by David Yeadon
At other times I’d set off for long walks on the narrow highway that serpentined around the coves and bays and when I was tired I’d hitch a lift back with whatever was going in the right direction. Once I rode with fishermen in the rear of an ancient truck, all sitting on the bare metal floor admiring their catch of large colorful fish and identifying them for me—a butterfly fish, a damsel fish, a goatfish, a blue-striped snapper, a rabbit fish, and a rainbow-hued parrot fish. All good eating, they assured me. Particularly when washed down with fresh kava from a communal tanoa bowl scooped up in cups made from halved green coconut shells that are marinated for a week or two in swamp water to give them their customary color and “reek.”
One of the older fishermen told me of the “good old days” when villagers would join together for regular fish dives, or yavayava.
“Much kava—much, much kava! In big tanoa bowls, sometimes four feet across, made of the vesi wood—very sacred tree. We prayed to our ancestors—the Vu—everything had to be done right. Very important ceremony. We prayed for our vine ropes—the walai, for the nets, and we prayed to the statue of Gonedau who watched over the dive. He was in a special boat—the bigger boats, the ladi, were for the fishermen out by the reef. And then as we pulled in the big nets and rowed in to the beach, we would pray that the nets would not break and that we would have a good catch for everyone in the village. Oh, it was so much noise and singing…lots of fish…lots of kava!”
The other men were nodding and smiling. There hadn’t been a real fish dive in a long time and they remembered the old days with relish. I was sorry to leave them.
“Vinaka,” I said, thanking them for the lift. “Vinaka,” came the collective reply out of wide-grinning faces.
Another time I rode with a thin and rather nervous Indian, owner of an “everything shop,” in Somosomo, the main village on the west coast and home of Fiji’s high chief, Ganilau. The Indian invited me in and showed me his wares piled high in a dark warehouselike store that seemed to go on forever in a damp, jungly gloom. Lots of cheap Naugahyde furniture, mounds of bananas, ripe tropical fruit and coconuts, bottles of Fijian rum, columns of cigarette cartons, enormous aluminum cooking pots, fishing nets, cheap stereo boomboxes and even cheaper pirated cassette tapes, big black and crudely welded cooking stoves, a table of secondhand books and magazines, racks of shapeless jackets, dresses, and trousers (also maybe secondhand, it was hard to tell), some glittery T-shirts adorned with Ninja Turtles and other Western-inspired instant images, a pile of just-caught fish in a huge enamel basin by the door, and—in prominent display—a miniature forest of bundled yanggona roots for kava making.
“Well—you seem to have thought of everything,” I congratulated the storekeeper, who followed me, rubbing his long, thin fingers, as I admired his remarkable range of offerings.
“Yes. Everything, I think. We are also having TVs next week. We should be receiving our first programs soon.”
“There’s no TV in Fiji?”
“Well, not until recently. The government allowed TVs for some very important rugby matches—World Cup matches—and now the people say they want some more.”
“It was banned before?”
“Well, the government said TV was not good for family life and interfered with the children’s education, you see. So…”
“How courageous of the government!”
He looked at me curiously.
“Just joking,” I said.
“Oh, yes, joking. Of course.”
He tried a bit of a laugh, but it didn’t come naturally.
A dear friend of mine in Suva who works with the blind in Fiji and other South Pacific islands would have described this as a distinct case of “optorectitus”—“an ailment where the optical nerve gets crossed with the rectal nerve and you end up with a shitty outlook on life.” The storekeeper did not seem familiar with the Fijian enthusiasm for laughter.
In fact, most Indians in Fiji have still not learned the easygoing, easy-smiling ways of the native Fijians. They seem to be far too busy running most of the businesses, worrying about their children’s education, and wondering how to grab a little more political power over a native population reluctant to relinquish any controls to “outsiders”—even outsiders who have lived here for almost a hundred years.
Ormond Eyre, owner of the tiny Maravu Plantation Resort near the airport, sympathized with the predicament of such outsiders. Descendant of an old part-European family of plantation owners on Taveuni, he still sensed some reluctance on the part of natives to see him as one of them.
