Taveuni, Part 2 - Vadewa Rainforest and Matei

Our second day in Taveuni included a return to Bouma National Park and, unfortunately, another taxi ride on the posterior punishing dirt road, although not for quite so far as the previous day. The objective this time was a guided half-day hike in the Vadewa Rainforest, which was to feature ancient village sites and bird watching. They told us we were the first tourists to take the hike since the cyclone and warned us the bird watching would probably be sparse because of all the damage. That proved to be true – we heard more birds than we saw – but we still enjoyed ourselves, traipsing through farmland first, past village ruins, into and out of old defensive ditches, and into the rainforest. After the hike we had some time to kill waiting for our taxi so we sat (on the ground, of course) and talked with our guide Rusi and some of the other residents of Vadewa, whose village marks the beginning of the rainforest hike.

The remainder of our day we spent poking around our home base of Matei, a small beachside town – if it can even be called a town – where a lot of expats (especially Americans) have built homes and put down roots. It’s a quiet place with a tidier, more affluent feel than most of the other places we’ve seen in Fiji. Even the dogs look healthier. We discovered the restaurant prices also reflect that relative affluence; no sign of the US$3 entrées we’ve grown accustomed to in Savusavu. Our accommodation in Matei was a wooden burre (traditional Fijian cabin) in the very friendly Tovu Tovu Resort. I'd call it a quiet place as well except for (a) the rooster next door who obviously had no concept of "dawn" or that crowing should be reserved for the onset of daylight, and (b) the fact that, like all establishments in Matei, it had to rely on it's own generator for electricity, which set the entire community to continually pulse with a gentle humming sound.

Tovu Tovu Resort

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The airy, light-filled dining area

Our hostess in Vadewa at the office for the Rainforest Hike.


A house in Vadewa Village

Our guide Rusi examines a cyclone-toppled tree in our path

Blake sits in the stone warrior's chair, used to scout the distance for invading tribes

Rusi makes a more convincing warrior suitable for the chair

Tree ferns

Rusi and Deborah demonstrate the use of the sacrifice stone

Taveuni, Part 1 - Lavena Coastal Walk

Taveuni is the third largest of Fiji’s 322 islands and is a four-hour ferry ride from our town of Savusavu. The ferry makes the journey just three times a week, always leaving at 6:00am, which required us to get up at a most uncivilized hour and walk for half an hour down our road in the dark to reach the dock in time to board. The sleepy crossing to the western shore of Taveuni was followed by a taxi ride to our accommodations in the town of Matei at the island’s northern end. From there we took another taxi down the eastern shore to the huge Bouma National Park and the Lavena Coastal Walk.

Taveuni was hit hard by the recent cyclone and, even a month later, there was evidence of this all along the road to Lavena. Huge piles of uprooted trees, broken branches, and other plant debris lined the road. Plantations were littered with fallen coconut trees. Some village homes were knocked off their foundations and still lay in crumpled heaps. Other houses near the water were completely swept away, leaving only their foundations. The road to Lavena became unpaved not far outside of Matei, but it was especially rough after the cyclone and resulting sea swells chewed it up further. After a butt-numbing hour-plus ride that made Deborah wish she was wearing a sports bra, we were ready for the 10km (6 mi) round trip coastal walk, which ended at a waterfall.

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The clouds light up at sunrise

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Deborah is very excited about going to Taveuni

View from the coastal walk

Homemade catamaran? I'm sure it's waterproof.

Mushroom Rocks

Suspension bridge for a river crossing

Tree ferns in a prehistoric looking landscape

The waterfall at the end of the trail

Sitting pretty. Deborah cools her heels.

Foraging

Yesterday we had quite the feast thanks to both Semoko and Deborah. Semoko provided some incredibly fresh and delicious fish he caught from his uncle’s boat the previous evening, plus greens he had plucked from the surrounding bush, plus cassava and plantains growing on his property. Deborah whipped the latter two items into a mashed-potato-type concoction that was quite tasty. She also cooked two types of pasta and a vegetable tomato sauce. Deelish.

Virtually all Fijians outside the cities seem to have some sort of garden, and many have domestic food animals also – particularly chickens and goats – but also ducks (as Deborah well knows), pigs and cattle (Semoko has five). But the Fijians are certainly great foragers as well. You often see them walking along the road with bags or bundles of bananas, papayas, pineapples, coconuts, various greens, cassava, dahlo (taro), plantains, or whatever else they’ve managed to harvest from the surrounding land. They also fish, of course, – sometimes with a spear gun – and some hunt wild boar, wild chickens, or even mongoose. (Semoko says mongoose tastes like chicken (naturally) but must be eaten hot or it smells funny). No, people don’t starve here. The abundance of foodstuffs growing all around plus the strong village culture are probably the reasons you don’t see any vagrants here on the island.

Of course, as I’ve mentioned previously, Semoko forages for his medicinal leaves as well, which Deborah has been diligently applying to that nasty boil on his back. She found a new use for feminine napkins also as they make terrific bandages for soaking up the puss from the wound. Semoko did take our advice and saw a doctor about his boil, and received some penicillin injections and antibiotic pills. I’m happy to report that his back is much improved.

Tomorrow we’re getting up before the crack of dawn to catch a ferry to the neighboring island of Taveuni, where we will stay two nights. Since we won’t be back until Thursday night, I probably won’t blog again until Friday.

