It began early, on a Qantas 747 still in Australian airspace. As the plane turned right and headed for Fiji the captain announced that he would be giving us the footbal results; he then reeled off a lot of NSW rugby scores.
Thus began a week of wonderful cultural confusion. Whenever we were lulled into thinking ourselves totally at home - Australian accents all around the pool, tea-making facilities in the room, Vegemite for breakfast - something would happen to jar us out of our complacency. I'm not complaining; if travel really does broaden the mind then it must be as a result of the tension between the real and the apparent, the expected and the actual.
I won't bore you with the plane flight, a quite bearable four and a half hours. I was splashed with iced water and hot coffee and I waited for the trifecta, most likely room-temperature red wine, but it didn't happen. Qantas deal very efficiently with disabled passengers so we charged to the head of the various queues at Nadi airport, then spent an hour sitting on the bus in the sticky tropical night waiting for everyone else. The first tip for any wheelchair-user contemplating a trip to Fiji is to investigate putting the trip together for yourself rather than through a tour company, since the transfers are all in buses. Taxis, many of them station-wagons, are plentiful and relatively inexpensive - I understand that the trip from Nadi to Yanuca Island, which takes almost an hour, costs about F$20.
We arrived about midnight, I think. At this stage the Ashbys were totally confused about practically everything. My watch was still on Melbourne time and Derrick had misheard the captain and only put his forward one hour. We tipped the porter far too much, took ages trying to work out how to get the electric jug to boil and had toasted club sandwiches for supper or whatever meal it was.
The next day, after sorting out the confusion about exactly what time it was and whether breakfast was still on (it wasn't), we explored. Initially we were just looking for something to eat, but when we found our way to the appropriate restaurant blocked by a flight of steps we wandered along what seemed like miles of verandahs until one of the staff rescued us and took us down in the goods lift. The Fijian is a vast establishment, occupying the whole of a 105 acre island linked to the mainland by a causeway. Every inch of the island has been landscaped and is subject to constant, thorough maintenance - we were present when a supervisor spotted a weed and you didn't have to understand Fijian to follow his remarks to the outdoor staff responsible! There are no mosquitoes and hardly any flies, the result of regular spraying of any spot where they might breed. The resident wildlife consists of very cheeky mynah birds and a family of dear little mice living in the rolls of matting in the Fijian Handcrafts shop - located, I hasten to add, a long way from the kitchens.
The Fijian offers just about every imaginable outdoor amusement and a few unimaginable ones like Ratu's Grog Bowl - free pre-dinner kava on the lawn. It is completely self-contained; when we snapped the back off my twenty-year old wheelchair (yes, I know, I wouldn't drive a car in that condition) the maintenance department had it welded back on in twenty minutes. Every so often the lights would black out for a few seconds - I noticed that the rooms were provided with candles just in case.
Much of the site is taken up by a golf course and other sporting facilities, but the hotel buildings sprawl all along the waterfront. They are linked up by covered ways and ramps (for the service trolleys but handy for wheelchairs). However, the hotel is basically on two levels, the Lagoon wing which is on the beach and the Golden Cowrie, Ocean and Reef wings which are on what you might loosely call garden level. We found we had to decide at which end of the resort we were going to spend the day and plan accordingly.
Our room was in the Reef wing, very conveniently located close to the Takali Terrace restaurant, bar and pool. Of course we had a magnificent view - there isn't a room in the place which doesn't have a magnificent view. The building was carefully sited so that the terrace outside the room was sheltered from the wind that came up every afternoon. In the evening you could step outside into a scented tropical garden and look up at Orion directly overhead, the stars not obscured by city haze.
The Fijian does have a disabled room, in the Golden Cowrie wing. It was occupied by a lad recovering from a severe accident; I gathered from speaking to his mother that the handrails were in the wrong places and it had a bath instead of a shower, a common state of affairs in hotels everywhere. I was quite happy in an ordinary room. There was plenty of space to manoeuvre a wheelchair, even in the bathroom. All we had to do was put the metal stool from the terrace in the shower and hope for a bathmat.
The bathmat problem was all part of the Great Housemaid Confusion. Even in the best-run hotel Basil Fawlty's influence will be felt somewhere; at The Fijian it was in the Housekeeping Department. The maids had a real knack for turning up at the wrong time. If you wanted to have a lie-in there would be a knock on the door at 9.30 am; on other days we would return to the room at 2.30 pm to find the room still not done - the knock would come the minute Derrick had stripped off his bathers and started looking for his pants. This would at least give us the opportunity to ask for more towels. Used towels and bathmats were always taken away but not always replaced, although it must be said that by the end of our stay we had three bathtowels. At night the bedspread was removed but there was no guarantee that it would be found the next morning, despite the fact that there were really only three places where it could be hidden.
