Versive

There's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home....holy shit Todo, it worked! This still doesn't look like Kansas though.

My ruby slippers weren't even needed, and in any case I saved the dressing-up for the weekend - and home is what I'm calling New Zealand for the time being, in case you were wondering. Checking out Nelson as a place to live and even a poorly paid job with less than proper hours would pay about three and a half times the weekly rent needed for a flat in the city centre, including in most cases all the bills and often such bonuses as internet access! Looking pretty good so far, I must say.

It's really so very lovely this country, and I would dare to say in some ways Kiwis are as friendly or even more so than the Fijians, less likely to cheerfully engage you as you walk down the street perhaps, but ask them for anything at all, from a helping hand with directions to specialised advice, they really do excell.

I wondered idly what the origins of the country's name was the other day, in the way I did as a kid when first properly cogitating over such ubiquitous names as New York and New Jersey, and as you might already know you clever, clever things, the original Zealand is the largest island of Denmark back up over the equator in Europland, although I believe most of it is now known as the United States of Euwwwww.
It was practically news to me that Denmark had islands but hey, it does, and Zealand is where Copenhagen sits which is of course the capital. I knew that without even looking it up, and you'd only have to jab me once or twice with pins to make me admit I double checked.

In Fiji, I had spent an inordinate amount of time at Nadi airport for one thing and another, and I found that I was worryingly familiar with the place as I waited to go `home`; and seeing as we're vicariously back there for a paragraph or two I can share the explanation for something that baffled me and I forgot to explain.

The profusion of overly effeminate men in that country is weird, weird with a capital F, in fact. There is not a strong gay community there as first I thought, far from it in fact - it is one of the serious sources of tension in the culture with the torture and murder of known gays cropping up in the news and public life a few times every year. Nasty old business, but anyway; the supremely camp gentlemen seen all over the place, especially often in airport reception parties and resort kitchens, are called fa'afafine and are men who in childhood `choose` to be raised as female, in many cases highly encouraged, persuaded or coerced into to doing so by parents who have usually had male children, and few or no girls.

A fa'afafine, like a daughter by tradition, custom and, arguably, genetics, will take care of their parents in their old age when all their sons are presumably off raising their own families, drinking, philandering, playing or at least noisily bitching about sports and farting in a conspicuous and time-consuming fashion, as all men are biologically compelled to do, as we all know.

Unlike Hijras in India there are, as far as a little internet research can tell me, no eunuchs among the fa'afafine, and few or no of the intersex designation, which is what we all basically think of as hermaphrodite although technically that's rather inaccurate.

All in it's a bit confusing yet strangely interesting as it certainly puts a tick in the `novelty` section, and I just had to share so I don't forget it myself. The best way to learn is to teach, as I believe they say.

I made it through the evil and sinister airport at Nadi with their typical nazi-like drinks policy (you can't take even sealed unopened water through the security area but you can buy as much as you like on the other side, I wonder how many zeroes that generates in global sales revenue) and found their expertly concealed entrance to the international departures wing cunningly screened from almost all view on both sides by office dividers, and flanked by vibrantly coloured stores selling overpriced books, production-line ethnic carvings, soft toys and all the usual merchandising tat.

International departures at Nadi international consisted, in fact, of one standard width door in a side wall without label; an overhead sign placed an appreciable fraction of a mile away down the terminal, and another slightly ambiguous one (saying `Planes/People` or `Humans/Animal Skin Containers/Minerals Less Than 1000kg Or Smaller Than A Big Box Whichever Is Lesser` or something equally thought-provoking) pointing roughly towards the murky portal from the middle of a sizeable concourse. The actual doorway to go through boasted no sign itself and I had to cheerfully ask the first person past the threshold if this was in fact where I wanted to be to catch a plane out of the place. Sometimes I think naiively that airports don't want you to actually catch planes, but then of course I realise that's the point and that they far prefer you in the terminal spending some more of that lovely money of yours, you rich tourist, you.

I went aboard after the usual routine, amazed possibly the twentieth set of security scanners at the metal detectors by walking through in huge combat boots without a single peep from the machine, and whiled away my Air New Zealand flight to Auckland over a happy four hours in a smallish seat surrounded by small, pleasantly banal talk, avoiding an even smaller kind of movie which was a bit of a bugger as I'd been looking forward to films on planes again, not having had the luxury more than once in my last dozen flights.

I'd greedily absorbed a proper full-screen showing of Iron Man on the way out which is a hugely watchable movie, the first time I'd seen the proper version with the full ending having bought copies in both Indonesia and Fiji that were both sneakily filmed in a cinema somewhere. Returning to full civilisation and a country with more than a million people in it, I was stuck with something called Mrs. Shitbrown's Large-Arsed Friends Bitch About Her Grey Funeral, In A Small Grey Town In A Plague Of Grey In 1970s Romania: Special Edition Fully Remastered With Never-Before-Seen Grey, or so I assumed its title to be from the odd painful snippets of dialogue I snatched as I cruised the inflight radio stations.
That must have been the first music I had willingly listened to for more than 20 minutes in years, and it thankfully didn'tt offer anything by Bob Marley (much as I love the guy) or any twinkly pseudo-traditional Fijian folk songs which had begun to grate long before and while in the country had refused to go away.