“It’s subtle—never overt. And it’s something I’ve got used to. I’ve been off-island for many years—I was a steward with Quantas for a while. Did all kinds of things. Traveled everywhere. But I always wanted to come home and run my own hotel. Something this small—we’ve only got eight cottages—bures—done in the traditional style with palm-frond roofs—but it’s nicer that way. I don’t need—I don’t really want—any more. I get to meet everybody and learn about their lives. You’ve got to know when to say ‘enough’ in this life. If you don’t you’ll spend most of your time doing things you don’t really want to do for reasons you can’t remember—or understand.”
I enjoyed one of my best dinners in Fiji here in Ormond’s open-air, thatch-walled and-roofed dining room—pungent garlic prawns en croute followed by roast chicken with tarragon, stirfried bok choy and celery, and fried plantains in a Thai-flavored peanut sauce. Flaming banana crêpes, liqueurs, and Fijian folk songs sung by a local group playing guitars, ukuleles, and tambourines, brought the meal to a delicious close as the moon eased up over the volcanoes and bathed the rolling lawns in silver light….
But I hadn’t come for too much of this, I reminded myself the next day. Time to get out and find that family I’d been invited to visit by the young man in Nandi. See what really goes on behind the pastel-painted walls of the bure homes in the roadside villages. Time to experience Taveuni in the raw, so to speak.
The following day I passed a village market, a casual sprawl of rickety tables and blankets spread on the ground. In addition to the rainbow-hued mounds of just-caught fish, I saw baskets brimming with shiny pawpaws, mangoes, melons, pineapples, clusters of burgundy-red grapes, and great orange moons of halved pumpkins scooped out and ready to eat. On separate tables were the muscular, bulbous staples of yams, breadfruit, taro, cassava, rich purple dalo, and small wizened potatolike morsels whose name seemed to vary, depending on whom I asked. And of course the inevitable forests of bundled yanggona wrapped in torn sheets of the Fiji Times and awaiting the ritual pounding for innumerable kava celebrations.
Under a shady awning of sackcloth, an old and very fat woman clad in an enormous togalike dress was cooking morsels of fish in a cast-iron caldron bubbling with palm oil. I remembered all the warnings about this particular oil but bought a handful of pieces anyway, brown and crisp on the outside and soft as whipped cream within. It needed no seasoning, although, encouraged by the cook, I tried a sprinkling of hot pepper sauce and immediately wished I hadn’t. I stood with lips burning, eyes streaming, accompanied by the grins and soft laughter of onlookers.
“It’s too hot for you!” the large cook said, trying to suppress her amusement.
I tried to say something funny, but it came out more like an inebriated squawk.
That was too much for her. She collapsed in a great explosion of giggles and fell heavily onto her stool covered with a square of ancient tapa cloth that looked as though it had been polished by her generous buttocks for years. The ancient patternings of bronze, white, and black dyes had been reduced to subtle shadowy hues, and the once-rough texture of the inner mulberry bark from which the “cloth” is beaten, looked smooth as shot silk.
Unfortunately, she fell a little too heavily. The stool gave a sad groan, buckled, and with sudden and very final snaps, two of the bamboo legs gave way and sent the giggling cook sprawling across her pandanus-leaf ground mat, whose broad dimensions def
ined the size of her impromptu kitchen.
There was a sudden silence—and then a hullabaloo of hilarity. My temporary discomfort with the pepper sauce was abruptly forgotten. Everybody turned to watch the poor cook struggle to pull herself upright. She rolled and struggled but couldn’t seem to raise her generous bulk from the prime position. The laughter increased. Then she reached out for the table on which the huge caldron of oil was bubbling away. God, I thought, she’s going to bring the whole damned thing down on herself. The table was starting to tip as she used it to drag herself up; no one seemed to see what was about to happen—they were far too busy guffawing at her ungainly struggles. I jumped forward and grabbed the table before it finally toppled.