Any confusion in the food and beverage area was more likely to be cultural. On our first night I ordered pasta and salad for dinner. The waitress (the only really surly Fijian we encountered, definite Ronnie Barker material) muttered something about dressing. I replied in the affirmative and she glowered at me. What type of dressing? "French," I said and then rather stupidly asked whether it would be American French or Australian French, by which of course I meant vinaigrette. I quickly cancelled the conversation - she clearly thought I was raving. Sure enough the salad, a sort of salad compose with more vegetables than lettuce, was covered in the mysterious white concoction which Americans are pleased to refer to as French dressing. I could have had Italian, Blue Cheese or Thousand Island. The staff must be quite accustomed to Australians looking blank when asked what sort of salad dressing they want, then sniffing suspiciously at what emerges from the kitchen.
On the whole the food was standard international hotel food. The best feature was the excellent bread and pastries, made on the premises; the worst, surprisingly enough, was the fish. We had expected lots of fish on the menu and we got it - all walu (a variety of mackerel). Walu steaks, walu fillets, fried walu, smoked walu, steamed walu, marinated walu in coconut milk. If you wanted anything else you had to go out and catch it yourself.
Getting plain sandwiches wasn't easy. They always came toasted with chips and coleslaw. The American Style Tuna Sandwich exhibited a minor cultural confusion - the bread was buttered, something Americans would never do.
I think that traditional Fijian food might be rather uninteresting, which would explain the high consumption of tinned corned beef among the local population (not at the hotel, of course). Taro looks like potato and tastes like cardboard. On the other hand kava, the national drink, is certainly interesting - for want of a better word. It looks like muddy water. Derrick describes the taste as being like beer aged for three years in an oak cask; all I can say is that it tastes like a drink made out of dried roots, with a surprisingly anaesthetic aftertaste. It is evidently good for what ails you in small quantities (the Fijians say "The more you drink, the younger you stay!"), but overindulgence leads to intoxication.
We went to the weekly lovo feast, featuring fish and various meats wrapped in leaves and cooked in a pit of hot rocks. (Tickets for the feast were F$24 for adults and for children under 12 prices were on a sliding scale according to the child's weight - yes, they actually popped them onto scales and weighed them!) The meat was certainly succulent, but no better than what you would expect of a good spit-roast. The best part of the meal was the spectacular variety of salads. The American couple at our table thought these were typical Fijian dishes, but then they were really very confused.
I'm not sure that they even knew which country they were in; it took me a while to realise that they had no idea why I should be insisting that I thought Fiji was perfectly safe for tourists. It did not seem appropriate to raise the question of the moral disapproval expressed by some of our friends, including people who seem to have no qualms about holidaying in Bali or even Queensland.
The Fijians are very conscious of the damage which the coups have done to the tourist trade, their second largest industry after sugar, and everyone seems to be engaged in a concerted public relations effort (I refer of course to the ethnic Fijians - I'm not so sure about the Indians, who seemed rather subdued). In its simplest form this involves bellowing "Bula!" - the all-purpose greeting - at any tourist in sight; the more extreme manifestations take the form of speeches about the joys of traditional Fijian life and exhortations to tell all your friends and relatives what a wonderful time you've been having.
Like all the rest of the world, Fijians are nostalgic for a past that probably never existed. The definition of traditional culture varied, but never included the old pagan religion - the Fijians are devout Christians, mostly Methodists. We were constantly reassured that they were no longer cannibals, an ancestral vice of which I think some people are secretly rather proud.
The pre-Christian Fijians do seem to have been a savage lot. At the Ka Levu Centre, an excellent museum and cultural display, we were shown an impressive collection of specialised killing implements, not to mention a non-lethal wife-beating club. The chief would sleep in the centre of his bure (thatched hut) in case anybody tried to assassinate him by thrusting a spear through the wall; his wives slept all around the walls! Slaves were buried in the foundations of new buildings for added spiritual strength. By the end of the guided tour I began to feel considerable admiration for the courage of the earliest missionaries, one of whom was in fact eaten.
Modern Fiji is of course quite civilized, but the majority of the population appear to be unsophisticated rural people living in Third World conditions. Among native Fijians the traditional social structure of commoners ruled by several layers of chiefs is apparently still more or less intact, although it would presumably be under threat from the development of an urban middle class.
Cocooned in our luxury resort we met nobody with whom we could discuss sociology, much less politics, but we eventually formed the view that the coups were probably more to do with the old order resisting change than with racial conflict. We began to think this way quite early, after going to a Fijian handcrafts demonstration given by a motherly lady who lectured the tourists on the disintegration of the traditional Fijian way of life, a process which began with people sitting on chairs instead of the floor and which was now well advanced with the modern fad for secondary education -the children leave the villages to attend high schools in the towns and who knows what they get up to? The women work and don't obey their husbands, they even insist on eating with them; the men on the other hand are a lot of lazy goodfornothings who spend their time getting drunk on kava... No wonder they've got problems.
