Fijian Diaries.

Day 3
12:15pm
It has taken me this long to find an opportunity to get out my laptop and document my experience here in Fiji thus far. This might give you an indication of how busy it has been – or how lazy I am. I’ll attempt to cover, in a nutshell, how things have been.
Plane ride = quite good, though I had a screaming toddler in front of me, and when one’s Ipod has run out of batteries that thing can be the biggest pain in the eardrum. Something this trip has taught me is to never, NEVER, bring children with you on them. They are too young to appreciate the astronomical cost and luxury, they will monopolise your time, and they will limit your activities. Plus, they are hell on planes. Your nerves will be more frayed AFTER the holiday.
So, anyway. We got there and went and stayed at Novotel hotel the first night, as our resort was an hour and a half away by car and we landed in Fiji at about 6pm. I ordered room service. The icecream was fantastic. The shower was not. The air conditioning was beyond my comprehension. I had a bit of a sleepless night.
The next day we were roused at 7 by the parental types and went to have breakfast – and again I have learnt something about my constitution. It seems that a habit of getting up late and eating breakfast at about 2pm over these holidays has trained my stomach into not eating between the hours of 3am and midday. A luxury breakfast – baked beans, bacon, eggs, toast, the works – is quite a shock to the stomach and mind after such rigorous conditioning. The orange juice helped, though.
Then we boarded a bus for a very long, very hot bus ride to our resort. I regret to inform you that I slept for a portion of it, but for the rest I looked out the window with interest. Fiji is two things that Australia is not – green, and poor. The place looks like the artist got sick of all the other colours and determined to paint a landscape using nothing but green and blue – and I honestly believe if he wasn’t worried about realism he would have made the sky green too. The place is absolutely lush. Palm trees, sugar cane, endless rolling hills and fields, marvellous. Of course, Fiji is a poorer nation than Australia – I think their main sources of income are tourism (judging from the amount we had to pay) and sugar exports. However, it was a bit of a shock to glance at the houses we drove past and to see that by Australian standards, ninety-nine percent of them would have been called hovels. No doors, dilapidated roofs and walls, paint on the outside but rarely on the inside, outdoor fires, filth – the people keep themselves and their clothes clean, but the living conditions are appalling to imagine. Funny, then, that the people I have met so far are exceedingly happy. I suppose most of them were employed by the hotels to be just that – I shall have to wait and see what happens when we visit one of the villages.
To wrap this up – we got to the resort, absolute luxury, but most of the holiday goers are fat and/or old. The only kid around my age is, by an astonishing coincidence, exceedingly attractive. I suppose we’ll see what happens there. He did smile at me, so that’s something.
Got to my room, walked on the beach, read a book all the way through and slept that day and night away.
I am writing this at half past twelve, after waking up just in time to go get lunch. In five minutes I am being picked up by bus to go to this zip-line thing – apparently the largest flying fox in the southern hemisphere. Sounds like fun. I’ll write more this afternoon.
4:15pm
Well, that did nothing for me. I don’t know why, but it didn’t. Consisted of several zip-lines that went through the jungle to several different platforms. Everyone else seemed to get an adrenaline rush out of it – I just thought that it was rather a nice view. Oh well. The bit where the girls caught sight of a giant millipede was suitably funny.
This evening there is a ‘crab race’. Apparently you have to pick a crab and pit it against everyone else’s crab on a track. I am intrigued.
10.33pm
My crab lost. Sadface.

