunday evening and, thanks to the international dateline, arrived in Hawaii Sunday morning. Apparently time travel isn't so difficult afterall. What is difficult is sleeping on airplanes. We must have managed to doze some since the red-eye flight went fairly fast for us, but we both felt foggy for the rest of the day. We are staying in Kihei in a very nice oceanfront hotel with a comfy bed, air conditioning, and television, none of which we've had for the last four and a half months in Fiji. So for us this is luxury.

We've spent some time on the beach, of course, but sometimes Deborah is just as happy to stay in the room and catch up on her Home and Garden Television. We did manage to visit the excellent Maui Ocean Center (aquarium) and also the town of Lahaina, which features many galleries showing mostly bad tourist art. Yesterday we took a long walk on the beach down to Wailea and strolled through some of the fancy hotels we couldn't possibly afford. They were shooting a movie on the beach in front of one of them and Deborah spotted Jennifer Aniston walking through the lobby. I looked up too late and only saw the back of her; however I can verify that it did indeed look like Jennifer Aniston's butt.

Maui lacks the exoticism of Fiji - in fact much of the developed west side looks like tidy but generic strip mall America, albeit with palm trees. Still, there is certainly something to be said for paved roads and level sidewalks. I'd like to see more of the wild areas of this island, but without a rental car or the inclination at the end of a months-long trip to spend large amounts of money on the many typical tourist activities, that will have to wait until our next visit.

Next up, in what will most likely be the last blog entry, I'll list our tip 5 likes and dislikes for Fiji.

Our regular taxi driver Ali gives us our last ride to the airport in Savusavu

Simoke (not smiling for photographs as usual) sees us off at the airport

Deborah uses elastic bandages as improvised compression stockings to combat thrombosis (they worked)

Our 19 seater that took us from Savusavu to the internation airport in Nadi, Fiji

Yellow Tang at the Maui Aquarium

Camoflage anyone?

Tulip or Jellyfish?

Beach between Kihei and Wailea

Whale season is just ending

The guy in the red trunks jumps on one end of the protruding part of the raft to send a kid at the other end flying.

Jennifer Aniston at the Four Seasons (or possibly Deborah)

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Goodbyes

Today was our last full day in Fiji; we fly out tomorrow afternoon. Deborah has been living up to her domestic goddess status by giving the house a final deep cleaning – with minimal help from me – even going so far as to remove all the furniture and other large items to the deck so she could clean every nook and cranny inside the house. She went to these lengths despite the fact that we probably won’t get a good referral from the homeowner no matter how spotless he finds the house due to his unjustified blaming of us for the death of his twenty-year old car’s engine. But we still feel taking first-rate care of the house as we originally intended is the right thing to do.

These last few days we’ve been saying our goodbyes to some of the many people we’ve met during our stay here. Mariam came over for dinner Thursday, which allowed us to return the favor for hosting us and feeding us her amazing curry a couple of months ago. We also had dinner at neighbors Steve and Iretta’s again last week. And we’ve been seeing our favorite market vendors, laundry lady, and restaurant proprietors for the last time. Simoke (I just learned I’ve been misspelling his name Semoko all this time) we still see on a regular basis, along with his ill-behaved but lovable dog Bonzo. Everyone keeps asking when we’re coming back, as if it is a foregone conclusion that we will. It could happen, especially as a stopover for a trip to New Zealand, which is on our list for sometime in the next two or three years.

For our last hurrah we ate lunch at the one “fancy” restaurant in Savusavu, where the lobster and seafood salad served in a papaya shell was probably the best meal we’ve had here – even better than the much loved duck curry we had again this week at The Sea View Café. There we exchanged contact information with the friendly managers who, knowing our fondness for their duck curry, wrote as a reminder above our name and address, “Duck Man.”