We paid $8 each to visit Nadroumai Village, located ten minutes away from the hotel up a twisting unmade road. The village was built on the side of a hill, very scenic but difficult for the wheelchair (which our guide insisted on pushing lest the chief think him discourteous to the guests). The housing varied - apart from the chief's traditional-style bure - from a solidly constructed little place complete with a rainwater tank to structures which, although in good repair, looked to Australian eyes like chooksheds. There were in fact no chooksheds, as the chickens, the pigs and the dogs ranged freely all over the village. The chickens are kept for consumption, so it doesn't seem to be a matter of concern where they lay their eggs.
The village is dominated by a magnificent concrete church, which would not look out of place in an Australian country town. It has its own electricity supply. There is no other power, although our guide's mother, who was apparently not in good health, pays $15 a month for bottled gas - everyone else cooks out the back on wood stoves. Clothes are washed in the river and water is brought up to the village in 44 gallon drums. I began to see why the young girl in the hotel handcraft shop had trouble believing that I did my own housework.
Some of our party were clearly concerned that the villagers were being exploited by the tourist trade. They need not have worried. Before we left the chief's spokesman waved at us the money which we had just paid for souvenirs ("You don't have to buy anything, but it's all cheaper than in the town....") and thanked us for our custom - it seems that the church was built out of money extracted from tourists. The money goes to the chief, a well-preserved 87 year-old who smokes roll-your-owns made out of tobacco he grows himself, who arranges for it to be spent for the benefit of the community. I worked out that they must make the equivalent of two labourers' wages a year out of tourists, without too much trouble; twice a week they tidy up, put the babies in their best clothes and assemble the village song and dance group.
The villagers appeared genuinely to enjoy our visit, particularly when coaxing the tourists into joining the dancing. The singing was magnificent. We were told that Fijians, rather like the Welsh, are naturally good singers with an instinctive ability to harmonise and no need of formal training.
The people we met, by and large a physically very imposing-looking lot, were charming and friendly. We had no way of knowing what they thought of the political situation; people who were capable of that sort of conversation clearly had no intention of risking it - we had enough trouble even discussing the weather, sensing a reluctance to admit that anything at all was less than perfect. Doubtless most people are a bit confused about what is going on. For example, Fiji may be a republic but they still have the Queen on their money.
Leaving was rather a wrench, but there was plenty of confusion to distract us. The bus driver was particularly stupid. He nearly left the wheelchair behind, having refused for some reason to put it in the luggage compartment, then he left early and nearly left some of the passengers behind. The drive to Nadi gave us a daylight view of the countryside, much more closely settled than in Australia, a patchwork of smallholdings. It is quite strange to see sugar cane being grown in little one acre plots. Along the way were bus-shelters donated by community groups or by somebody's widow in memory of her late husband, as well as mosques, Hindu temples and Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Halls.
Nadi itself, all shut up because of the Sunday observance laws, did not appear very impressive. The climate was humid, nothing like as pleasant as down on the coast, although the Mocambo Hotel was of course air-conditioned. We never did find out whether 'Mocambo' was a Fijian word - it doesn't appear to be from the spelling. The Fijians use the Roman alphabet in a slightly different way from us; 'b' is pronounced 'mb', 'c' is pronounced 'th' and 'd' is pronounced 'nd' to give but three examples.
At 4 am we received our wake-up call, only to be told to go back to sleep. The plane was delayed in Honolulu, for fourteen hours as it turned out. We considered going down to town to dodge the souvenir-sellers - who will reputedly accost you in the street, ask your name, carve it on something within seconds and then try to force you to buy the object - but the weather was too sticky. When we finally checked out we enquired about our pre-paid transport. The management made obliging noises and suggested we get into the station-wagon taxi which was about to take two other 'Qantas delayed' passengers to the airport. This was much less bother than a bus except that on arrival, the other couple having disappeared, the driver demanded the fare - fortunately only $2!
By 2 am Melbourne time we were lined up in Customs behind a lot of Indian passengers (all of them much more warmly dressed than the Australians who were still in their holiday t-shirts) who were being relieved of huge quantities of vegetables and curried substances. We confessed to having mixed with farm animals but considered that our shoes were clean - nobody gave any thought to the wheelchair tyres.
Next time we'll be better prepared. We'll leave the beachtowels behind (the hotel supplies them) and we'll take a roadworthy wheelchair. We'll load the film into the camera correctly (I'm not going to elaborate on that) and we'll be ready with our request for the strolling serenaders in the Golden Cowrie Restaurant. Above all we'll be better read on Fijian history, geography and politics. I'm not sure, though, that we'll get any greater enjoyment out of our holiday than we did this first time, soaking up the confusion along with the sun.
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