Wanderung 33

Suva is the capital of Fiji and is located on the southern side of island of Viti Levu, whereas Lautoka is on the northern side. Suva kind of runs up a hill from the harbour in Laucala Bay, and has a beautiful, lush environment because this is the rainy side of the island and it rains every single day of the year! We were hoping it would rain at night so that we could wander around Suva during the day of our visit, but as we approached very carefully through the lagoon in Laucala Bay, we clearly saw three distinct rainstorms between us and the main island.

We also saw at least two sunken ships in the bay, which reminded me that we had also seen a sunken ferry boat off the port of Lautoka the previous morning. One difference was that one of the wrecks at Suva had an oil-containment boom rigged to float around it. From that I inferred that it was a fairly recent wreck and they were trying to prevent leaking fuel or other fluids from contaminating Laucala Bay and the surrounding lagoon and coral reef.

Docking was delayed by a small, inter-island container ship, the "Max Schulte", from Singapore, ostensibly. They had to finish loading and put out to sea in order to free up the pier, so we docked about 1/2 hour later than scheduled.

But that gave us time for a leisurely breakfast before disembarking around 9:30. Since it was Sunday, most of the stores were closed although some had opened up for the cruise ship traffic. We were searching for a free Wifi hotspot, but in that we were disappointed because not even McDonalds had a truly free hotspot. We found that the Suva city library, a Carnegie-funded library in a very pretty old building, would have offered paid Wifi access, but it was unfortunately closed for Sunday. So no luck.

We did, however, find a Catholic church a short way uphill from there that was having a Sunday Mass, naturally enough. The folks there were very friendly and tolerant of our nosing around outside, even giving me a summary sheet on the sermon for the day, which was actually quite interesting. I was tempted to temporally convert to Catholicism so I could go inside to see the pretty stained glass windows, and hopefully hear those wonderful Fiji voices in a choir singing some songs, but that would have involved going to Confession, and that was unfortunately a deal-breaker for an old sinner like me!

We walked past a picturesque canal and pagoda. But as we were marching around in circles by this point, we decided to search for a city map to guide our walkabout. Unlike most ports, we could not find where to get one on the dock, possibly because we were so bedeviled by sellers of tours and knickknacks that we hustled right out of the port area and missed it. Also, Royal Caribbean clearly did not believe in offering maps of any kind of any of their ports of call to their passengers, so we were left floundering around even more than we had been in past cruises by the "not-to-scale" maps provided by Princess Cruises. Argh!

In desperation we stopped into a rental car agency and asked if they had a map, and they very graciously supplied us with a very nice map that they probably provided to their car renters. Unfortunately, they did not rent motorcycles, mopeds, or electric bicycles, which is all I would have been comfortable driving in Fiji because the traffic drives on the left side of the road as in much of the old British Commonwealth, and quite differently from the right-hand driving of the US, Canada, and mainland Europe.

But having the nice map made it clear that if we just continued past the government building complex and then past what looked like a rugby field,we would get to the Fiji Museum was in the park just beyond. Our port lecturer had mentioned that museum, so we set that as our target for the day and walked that way.

We finally fetched up at the museum, located at far end of a small park, and it turned out to be a wonderful example of the old-fashioned museum that has copious written commentary explaining the displays of artifacts. In the entrance hall (entrance fee 10 Fiji dollars), we marveled at a 1/3 scale model of the old Fiji war canoes, which were really BIG. I learned that the planks were carefully notched and fitted together with matching holes drilled in each adjoining piece so that they could be sewn together with the rope. Intricate work, for sure, and probably why the construction process took around 7 years for each one.

That entrance hall also had a take-goods-to-market kind of raft made out of a lot of pieces of bamboo lashed together. The amazing thing is despite all the work required to make one and despite the provision of a kind of cabin for shelter and a place for cooking meals on the rear deck, these ships were made for just one trip from the upland, interior villages where the main river begins, down the sinuous curves of the river to Suva or the other coastal towns where the marketplaces were located. That reminded me of the log rafts that were constructed on the Ohio/Kentucky frontier in the early days of the USA, and then floated down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. It was a one-way trip as the boats were broken up and the wood sold in New Orleans. The boatmen, by the way, took passage back up to Natchez, Tenessee, on the early steamers and then walked the Natchez Trace overland trail to return home to Ohio/Kentucky. Different country and century, but the same basic idea!