Auckland international airport is a bit odd to get around - the airport planning demons at work again had done their best to confuse us all into mindlessly emptying our wallets into the nearest cash register, not to mention deploying the standard play of making the corridor itself between immigration and transfers/exits into a gigantic perfume shop. I hate that, not just because I am a cheapskate and I smell bad, but mainly because I know one day I will knock over a thousand quid's worth of Chanel No.5 and have to flee huffingly from the place with all my flapping baggage and lots of ill grace before they try and bill me.

Mooching through more ambiguously signposted doorways and walking the half-mile through carparks and private road systems, past complicated-looking antennaes closeted behind white palisades and chainlink fencing, following a little blue and white line painted on the earth which takes all applicable bipeds to the domestic terminal, I arrived and became immediately more relaxed, as internal flights aren't really flights, are they, not in the sense I grew up thinking of them as.

Yet having allowed for this extra level of bureacracy, immigration staff at Auckland impressed me in every way as they were excellent, real human beings despite the fact the job description practically requires you to shove a sharpened plank up your arse every morning to get you in the mood for passengers. All the check-in and security folk are great too, every person employed in the airport is in fact about ten notches above their counterparts in every other country I have been to, even being far more friendly and, well, human than the first folks you meet in Australia. .

Charmingly, I Didn't even have to wait to get back to New Zealand to feel warmed and happy as a dog with two tails as the head steward on the domestic flight spent as much time cracking jokes as he did on the safety brief, with the whole cabin chuckling happily more or less every time the P.A. sounded. The whole flight back from Auckland to Christchurch was comfortable despite the compulsory miniature seat, because I knew I was re-entering a country where pleasantness, friendliness and good cheer was not an exported image, not an oft-forgotten and now hard-won part of the national psyche, not a qualifiable elitist notion, and not an overplayed and often untrue habit of the people. In New Zealand it's the custom, practice, almost the duty of citizens to be cheerful, enthusiastically helpful, and pleasantly (and refreshingly) intelligent.
The countries that really could do better from what I know of their peoples, if you were wondering about my list there, are Fiji, the UK, the USA and Australia, respectively.

If you want to feel better about yourself, go to Fiji. Almost everyone treats you as an immediate friend, making you feel guilty for having a hangover and dealing with them as if they were some kind of talking vertical cesspit, but at all other times this is a marvellous feature of society.
Taking a trip to the Yasawa islands requires amazingly little planning or effort, although in hindsight this was perhaps a bit of a warning sign, for anyone who might not like being managed and directed to go everywhere at all times.
Despite a couple of minor rebellions though, I was happy to live under the rule of Awesome Adventures, the larger of two companies that cruise from Denarau, near Nadi, to tour the nearby island groups of the closer and smaller Mamanucas, and the distinctly larger and slightly more distant yasawas.

All inter-island transport is conducted aboard a single flagship vessel, a large catamaran of maybe 60 tons named the Yasawa Flyer 2, leading to inevitable dry ruminations on how the YF 1 was sunk and which senior position that captain now holds in the company. The first leg aboard took me through the calm and shallow waters, by pacific standards at least, to the top of the group and my first resort whereupon a small motor launch took a group of us ashore, between the twin house reefs and across almost inconceivably glass-like water.

In fact I spent so much time on boats that week I practically had a right to walk around on land like Jack Sparrow rather than just the desire to. At least every day I had been on one and most days been on three or four different craft, very good for the old English seafaring spirit, or something like that, and all thankfully on calmer waters than the shark dive amid heavy rollers back in Bega lagoon. That really was something else, believe me. In fact I'm going to post the vi- yes, in fact I just have (this time- travelling of tenses is fun, isn't it?) posted it.
But of course you already know that by now

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Throughout the Yasawa island group, resorts are dotted along the more accessible parts of the coast usually near or even built in to villages where the company draws most of its employees from for each site, although many of the frontline staff on the travel desks, activity guides and the resort managers were from Suva and Nadi on the main island, probably due to there being more chance and more candidates from those parts who speak fluent and business English, the latter being something I have no knowledge of myself, thank the good lord; sing his praises eternally.
Resorts here are the better kind - authentic huts, dorms and offices made by hand from locally cut trees and thatched with woven coconut palm leaves, all tied together with coconut-husk twine and open to the air, although unfortunately open to the mosquitos. Also spiders, as I found a three-inche-long dead one by my bed one morning, apparently I had squashed it from this existence when I trotted to the bathroom in the night. Yes, Fijian spiders are poisonous, but only a bit. English and an internationally-sponsored fighting weight seemed to win.