Deborah Kills a Duck

Wednesday we returned to our frequent lunch spot The Sea View Café for duck curry, which is a special menu item. They offered it a few weeks ago also and Deborah enjoyed hers so much that a few days ago when she passed Dave, the friendly Indian proprietor, in the street she asked him when it would be offered again. He said he didn’t have any immediate plans to offer it, but a couple of hours later he tracked us down while we were picking up our laundry in town to tell us that duck curry would be on the menu for Wednesday. What this meant of course is that (a) we were obligated to have lunch at the café on Wednesday, (b) we would be ordering the duck curry, and (c) some unlucky duck would loose its life that same day as a direct result of Deborah’s craving.

Naturally, some poor creature must die whenever we eat meat, but there is seldom so direct a connection between us and our dinner as when it is killed specifically at our request. We don’t eat animal flesh that often, but when we do we eat mostly seafood and avoid eating factory farm animals – so common in the US – in favor of the organic, free range variety. But it is a safe bet that the duck we ate was running happily around in someone’s yard before Deborah personally gave it a death sentence. It may have even been one member of the flock of ducks we see most days toward the bottom of our road. It would have been interesting to count them before and after our lunch. The cook at the café came out of the kitchen to ask us how we liked the duck curry and to please let them know the next time we’d like to have it. But, as good as the lunch was, Deborah is not so sure she wants another execution on her conscience.

The Hidden Paradise Guest House and Sea View Cafe -

where ducks go to die

Religion

The missionaries descended on Fiji in the 1830s with an eye to convert the Fijians to Christianity, and were largely successful. That success was partly due to a strategy of converting chiefs, and partly due to the similarities between Christianity and existing beliefs of tabu (sacred prohibitions) and mana (spiritual power). One renowned exception was the Reverend Thomas Baker, a Methodist missionary in 1867 whose arrogance and cultural insensitivity led to his being eaten by his intended converts. Today 53% of Fijians are Christian, and a majority of those are Methodist. The Methodist church is quite powerful here, but there have lately been calls for greater separation of church and state.

Because of the large Indian population, who were brought here as indentured laborers in the late 1800s and early 1900s, 34% of Fijians are Hindu and 7% are Muslim. All the major religions have at least one national holiday including Easter, Christmas, Diwali Festival, and the Prophet Mohammed’s Birthday.

The churches are very basic buildings, or sometimes they just take up one floor in a commercial building, such as the one here in Savusavu which is above a Chinese restaurant. The most lively one is at the bottom of our road where the preacher uses a microphone and speaks with great fervor in Fijian, with frequent outbursts in English of “Praise God” and “Halleluiah” intermingled in his sermon. On Sunday mornings he can be heard from several blocks away. The Hindu temple just above town is easy to spot as it is painted very colorfully. I’m sure there is a mosque somewhere in town also, but it must be a modest one. In Labasa we saw a much more substantial one near Semoko’s village, and heard the regular calls to prayer over their loudspeaker. Religion can be really noisy.

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Stairs leading to the Hindu Temple

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The noisy church down the road from us

(God blew the roof off of this place in the recent cyclone)

All are welcome here (just on the other side of the security fence)

A Christian named Singh?

A muslim man (I presume)

The Dampness

It’s sunny today (well, this morning anyway) after a few very wet days. Previously most of the big rain showers have happened at night, but the past three days we’ve seen solid rain and wind. The humidity is bad enough here in normal times, but when it rains like that you really feel it. The bed sheets feel damp. The clothes hanging outside on the clothes line under the eaves never dry. The shoes I rinsed after kayaking four days ago are still soggy. Your beverage glass just drips with condensation. You can’t work the touchpad on your laptop because your finger is too moist. You try to draw and find the paper is so damp that your pencil barely leaves a mark. Your clothes smell musty. Your towels smell musty. The suitcases we stored under the bed smell musty. Everything inside the suitcases smells musty, even our passports and American money, which were showing signs of mildew. One of Deborah’s hats was growing mold on it. Even the walls feel sticky.

We do take steps to try and dry things and air them out when the sun is shining like it is today. We pulled the suitcases out from under the bed and opened them up out on the deck. Of course, not more than ten minutes had passed before Semoko’s dog had discovered these cozy new places to curl up and take a nap, as you can see in the photos below.

Deborah thinks the dampness is also contributing to her spate of illnesses, particularly those related to the ear, nose, and throat. It’s as if she has mold growing inside her head. The humidity isn’t helping her hair any either, which has a regrettable inclination to turn into a big frizz ball. She says she hasn’t had a good hair day since we arrived in Fiji. Occasionally she will blow it dry and comb it out to look like her normal glamorous self, but this only lasts an hour or two before it starts to frizz up and she has to once again pull it back and tie it off like some inconvenient hair scarf that’s stuck to her head. For me, the climate seems to actually improve my hair, giving much needed volume and fullness. But somehow I think that small benefit is unlikely to ever persuade Deborah to live full time in a tropical climate.

Does the puppy prefer Deborah's suitcase...

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...or Blakes?

(photo by Deborah)

Kayaking Photos

Our laptop has resurrected itself once again and therefore allowed me to get the photos from our kayaking trip onto the blog. Enjoy.

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It's a good thing I have a life vest on..

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...these waters are treacherously deep.

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Passage through the mangroves.

Coral beneath our kayak

More coral (not an alien)

What a cyclone can do to a boat house.

Eel

Broad tidal pools at low tide.

Mangrove tree

All the sea stars we saw were this bright blue color.

Lots of coral on the beach.

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Sea Cucumber (or possibly a turd)

Spiny Sea Star

Dead Cow

Latest additions to our shell collection.