Passing through the gift shop located in the center of the museum, we explored two floors of galleries on the other side. That took me well over two hours, but I soaked up a lot about Fiji`s history in the process. One mysterious thing to me was that the first wave of settlers on these islands were the Lipeta people who were expert pottery makers. They continued making pottery over the centuries, but the designs on their pottery became simpler and finally the entire knowledge of pottery making died out completely in Fiji. Losing a clearly useful skill or craft like that over time is very mysterious to me as it seems clearly counter-intuitive, but it has happened in other cultures also.

In the late 1800s, people from India were brought over as indentured servants, having to work for 5 years in the sugar can fields to pay for their passage to Fiji, and they brought the Hindu, Moslem, and Sikh religions with them. Many stayed as free men after their indentures were up, partly because to return to India they would have had to indenture themselves as slaves for ANOTHER 5 years! I was amazed that this form of temporary slavery had continued in Fiji right up through World War I and was only finally ended in 1920. Unbelievable how recently such cruel, inhuman treatment had occurred. Unfortunately, strains between the Indian minority and the other Fiji people seem to have persisted to the present.

Passing back through the gift shop, we paused to look at the prints made on the mulberry-tree-bark pounded flat, which sounds to me like a very laborious process. I found a print of a dolphin done with a style and symbolism that reminded me of the artwork of the Australian Aboriginal people, and I just had to have that. Monika found a larger print of two thatched huts surrounded by an intricate pattern, and we both agreed that would be our second piece. Fortunately the large piece folded together like stiff, thick paper, so that it could be packed at the bottom of one of our suitcases and thus hopefully make the trip home with us safely.

We were both getting tired and hungry by this point, so at a gas station we bought a Coke (real sugar!) and cheese puffs to munch on before we walked back to the ship.

Regular gas cost 1.89 Fiji dollars per liter in Suva, or a little under $4 US per gallon, which explains why we saw so many fuel-efficient hybrid cars as we sat and ate our snack on the main drag through Suva. I counted 11 Prii or Insights compared to 29 non-hybrid cars as we were munching, which is a doggone high ratio of hybrids!

Instead of taking the Main Street back, after our snack we cut over a block and followed along a seaside esplanade that started in a park area and continued for a couple blocks. Walking just inside a sea wall gave us very nice views out over the big harbor area in the lagoon next to Suva, with the commercial steamships scattered about and our cruise ship at the far end where the container ship dock was located.

We were approached by a couple of local folks begging, and that surprised us as we had not experienced any begging at all at Lautoka. We both also felt that the vendors on the dock were much more aggressive and pushy than the more low-key vendors we had met in Lautoka, and those sales assaults continued for a couple blocks after the port entrance as we walked into Suva. Suva also featured those "sidewalk barkers" who engage you in conversation and then try to get you to enter a shop, which phenomenon was basically absent in Lautoka. Monika also found the aggressive taxi drivers trying to sell you a ride or a tour to be unpleasant, whereas to me they were just a nuisance. We walked for several hours in both Lautoka and Suva, but overall the walking experience was far more pleasant in Lautoka, which seemed to have more of a "large town" atmosphere compared to the "city" atmosphere of Suva.

We were a bit weary by the time we were back on board, but felt much better after a belated lunch in the Windjammer. Then we put our aching feet up in our cabin for the afternoon until it was time for supper with the folks. I later found a blister on one of my toes, which explained part of the ache! But the rest was just walking on a hard surface for 3 hours or so, which pounded our feet more than the trails we typically walk. We swapped stories with our table mates, but Linda took the prize for her story of a bus tour around Jamaica where she had observed one woman only wearing the bottom of a bikini, which I could easily imagine, but also one woman who was only wearing the top of a bikini, which I could NOT imagine. Norm then speculated that they were both just sharing one bikini swimsuit and switching off who wore which piece on different days, at which point the entire table just erupted in laughter. As Denise says, only half jokingly, if we keep this up, we may get thrown out of the dining room one of these days. But today was not that day, so we finished our meal and toddled off to our cabin for the evening.