3/7 - Natadola Beach and Evening with the family

After lunch, I decided to venture out to the beach. Pio and Ratu highly recommended Natadola beach, one of the most beautiful white sand beaches on Vita Levu (Fiji's big island). The trip required a 45 minute bus ride, and then a 15 minute taxi ride to get there. Before heading to the bus station, I got my first taste of pushy tourism. I met a man ned Kai who told me that "there was no way to get to the beach for less than $50 dollars. He claimed that that it was really hard to find a taxi there (turned out that there were two waiting at the bus drop off), and that they would charge about $40 one-way (turned out to be $10, just like my host family had said it would...yay, couchsurfing!). Kai then went on to try to sell me several day-long tour packages for well over $150 dollars a day. Sigh...I really don't like being a tourist sometimes.

While waiting for the bus it began to rain. Hard. I began to question whether heading to a beach in the rain was such a great idea, but decided to take a chance on it. Based on my experience of tropical weather, the rain will come down in buckets, but it never lasts very long. This proved true. The sun came out again as the bus ride started, and shone amongst the sugar cane as we drove through the countryside. It was a bit hard to pay attention to the passing scenery, because, again like Central America, there was a movie blasting on the bus. It was one of those post-apocalyptic pastiches, with people using swords and bows and arrows combatting mutant monsters and trying to find a cure for a respiratory disease. Very silly. (The movie on the way back from the beach was even worse...a comedy with a white witch doctor, along with a black tribal king get thrown into the future in order to rid their tribe of a curse, and Benny Hill-like humor ensues when they encounter modern technology).

Upon reaching the bus drip-off, I was offered a cab ride by Abdul, a middle aged Indian man who had been running a cab along the beach route for over 20 years. He told me to sit in the cab with him. There was an older Indian man who had been going to sit in the cab. I was going to refuse, but Abdul insisted. It was only when we started moving that he told me that the older man was his father. I felt, yet again, marked as a over-privileged tourist.

Abdul agreed to come pick me up in time for the last bus back to Nadi, and I set off along the beach. Almost immediately it started raining. This proved to be a mixed blessing. I needed to take cover, but everyone who had been in the water also ran for the resort that was set up along the beach. They didn't return outside after the downpour, and I ended up having the beach to myself, except for two native Fijians, one who tried to sell me a horseback ride along the beach, and the other who tried to sell me jewelery.

The beach was beautiful, but I experienced a particular kind of loneliness on it. In part, I'm sure influenced by the limitless Oceanic landscape, and in part from my isolating positioning as a lone tourist, I began thinking about how much I really do value the friendships I've developed in my life, and about how much I really want to actively cultivate and appreciate them more. I really love you, all you wonderous people I have met on this crazy life-journey!

In the evening I did get the chance to sit down to a dinner cooked by another house-guest, a Japanese woman here through an English school with her 5 year old son. After dinner, during which I tried to learn a few Japanese phrases, my hostess and host sat and chatted with me. We got to talking about the social inequities present merely by my presence - why do I, simply through the luck of my birth, get to travel to her country, while she doesn't get to do the same as easily. She did visit the US recently, but described the difficult and expensive Visa process (it cost her $300 for a simple tourist visa, as well as having to be interviewed by the American consulate on her reasons for going...she also said that many people spend the $300, then are denied, and they lose the money). Note: American travellers don't need any visa to enter Fiji. In the end, however, inevitably the question of "what can we do about problems so big" came up, and neither of us had an answer. Shortly after I went to bed, tired and a bit saddened by the state of the world.