Day 4

12:09pm
Breakfast here is a sickening affair. Sausages, bacon, eggs, salads of all types, fried rice – for a stomach used to one piece of toast or two weetbix, it is particularly stomach-turning. I can never manage much.
Turns out that it was probably a good thing I didn’t fill up on scrambled eggs, though – as I needed the room to fill up on salt water. Today we went snorkelling. I probably ingested more salt water through my snorkel then I have in my entire life. Particularly amusing was the snorkelling guide – and it struck me how different things are over here. Back home, you would have had to sign documents promising not to sue, there would be strict guidelines, the works. Here, our warning/legal procedure consisted of “Don’t go too far to the left, and watch out for anything spiky, it’ll probably be poisonous.” Gotta say, very refreshing.
Despite my poor ability at breathing through the damned snorkel, we eventually got out into the thick of the coral and in no short order were investigating schools of fish, giant clams, sea urchins (spiky! Must be poisonous) and fish that looked like the bastard offspring of a lizard and a vacuum cleaner.
Out there, surrounded by the teeming, vibrant life, with the sound of the waves echoing around (and sometimes inside) my snorkel, I felt suddenly and intensely close to God. If he does exist, he’s in the reefs. Indeed, this entire trip has made me feel a lot more spiritually aware. I think it must be the people. For example, we were driving through a decrepit, tumble down village the other day, where the inhabitants were all living in poorly constructed shacks. Their church was the same, and the sign outside read “The Church for those who know their God is great and will do great exploits.” And everyone we saw was smiling. I cannot help but be impressed by the prevalence of the faith here. Every village has a church. Perhaps here God is stronger. His enemy, Technology, is certainly absent.
Anyway, now I have lunch and apparently a trip to some hot springs. Strangely, all that salt water has worked up my appetite extremely.
10:03pm
I didn’t end up going to the hot springs. I fell asleep and slept till dinner. Holiday life is bringing out the sloth in me.
It is interesting how many Indian people holiday here. I’m not sure why, but something like forty percent of the guests are Indians. My mother tells me that many Indian families came here to work on the sugar cane when the industry took off – they had to, she asserts, as Fijian people have a reputation for extreme laziness. I’m not sure how true that is, but it results in dinner usually being some form of curry. For someone like me with finicky eating habits...
I am worrying my mother immensely. She can never hold her tongue about my weight – I should be admitted to hospital, I’m so undernourished, no wonder I’m tired all the time, why don’t I go try the beef and potatoes. It is a sad fact that I often find it impossible to defeat my tastebuds. They are used to highly processed fodder.

Day 6
1:39pm
Yesterday was too full for me to find time to write, but I’ll type it out here.
We went to an island to watch dancing and firewalking and stuff like that. I have encountered an amusing phenomenon called ‘Fijian time’. Two minutes in Fijian time is about twenty minutes Australian. They take so long to get anywhere and to do things, but they don’t seem to mind.
The firewalkers were very impressive – walking over hot rocks that then had water poured over them to prove their heat. The dancing was also quite neat, and the girl in the hula skirt who flung the knives around was breathtaking. I did not enjoy the boat ride back from the island around midnight, surrounded by drunk, middle-aged holiday goers. I did see a sea snake, though.
So, that was all yesterday. This morning I had a massage. My muscles feel like water – truly fantastic. I think my mother actually managed to fall asleep as they were massaging her.
Tonight is New Year’s Eve. There are to be fireworks, apparently. I’ll have to think of some resolutions.

Day 7
5:36pm
Today is New Year’s Day, and as 2010 hit the coast of Fiji I was being informed by my brother that he hates me, that the entire family hates me, that I’ll be booted out of home in a few months, and that every friend I have ever had or have hates me or will hate me. Happy New Year! Ah well. I thought of some resolutions, too. I’ll write them up later.
This will be my last entry as we are waking up at 5am tomorrow in order to catch a plane back to Australia.
I suppose I’ve figured out a few things about holidays – this being my first time away from home soil, so to speak. I’m not sure I enjoy travelling – or at least, staying at this kind of resort. It seems to attract two types of people – the middle aged who need variety in their boring lives or parents who want to treat their kids. I fall into neither category and thus probably didn’t enjoy this kind of place as much as I could have. A week is a long time to be away from one’s busy teenage social life.
Still, it was certainly an experience – snorkelling, sunsets, the mildest curry I’ve ever tasted – and I am grateful to my parents for taking me on this, the last year I’ll spend at home. Though when I heard the cost, a part of me would have preferred the cash.