I may have been unlucky in getting to the best resort first, but hopefully the guys I met there (Vanessa, and a Kiwi of uncertain provenance and unchartable cynicism using the name Graham), both of whom recieved my appalingly cheap `business cards`, will get in touch. It'd be nice, so when you read this guys, drop me a message.
And I'm sorry, Graham, I made some of that up. It sounded good.

Having two nights at a place could have led me to think I could take things easy a few months ago, but I know better now and know that two night means one usable day, and consider yourself lucky if you get anything more than meals and a nice view on days you travel. That day at the Coral View resort was pretty splendid though, taking a trip with a boatfull of other guests to the caves used in the filming of some old film called Blue Lagoon from the late '80s or early '90s starring Brooke Shields, and endlessly rammed down the throat of guests by everyone on the islands employed by Awesome Adventures, which is everyone.
I am a huge film fan (nerd) and have seen really rather a lot of movies (because my name is Tim, and I am a geek; It's been three hours since my last screening) yet I have never seen Blue Lagoon, preferring only to watch films that are good.
Or at a push, slickly bad enough to be entertaining.

Such things as Night At The Museum are okay, because they are very bad films with very good effects and a few passable actors committing only slightly bad acting. Ideal hangover material, or for those times when you don;t want to really watch a movie so mush as see some animation in front of your eyes while you think serious thoughts.

Anything with Brooke Shields in contains at least one very bad actor and no-one involved with the projects possessing balls enough to tell everyone else about it, and probably tries to be serious when all it should do is try to be over. So no, I have not see Blue Lagoon and do not know how famous these caves could almost have been, although they were very pretty, and there is a short underwater dive from one cavern to another which I would never have been able to do had I not already learned how to scuba dive. As it was it was amazing how briefly I was underwater, and not just because the tunnel was only about five feet long.
I can't tread water very well though, being for some reason a natural sinker, and so it would have been nice if the guide hadn't stoppped to give the lecture inside the second cavern while I was the only person without a space on the walls to hang on to. Still, did me some good, I'm sure, to be constantly on the edge of panic while in an almost pitch-black cave

Back at the resort after the half-hour ride in another speedboat, and I raced to hire some snorkelling gear (mask, fins, snorkel, childlike sense of wonderment and childlike ability to sense danger, as we shall see) because I had for that wonderful day been granted the ability to see. It was a miracle, a wonderful working of some higher mysterious power, and had I not been held down by two people again while a third (Vanessa, to whom I am forever slightly in debt) shoved contact lenses into my eye sockets I might have started believing something was out there.
Again we went through the circus that is me trying to see like normal people, and again it was marvelous and amazing and wonderful in every way, apart from the first bit when my eyes water like taps as other people poke my eyes, albeit in a kind and helpful fashion.

Out above one of the house reefs there were another great multitude of fish to see, almost none of which I could name and even less could I care having seen them as it was, as always, an amazing and beautiful experience, more so now I have become comfortable with diving and happily thrust myself down through the water half a dozen feet to get a closer look at various underwater sights.
I saw a massive number of blue sea stars there which were sometimes massive in themselves, and I think I finally twigged the difference between starfish and sea stars, obvious as it may be to anyone looking in a book, but never have looked in a book, just at a couple of each in the wild. It is ( I think) that the stars have five (or more, brittle stars have up to twelve, or something like that) `arms` radiating from their centre, equal in thickness all the way and without any larger mass at the centre, and the arms of starfish come out in a classic pentangular star tapering to smooth points, making them chunky, as opposed to spindly like sea stars.

Less fascinating and a good deal more dangerous was almost being hit by the propellor of a boat as I lazed around on the surface. I was absolutely in the wrong place, but where the boats went and where snorkeling was supposed to be enjoyed were explained in a way I can only call assuming, i.e. various people assumed I'd been paying attention on the boat on the way in, assumed I could take directions as well as a child, and assumed I wasn't the type of person to see dozens of other ways to interpret things due to an annoying habit of noticing extra details, such as people using the wrong words to describe things and not telling me where important things were. Anyway the water was so clear the pilot could easily see me and stopped well in time, although I had heard the engine and was quietly pondering what the hell it was as I gazed at the aquatic scenery. The people of the boat told me to go on the other side of the barrier, which I did, and successfully managed to nearly be struck by another boat two minutes later, which they did not tell me to do but I seemed to want to try my luck that day. I dived to see a particular fish and must have propelled myself beneath the rope barrier several feet below, I can only assume.

