Wanderung 33

Wow, there are a lot of small islands fairly close together in the main area of Fiji! Shortly after dawn we heard a powerboat approaching the Explorer of the Seas, and rightly guessed it was the pilot boat. We managed to rouse ourselves and get quickly out on our balcony (not fully dressed!) to take pictures of the pilot boat nosing up to the port side of our ship and dropping off the pilot.

After the pilot boat roared off again, our ship started threading its way along what seemed like almost one truly huge reef-fringed lagoon with many large and small islands scattered across it. Tiny white lighthouses on white stilts marked the points of parts of the reef, I think, and our ship threaded its way around them southward to the main island of Fiji upon which both Lautoka and Suava, the capital, are based.

When we arrived in the commercial dock area of Lautoka, the local folks where ready to great us with songs, dancing, and vendor pavilions set up along the wharf. This expression of hospitality did not, however, appear to be forced or artificial, as during our entire time walking around Lautoka we repeatedly encountered friendly strangers in the stores and marketplaces who would greet us with "Bula", the Fijian word for "Hello", and be far more friendly than one would normally expect, and go out of their way to help us. Now some of that was due to us being from the cruise ship and giving the community and economic boost, I'm sure, but really not all of it. I still remember the 8-year old boy in his school uniform who both said "Bula" to me with a big smile, but also gave me a "high five" hand slap as we passed on the street. And the children in general were curious about us, but overtly friendly rather than being afraid (and those children were cute as buttons, by the way!).

But I'm getting ahead of myself. After over an hour on deck watching the ship approach Lautoka, we were already hot and sweaty even though it was just shortly after dawn, which shows exactly how strong the sun is in the tropics. We discussed our limitations, and when we checked down at the Shore Excursion desk for a map, which they did NOT have, we caved in and bought a shuttle bus ticket to get into town with a minimum of sweat. You CAN walk from the commercial dock into Lautoka, I hasten to add, and it is less than a mile to the edge of town and another half a mile to the center of town. BUT you must strongly consider whether the sun is shining and what your heat tolerance is when deciding whether to walk or not.

In the event, we took the non-air-conditioned shuttle bus for the 9-minute drive into the center of town. We had a couple items on our agenda to do while we wandered around town to get a feel for it, and first off the bat was finding an ATM to get Fiji dollars. We found one just down the block and around the corner from Jacks, which was our drop-off point. We successfully got 80 Fiji dollars, but it cost us 95 as a 15 dollar service fee was added on to the transaction. Ouch!

Still, that transaction gave us some pocket money (80 Fiji dollars were worth about $40 US) to wander around the stores and craft markets and purchase what we needed. Monika found a nice set of bracelets in an Indian-run store that seemed to specialize in fancy Hindu-type dresses, wedding announcements, and such like. I found those dresses to be spectacularly pretty, although I'm sure that they were mostly for special occasions like festivals. Coincidentally, we visited Lautoka on the Hindu day of Diwalii, the Festival of Lights, which is celebrated by many folks descended from the Indian laborers imported to work the sugar cane plantations right around 1900. Thus the large array of beautiful clothes in most Indian stores.

We also wanted to find insect repellent, which turned out to be rather difficult to find. We found some at the second grocery store we searched, but it was shelved with the rat poison and heavy-duty insecticides, which I would not have expected. We also later found it at a slightly higher price at a drug store, so if you need bug repellant in Fiji, looking for it in a drug store is your best bet.

It turned out Lautoka has two main shopping streets that run parallel to each other one block apart through the downtown district. The "Upper class" street has the nicer stores and has the old sugar cane narrow-gauge railroad line running down its median. As the railroad line is lined by graceful palm trees, the overall appearance of that street is very nice.

The "Lower class" shopping street has many more of the bazaars, which seemed to me to be the Fiji equivalent of the Euro stores in Germany or the Dollar stores in the USA, which are always fun to browse through because you just never know what you might find, and you can be fairly certain the price will be rock-bottom. This was that street that had several ATMs as well, one of which we had used. We also enjoyed a rather strange looking Prius and several ovehead signs, of which "Venom Coffee" was the most memorable.

Near the far end of the business district, I asked one of the bazaar employees for expoxy glue, which I needed to reinforce my clip-on sunglasses , and she directed me to an old-fashioned hardware store across the street. Sure enough, I found the 2-part epoxy glue I needed, but I also had a nice conversation with the other guys while waiting in line to check out. That's the type of friendliness that had no possible ulterior motive as far as I could discern, and that's one thing that would make me want to return to Fiji because that just doesn't occur that frequently around the world!

We also found a Mercado and enjoyed looking at all the odd food that was being offered for sale.

Despite sticking to the shady side of the street whilst doing our walkabout and occasionally ducking into an air-conditioned building, we were both getting heat stressed and decided to take the shuttle back to the ship for lunch. I had noticed a lot of hybrid cars on the streets, so while waiting for the bus I simply counted how many Toyota Prii or Honda Insights were in the traffic mix. In 6-10 minutes , I counted 40 non-hybrid cars and 8 hybrid ones, for a ratio of 5:1, which means about 1/6 of the car fleet was hybrids. I suspect gasoline is VERY expensive on Fiji, but the only gas station we passed did not post any prices (always a bad sign in my experience!).

Although we had the best of intentions to take the shuttle back into Lautoka later that afternoon , it took over an hour to really cool down, and we just couldn't face getting hot all over again so soon. Instead, after I glued my sunglasses , we chilled out on our balcony, which was quite comfortable in the shade, and listened to the Fiji music being played by groups on the dock. The music is hauntingly beautiful , reminding me of the Polynesian music we have heard in Hawaii, and the choral numbers were absolutely stunning in how well their resonant voices melded into a chorus. Try to find some Fiji choral music if you get a chance and you should hear what I mean.

At dinner that evening I found a partial explanation of why the Fijian people can sing so beautifully. Gretchen had taken a tour of a modern Fijian village that day, and she reported that the children all start learning both English as a second language and singing, starting in first grade! That also explained why so many Fijian folks spoke English competently, including the salesman at a small electronics store who explained that the small (9"x9") solar cell assemblies he was selling for 230+ Fijian dollars would power an LED light bulb that he was also selling for 4-7 hours if you had a large enough battery pack to store an all-day charge. He informed me that quite a few of the outlying homes were using small solar cell arrays for producing lighting in this manner. That made sense although the price seemed a bit high for such a small array of cells.

After dinner we returned to our balcony and watched fireworks displays on the shore where the Indian folks were celebrating Diwali, the Festival of Lights, as our ship very carefully worked its way back out of the lagoon with its coral reef. Taking pictures of fireworks is never easy, and I found that taking pictures of fireworks a mile away with a 1-2 second exposure from the deck of a moving ship was quite a bit harder! But it is not often that you get to watch fireworks all along a coastline, while cruising by. But the show reminded us of watching fireworks from surrounding towns on July 4th when we were camped in Mesa Verde National Park, another great memory. After our ship had edged out to sea, we just curled up with a cryptic crossword puzzle until I collapsed and starting snoring around 8:30 p.m. that evening.