Churned by the rocking table, the oil spat and leapt. A few drops splashed my arm. I could smell singed hair and seared flesh. But at least she now had the leverage she needed and slowly raised herself up, still laughing. The squashed stool lay spread-eagled on the ground under the tapa cloth. She didn’t seem to mind. Instead she took one look at my smoking arm, scooped up a fistful of something greasy and gray from an ancient coffee tin, grabbed my wrist, and proceeded to plaster the rancid-smelling whatever-it-was over the reddening oil-burn marks.
It all happened so quickly I never really felt the pain or the burning. I was amazed by the speed of this apparently ungainly woman.
“Vinaka—thank you very much,” I said.
“No,” she said, still grinning but trying to be serious. “No—vinaka to you—you would now be covering all of me with this grease if the pot had fallen—vinaka.”
There was a ripple of echoed “vinakas” in the crowd. Someone patted my back; an old man stepped up, looked me in the eyes, and rubbed my unburned elbow as if it were a kind of good-fortune talisman.
“Bula, bula. You were very fast, sir. That was a very good thing for you to do.”
More mumbled agreement from the market crowd. I had suddenly been transformed from a foreign fool with a pepper-scorched palate into some kind of hero-of-the-day. All within a few seconds.
“Are you all right?” I asked the cook.
“Oh, yes—thanks to you.”
“What about your stool?”
“Ah—it was a bad stool. For a year it’s been creaking and wobbling. Now I can get a new one!”
The smiles and laughter began again.
One of the fishermen who had been standing off to the side behind his pile of parrot fish approached with an enormous specimen in his arms.
“This is for you,” he said shyly.
“What—oh, no. No, I don’t need any fish. Vinaka. That’s very kind of you, but honestly—I have nowhere to cook it—thank you for a very kind thought.”
He stood holding his fish and looking a little sad. It turned out that he was the husband of the cook and felt obliged to say thank you in the traditionally generous Fijian way of giving something of value.
The cook looked at him sternly as if to say, “That is not enough.” Then she bent down and picked up the beautiful old tapa that lay buckled over the crumpled stool.
“No fish. This is for you.”
She began to roll the tapa slowly.
“This would have been all burned too—just like me!” she said, grinning. “So now it’s yours.”
It was a superb piece of bark-cloth. Altogether different from the stuff I saw in Nandi’s tourist stores. Its stains and discolorations from years of use, and smoothed patches where the cook’s behind had rested for countless hours, made it even more authentic and precious. I was very tempted.
“No—honestly. I can’t accept this. It is very beautiful—but it belongs to you.”
Now she was the one to look sad.
“Listen,” I said, desperately trying to think of a way to avoid offending anyone. “Y’know what I’d really like…some more of your lovely fried fish. It’s the best I’ve tasted in Fiji. I’d like some of that—only without your special sauce!”
The crowd broke into raucous laughter and started applauding. This was all getting a little embarrassing.
“Is that okay with you?” I asked, hoping I’d said the right thing.
She looked at me, and then “into” me—deeply. (Fijians have a special way of focusing their eyes into your eyes that makes you feel as though they’re peering into your soul.) There was what seemed like a long, long silence. And then she laughed.
“I will make you some special fish. You will not need your dinner tonight.”
And she did. The cook and her husband filleted the large fish he’d carried over, cut the large steaks into small cubes, which she rolled in her flour mix (“My secret,” she whispered), and then deep-fried them in the still-bubbling caldron.
I left with enough golden brown fish pieces to feed the whole market and they were, as I knew they would be, utterly delicious.
And—she was right—I didn’t need dinner that night.
Snorkeling—I had to go snorkeling. Overcoming residual fears from the Ningaloo experience in Australia, I decided that as Taveuni had been proclaimed one of the top five diving areas in the world, there was no way I could avoid the experience.
I’d been advised to avoid the treacherous currents of Rainbow Reef and the “bottomless” chasms of the Great White Wall. So I hired a boatman to take me out to the benignly named Blue-Ribbon Eel Reef and swam along its shallow slopes, circling around a couple of fiercely striped (and very poisonous) lionfish, grinning at the fat-tomato clownfish that played among the swaying anemone, and chasing a pufferfish that grew ever larger as it propelled itself through the coral reefs with a tiny, almost invisible tail fin.