Straight afterwards, still with my contact lenses in (and did I tell you about getting them, in Suva? Long bus ride in, long ride back, demented wheelbarrowing men attacking the luggage ports as we pulled into the station? Oh yes, I did tell you.) and not wanting to waste the opportunity of real eyesight, I carried on the watery theme and went diving, not too far down just to a depth of about metres (49 feet) or so, and supposedly on a drift dive whereby an established and predictable undersea current would drift us - myself and two local divers, one of whom is by custom and practice (if not by law) qualifed at least as a Divemaster - about 120 metres along and around the edge of a large reef.

The ground at that depth was disappointingly barren and the sea life was nowhere nearly as abundant as the other dives I had been on, but there were a huge number of giant clams, and although not quite as massive as the imagination may once have painted (I read the wrong kind of novels about the South Seas as a kid, like the ones that appeal to a child's imagination, or, in adult terms, lie completely to the reader) they still are pretty giant, some of them getting upwards of a foot across and with hugely crimped lips to their shells. I have yet to see ones a metre or more wide, but hopefully will one day.

What was extremely cool was a small school - a classrom, if you will - of hunting barracuda, and they really were big. At least 4 and maybe up to five feet long, 7 or 8 barracuda were stalking shoal of a hundred or so smaller fish, surely waiting for the moment to strike although unfortunately they didn't think it timely to attack while we were there. Shame, would ahve loved to see fish hunting fish underwater, make me feel almost like a proper travel hack or something

The only slight technical hitch apart from needing an extra weight on my belt as alway seems to happen, was that my BDC (Buoyancy control device, in reality the waistcoat-like jacket that plays host to your entire set of gear, but essentially a couple of bladders linked to your air tank via a low-pressure hose and a couple of switches to inflate/deflate it) was leaking, hardly an ideal situation for a number of reasons I won't go into, but basically I ascended far too fast near the end of the dive; an inadvisable practice that can lead to paralysis and death on deeper dives; and came within a metre of being struck by yet another speedboat, and this one was going far too fast in water far too impenetrable to be able to do anything to avoid me.
Again, a number of boring, complicated proximate reasons were behind this, the primary one being leaky equipment. Almost a very sad day, a damn good job the divers I was with were quick with their frantic underwater signalling.

Back on land for the second night and a feat of championship-standard drinking, Graham and Vanessa and a couple of English lads out and about around the world all sat around and we all got mightily sloshed, there was a great auctioning of hermit crabs - grab a bunch of them from the beach and paint a number on each of their shells (different numbers help ) and pop them in a circle drawn on the floor and see which one makes it to the edge first, and you have a crab race - where our table of five drunkards bought nine of the sixteen or so contender crabs, leaving the other ten tables to scrabble over the rest and us to eventually take all five top prizes, of which I believe we left all of them on the table at the end of the night. The fact I can remember no more of things that evening, apart from Graham entertaining us with tales of his batty fishing mate Bill who loved nothing more than piloting a shitty old boat out into the Pacific currents with no spare fuel and no radio or any other way of saving themselves if the engine conked out, just about says it all, really.

Leaving the next day was easy and pleasant, no cruel early morning wake-up calls or any nonsense like that and I was off and away to a cruise on the Wana Taki, which was largely a non-event once I got there. Aboard, and a huge boring man gave the five of us who had hopped off the Yasawa Flyer 2 a huge boring lecture without saying anything at all new, and I knew then once he had started that I had made a bad choice in coming along for this thing.

Nevertheless there were a couple of distractions; a launch from the Wana Taki out past the bluff of a nearby island to view the sunset, and later that night a few interesting games, not least of which a crab race which I won having sneakily assessed the field by looking at the bowl of crabs beforehand, and picking the one with the biggest leg-size-to-shell-size ratio that was giving a good go at escaping, and comfortably won. There were some other things to do, the ultimate forfeit being that the losing team was sent to dance around a support pole in the manner of those ladies who dance 'round poles and remove their clothing in order to part men from money. They gave it a jolly good show, I must say, and that Japanese guy seemed to really know what he was doing, that's all I'm saying.

The four folk I got on with were a funny lot really, and it only took half an hour after the lecture for them to start going on about the food at every place they had been to - now really, I have to stop you there, folks. As I had been talking about with Graham the night before, it seems to me absolutely insane to go on holiday for the food. It is a nice bonus to have great food and interesting new styles of cuisine, yes, but to actually plan where to go based on that??! What the bloody hell is wrong with some people?! Halfway around the globe and they will actually refuse to visit a whole country - an entire country - because of their perceptions regarding food there.
And, perhaps even more insanely, people will go to a foreign country for nothing BUT the food; and basically see fuck-all of the entire nation outside of a handful of restaurants and a hotel or two.

Nevermind that there are a dozen different things to eat in even the most spartan and single-minded of places, nevermind that it's a vital part of human experience to try things out of your comfort zone, nevermind that you can eat absolutely any cuisine style and dish from any and every place on Earth in every Westernised country - why not go abroad to stay in the same little bubble you've always known. Muppets. Crazies. Candidates for a Damn Good kicking every one of them.

So I transfered late the next day after a seeming eternity left aboard the Wana Taki, and took to the YF2 once more by way of a couple of short trips on motorboats skipping again over the staggeringly crystaline waters that distinguish Fiji as one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Gliding into the next resort was a solo affair for me, or rather a solo affair for tourists and only three Fijian locals to accompany me, one of whom was to be my guide and general nefarious accomplice for the next few days, although I could almost never then, and cannot now, accurately recall his name. My excuse, as always in these circumstances is that I don't know how to pronounce the local language or spell the word, the one necessitating the other, which hardly excuse me for not sitting down and learning it of an evening, but still.

WayaLeiLei was the third resort, second island, second dive site and second best of the lot, and pretty damn marvellous it was, even if the kitchen/serving crew had seen a few too many tourists for their own good by the time I arrived. Ashore once more after a day and a half over waves and, with the sun shining, I booked myself in for the morning hike to the summit of a massive boulder outcrop atop the hill, this resort being perched on the side of what must have been a massive piece of volcanic fallout, as all the boulders were fully formed blocks of hardened stone, probably expelled as one of larger islands was formed as a surface-breaching volcano.

Cool thing about the Yasawa group is that they are entirely volcanic islands, one way or another. Every one was directly or from subsequent ash and explosions formed by volcanic activity, or as I like to think of it, truly unimagineable power right here on Earth including big massive way-cool explosions an' lava an' stuff. Just imagine it. A volcano erupting, I mean. I'm so very terrified of natural forces, I have to see one

The summit trek seemed like a bad idea almost as soon as it started. 04:45 in the AM saw me walking across the resort between bures; those same traditional hand-built huts seen in all the resorts and elsewhere throughout rural Fiji; to the kitchen and eating area, being molested by frantic dark shapes in the tar-black night which turned out to be a couple of the resident dogs, apparently having had their Pedigree Cocaine already they were unbelievably enthusiastic and a little terrifying as they tried to climb up my front and back simultaneously, and then I noticed a couple of dim lights and found the little group preparing to make the ascent.
Five of us altogether went up, my faithful guide in the rear and the male compnent of a German couple in the front, storming up the cliff in the darkness with the help of his torch, the lady of the outfit behind with hers, the idiot boy (guess who that is) very close behind her with no torch at all, relying on her second-hand light and footsteps in the blackness, and then our guide and a little Glaswegian girl who struggled with it all, and was being helped and occasionally hoisted up the rocky track by our guide. I'm gonna call him Bob from here on in just for the sake of convenience.

I was struggling too, seriously so. The path was all uphill on an angle of maybe 30 - 40 degrees, 45 minutes almost totally solid smashing ourselves up through the trees and over the rocks with only three breaks of two minutes. Calling it a path was, in places, very generous as well because after the first half or so any kind of trodden or smooth surface gave way to the results of the most recent landslide, and we were climbing on and over boulders and shale - in the middle of a jungle mind, dodging half-seen trees and branches placed treacherously at neck height in the pitch-black-to-very-dim morning light, and being in that jungle with an almost perpetual canopy above meant we were in the darkness, and a better quality of darkness at that, for longer than the world outside.

Breaching the forest at last, just 20 metres from the summit and lookout point at exactly 06:00am we all nearly collapsed and waited for sunrise, or at least the girls and I collapsed, the German fella would clearly have liked to have been going faster but had to slow enough for his girlfriend to keep up, and of course Bob hardly noticed he was even moving, let alone climbing a bastard of a hill under cover of darkness. Bob went up to the peak almost ever single morning, and, would you believe, the dogs went with him as they had done today, and it seems their favourite pasttime is in fact to run up this hill and stand atop the Easterly pinnacle of the summit rock to watch the sunrise themselves, and feel the wind racing through their fur. I have photos of them looking like doggie pioneers up there.

Going back down Bob asks us if we want to go the `man's way or the woman's way` with a cheeky misogynist's grin. I elect for the group the way of the small crippled girl-child, to general agreement, and Bob takes us back halfway down through easy gentle slopes across rolling fields at the back of the hill. In the inky darkness, the cheeky bugger had led us up the most difficult route. Total git.

Later on I tried to go kayaking but no-one else wanted to, althoguh there was a guided tour set out in the promotional material for that day and I had, after all, paid for the all-extras-included package, the summit trek being one thing also the cave tour from the first resort, and the kayak tour another one. But hey, I went o the dive shop to reschedule and they rescheduled me, doing the dive as they were a couple of hours before we had planned.