There were scores of gray and dark red bêche-de-mer among the explosions of coral. We know them by far less graceful names, of which sea slug or sea cucumber are the most familiar. Lovers of Chinese food will have seen them listed on menus in the more authentic restaurants and the Chinese themselves revere them as restoratives of sexual prowess. I can’t vouch for this particular quality and neither can I really recommend them as a memorable dish. Bland, colorless, gelatinous, and resembling floppy slices of dill pickle, they are quickly overwhelmed by other flavors at a Chinese banquet. Even when eaten along with minimal accompaniments I still fail to understand their appeal. And yet vast fortunes were made by the traders who visited here in the early 1800s to supervise their collection and curing. The “black-bêche” were considered the most valuable and formed the basis for a lucrative trade with the Orient.
These mature creatures, a round ten inches long, three inches thick, covered with warty bumps, and coated in a thick sticky goo, were harvested by Fijian fishermen from the reefs. Carried to shore in great straw baskets, they were split, boiled for a few minutes, and then smoked, sometimes for days, over green twigs and branches in a smokehouse, or vata. The results were shriveled leatherlike strips which were piled into sacks or baskets, each weighing around 140 pounds (a picul), considered to be a reasonable load to be carried on a man’s back. And off the trading ships sailed to Manila and other Oriental ports to sell these odd wizened creatures for ten to twenty times the cost of their processing.
There was only one problem with this seemingly lucrative trade. The Fijian chiefs began to hear of these enormous profits and became discontent with the paltry payments of the traders, usually in the form of iron implements, rusty muskets, and, as the whaling industry increased, the polished teeth of sperm whales (tabua). They were particularly incensed by the stinginess of the New England traders, who were notorious for hard bargaining and duplicitous deal making.
On one particular occasion in 1834 the chief of Ono Island reasoned that the sailing skills of his subjects were more than a match for those of the wily New Englanders and that there was no reason for him not to confiscate a trading ship and arrange his own export ventures with the Orientals.
So one warm September afternoon he sent his warriors to the smokehouse on the island, with orders to destroy it and club to death the whole Yankee crew. Ten men were
killed within minutes and it was only the shot from a single cannon on the trading ship, the Charles Doggett, that prevented the chief from realizing his schemes of easy riches and glory.
A similar attack occurred around the same time on the English brig Sir David Ogilvie. The Fijian chief, who was actually a guest on board, suddenly clubbed to death the unfortunate Captain Hutchins with whom he had been chatting on the quarterdeck. This was the sign for attack. Warrior canoes immediately sailed out from shore to complete the rout, only to be driven back by frantic musket fire from a terrified crew. The chief was shot as he sat in the captain’s cabin wearing Mr. Hutchins’s gold-braided hat.
It took regular visits by British and American men-of-war ships to subdue these occasional uprisings. Eventually better terms were offered to the angry chiefs and the trade continued, albeit on less friendly terms.
And there they were—the cause of all these problems—scores of fat, floppy sea cucumbers between the coral sprays, benignly oblivious to the battles that had once raged around these reefs, all for the sake of improving the sexual potency of already overpotent, overpopulated Asian nations.
In contrast to the gray anonymity of these sluglike creatures, the coral itself exploded in bouquets of rainbow colors and effervescent shapes: hard knotty clusters of polyps, delicate fanlike sprays of soft coral, bulbous mounds of brain coral, strange gardens of cabbage coral, the aggressive spikes of aptly named staghorn, fluffy sponges, and a dozen other less familiar species displayed in a welter of golds, jades, crimsons, blues, purples, and pinks.
Snorkeling is a very seductive pastime. No matter how many times or how many oceans I swim in, each experience reveals new wonders of form, color, and texture, new delights at the incredible variety—and intensity—of aquatic life. Even more so with scuba diving, although this time I erred on the side of caution and stuck with my snorkel mask and tube. I was disappointed with myself but gave in to the urge of self-preservation, even though the deep purple-blue depths of the cliffs and canyons below the surface reefs beckoned me with fleeting images of enormous groupers and lithe-bodied whitetip sharks.