Out over the reef and things were vibrant and teeming as anything I'd yet seen, with the added bonuses that 1) My BCD and gear in general was not leaking, and 2) My two companions were doing a spot of underwater spear fishing in order to try and attract and feed some sharks.
After skewering a couple of rainbow runners and something else I couldn't identify, and thousands of small fish from the size of matchboxes to that of shoeboxes having come and pecked and munched recycled their fallen comrades, a couple of white-tipped reef sharks appeared and lazily hung about the reef a few metres below us, only making one pass to grab food from our diver thatI saw, but they came close enough and were small, but magnificent nonetheless.

White-tip reefs don't get very big and these ones were maybe four feet long nose to tail, but it still adds another shark to my scoresheet, as it were, and they have the most amazingly lithe way of moving that their bulky bigger cousins can never manage.
Unfortunately I had not been wearing a wetsuit - the water was 29 degrees C after all - and, wearing trousers rolled up to the knee which inevitably unfurled themselves, I had been propelling myself about underwater for the best part of an hour with a massive extra resistance thanks to the heavy flapping trousers, and when I reached the surface I got the most evil cramp and had to float about uselessly near the boat while I sorted it out. I really should have thought about that, expecially after an hour and a half of early morning trekking that day and, well, there was no way I could do another dive, and I had a strained tendon for the next few days.

And the next day, yet again aboard the YF2 and off to South Sea Island for one night, the smallest in the whole group being only about 130 metres from shore to shore. Nice little place with some agreeable folk, but the bedbugs were something evil. Lovely sunset though and wide coral-strewn beaches refreshingly free from coconut palsm, for once.

The next and final day and I went aboard the last of my paid-for included extras (after a trip on the YF2 again and a couple of motor launches, natch) which was a sailing tour of the Mamanuca group aboard the Seaspray, a sailing yacht of maybe 90 feet, with about 40 guests and an open bar, or at least an open cool box stocked with beer and a few bottles of wine and champers, to which I settled down having struck up conversation with a young Aussie bloke and then another Aussie couple of Japanese extraction and two Brits, who between us polished off every bottle of wine and champange in the cool boxes bar one, and as much beer as everyone else. Yes, we were bastards, but if it's any consolation I got a near-fatal round of hiccoughs and had force myself to throw up lavishly in the head, for the sake of ot hiccuping out a lung.

More beer and some cruising later we fetched up alongside a lovely little island with a delapidated reef but some lovely scenery, and I managed to snorkel-swim to shore with the rest of the lively guests despite having to stop, tread water and empty my mask of water every 15 seconds thanks to my glasses forcing the sides away from my head, not having brought my contact lenses or really trusting any of the feckless drunkards aboard with my eyes either, really.

Back aboard, a bit of sunburn and a lot of drunk and disorderly later, then back out to sea to rendezvous with the YF2 for the final time, then into port and off to a single night's stay at the Kennedy near the airport and back the following day on a plane home.
Well, I call it home for now. New Zealand really is the most agreeable and homey place I've ever been to, and you shall see why very soon.

Unrelated to travel, but a thought just occured to me. In England, Australia and New Zealand there is a subtle common theme to eating habits, namely that, so far, each English-speaking country has a favourite flavourless fruit. Vegetables must be included but not if they're staples, so potatoes, for all their tuberous might and gustatory indifference cannot be counted, and anyway, everyone eats them like mad the world over.

In Aus and NZ, I have just noticed, they are obsessed with the avocado, although for the life of me I can't imagine why. If it cures at least five major diseases then fair play, stick it in everything and munch your way to flavourless victory, however I suspect its healing powers are somewhat less than that.
I just had some of that supermarket sushi, handed to me by the Irish girl I was sharing a room with as she left for an early morning flight (and yes, I am allowed to eat sushi at 03:30 in the morning. I am ill. I have a note). This sushi contained a miniscule sliver of avocado - and, it almost goes without saying, a virtually negative value for fish - which is hardly enough to cure even one small spot even if it were the miracle food we've all been waiting for.

It also routinely finds its way into burgers, abetted by humans, who in the Southern hemispher so far seem unable to control themselves, and whack a thick slab of the flavourless green goo in between burger and bun without so much as casually vomiting. Very strange.

In England we have our own beloved and completely flavourless favourite, the cucumber, a food with less point than a sphere and as much flavour as a glass of water, which it basically is, plus some vibrantly snot-hued rind.
In cucumber sandwiches (kill me now) with tuna and salmon (kill the cook) and in any kind of salad (I'm gonna kill you if you try and feed me that) it is the most futile of fruits, and it's one of those bloody stupid annoying ones that people will claim to be a vegetable on account of it not tasting sweet.

It tastes of purified condensed fuck-all, why would you expect sweetness from it of all things?

The crucial thing that links these is that they are completely superfluous to the actual food, being slopped in or added for `garnish` or whatever, unlike, say, rice which is the most important and often only food in huge parts of the world.

So, the question is, does the United States have a favourite flavourless fruit or veg, one that sneaks into every kind of cuisine and dish?
How about Canada? Any other little ex-colonial outposts of anglophones?

I'd just like to know.

Continuing the video series of transport to shit your pants to, and with another bonus look at me, looking at you, wearing what I like to call the `stunned mullet face`.
I never had the camera ready during any of the big swells, unfortunately:

The week falls away before my sandaled feet and I come closer and closer to re-alterpatriation, bipolymigration, repetimmigrasidence or whatever a good made-up word might be for reentering a country that is temporarily taken for one's home. I'm sure the correct word exists. It usually does.

Terminology for such complicated things and myriad bewildering alternatives for established speech tend to prey on the mind after having read anything by Stephen Fry, as I have been doing (The Hippopotamus, not for the weak of spirit, Fry 1988) which is entirely inevitable. Inescapable. Ineluctable, in fact.
Subsequently one is left feeling a tiny bit inadequate merely as a fellow anglophone, not to mention a fledgling wielder of words, and not just a little bit relieved, appalled and amazed as well. Interesting book, you see. Really not for the weak of spirit or prudish of morals (or language) though.

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And now I'm in Christchurch again. Aren't I fast? This is what happens when you start something and don't immediately finish it, of course: a mess of tenses I simply can't be arsed to clean up

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I was pretty much lying about the sandaled feet by the way, mine broke on a beach in Pacific Harbour after a night getting leathered with a crowd of locals, although I may have told you as much already. I cannot imagine why I thought it was interesting the first time, except perhaps to highlight my hatred of flip-flops, sunbathing and the beach mentality both individually and as a whole loathsome package, so perhaps the timely destruction of just one of these just made me so perversely smug I had to share.
On the night in question I might have passed out on the sands in the clasp of midnight and much rum, but I had in fact lain down for only a minute or two to have the ocean lap at my feet. The sandals bought on the first day in Nadi were not up to much, being mere flip-flappy wastes of otherwise useful atoms and cosmic fluff, and fell apart for no particular reason save that their very existence was a minor insult to me. Weaving back to the party I could hardly tell the difference, anyway. So for the most part boats and bare feet have been carrying me around the place.

All this talk of errant footwear is terribly thrilling, I know, but I really must tear you back to the facts of my last week of freedom, as I have come to think of it, before I jet back to Christchurch and thence to somewhere else to be a proper person again (as I have now almost done; the jetting that is, I'm in Auckland airport at the moment awaiting a transfer; I suppose the proper person idea will have to wait again) and go back to some kind of normality and routine. I would hate to disappoint you however or become bored myself, so I will try and do at least a couple of dumb or dangerous things every week, just so I have something to fill this space with. Suggestions are welcome. Bear in mind I am an abject coward at heart. I'm now mindful that this would make anything very silly or stupid immeasurably funnier, but I'll go out on a limb and accept anything you can think of.
Except a bungee jump or canyon swing.

It will probably be Nelson (my next location and pro tem place of residence) at the very north of the South Island, pretty much because I like the name and it has a population size I think will be to my liking; and into the immoral and greasy machinery of the employed shall I descend once more. Or ascend, depending on how you look at these things - I certainly won't be getting any warm remarks from you, my lovely audience, for not having had a job for the past 10 months, but if it's any consolation I am now poorer than a Soviet church mouse in the midst of a vodka famine and will soon be engaged in much toil, to the amusement of, not least of all, you lot

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Enough already!! Five paragraphs of nonsense and I haven't even started on the final week in Fiji, the Island Hopping Tour on and around the Yasawa islands which, possibly, is the first proper content yet in this post, Jesus queuejumping Christ.

I have to admit that I almost got annoyed with the legendary Fijian friendliness at times, as hard as that is to believe and as much of a grumpy old bastard that makes me sound. The fact everyone is so aware of this legend is most of the problem - for this sort of thing to work a little more grace is required for it to...work.
I wasn't actually pissed off you understand and not at all with any individuals, just a little weary from hearing that people are so friendly here sometimes from very drunk and very friendly Fijians, or listening to the same welcome/farewell song for the 13th time, or from being mobbed by staff members at every place because I have DVDs, something akin to flaunting hard currency about in the former USSR if you are to judge from the reactions of most locals.

At some points you don't want to have to explain yourself or where you come from yet again, and you might not like being coerced into appreciating the culture more or less at the point of a knife (or at the point of practically infinite friendliness, which in a way is far worse) and have traditional music, dance and art thrust inavoidably before your defenceless sense organs.
And particularly, because I'm ranting now and this needs to be said because almost all you humans have so far been unable to recognise this, particularly one might not want to be interrupted while watching a film. Why do people talk to me when I'm watching films?

It's like interrupting a deep conversation between two entirely absorbed strangers, never with anything important and usually some inanely trifling nonsense anyone else could help with. Is it assumed that because I'm in the middle of a movie I actually want to meet someone for the first time or engage in some whimsical bollocks of no account, or even talk about the movie itself when I am halfway through? Surely this cannot be a sane assumption, but if experience counts for anything then 10% of people I've met in my life are partially unhinged.
Actually that's quite a conservative figure given the many colourful ways people I've known have been deficient of hinges, but the movie interruption thing is one of the more consistent warning signs.

That singing thing is a famous and unmistakably Fijian feature of any holiday there - it is carefully designed to be so, a cynic might say - where each place you stay at apart from busy hotels and resorts welcomes each batch of new arrivals with an choral song performed by the massed ranks of staff. It can get quite impressive, with the Coral View resort where I first stopped sporting a choir of about 30, and a full range of singers from bass to soprano to the confusing womaney-man who helped out in the dorms. But more on those guys (or gals) later.

It's great when you have been friends with the people for a couple of days who then, for example, seranade you as you leave. That is charming and warming and supremely friendly. But when you have hardly said a word to anyone at all and have been there for just a day, possibly not even a ful day and much of that spent sleeping or talking only to the barman, and it has, for the sake of argument, even all been a bit shitty there and many of these same said people singing you off have been gruff and rather less than friendly, then it just smacks of something terribly false and even belittling to all the other wonderful people you have met. I speak mostly of just one place, but really there are three drawbacks to this island-hopping lark and I mention them here for good, even fluffy reasons:

item: On arriving at the port of Denarau where all these cruise thingies depart from, things are immediately confusing because you have to check in your main luggage, but are never told where or with whom. Two companies operate from the adjacent booths and their staff all wear the respective company garb, yet only one company apparently has anyone to deal with luggage so you (well, I) am left drifting uncertainly with all your (my) gear as the time of deperture creeps ever closer. The check-in staff offer no help, they just take your money and look weary and a bit pissed off, and you eventually have to track down fellow passengers to find that your luggage goes with the other company while you stay under the less-than-close wing of your own. Great exercise for your anxiety glands as you give your stuff to people you are apparently not even dealing, with and wave it a mournful goodbye from the quay as it disappears into thickets of dockside workers.
The check-in staff there were the first unfriendly Fijians I had met as well, which didn't improve my impressions.

item: You are almost constantly hurried about the place, unnecessarily as it usually turns out, and it seems you are always being told what to do which isn't much of a holiday, let alone one that's costing you as much as three weeks elsewhere.
This is linked to the strange and hugely overplayed notion of `Fiji time` which became an irritation not because you might be late (the idea being that it's all very relaxed over there and no-one cares much for times and schedules) but because everyone seems to think it so bloody funny, clever, charming or whatever. That it was almost never noticeable that anything was ever even late made it all rather banal, and achingly trite.
The meal times were always maintained to the very second, and were regimented enough to disprove the idea of Fiji Time entirely. The food was bloody good, and most were buffet-style affairs ideal for big fat greedy buggers like me, but they were at the same time every day which I can't get used to after years of making it up as I go along.

What actually became a problem was that it often ran in reverse, and we were all sent scurrying around far too early to do things such as when we were sent off the Wanna Taki cruise ship (or at least they tried to send us off, myself and a bloke from Kerala rebelled and refused to take part in their enforced shore leave, both claiming ailments of the leg, but really presenting classic symptoms of an irritation of the wallet) for mysterious cleaning purposes. A few days later my scheduled afternoon dive at The Pinnacle, just off the Wayaleilei coast, went ahead a full two hours before we had arranged, and had I not busted in on them to rearrange matters due to the promised (and paid-for) kayak tour of the lagoon not being run, because no-one could be bothered to do it, I would have completely missed it.

item: The Wanna Taki cruise was boring as fuck, quite frankly. It also wasn't even a cruise at all, because we arrived at a moored ship, the Wanna Taki, departed from that ship still moored and had not moved at all in the interim. It was, in fact, like being on any other island without any benefits of an actual island, such as a beach, some jungle or some room to walk ten feet without hitting something. Of course I could have gone ashore at the prescribed time, but refused on sheer principal because the staff came in at 9am and all but frog-marched us out of the dorm, claiming that we had to leave so they could `spray` inside, although all they could have wanted to use were deodorants and air fresheners, which I can quite happily cope after all my years inhaling more fruity and pungent airs.

Also the bloke in charge was the most boring bloke in the history of bad choices for blokes who run cruises. I once had a brilliant job as a salesman ("during the war....") where I was earning very well and was, in fact, pretty bloody fantastic at it being the highest earner not only of the people in the field, but of those in the office on the phones as well speaking to literally foour times as many people as I was every day. When some other guy came along with more training and experience than me and earned and performed even better, I didn't mind being second best because I was still damn good.
Then along came a guy called Bret who simply knew nothing of the world of sales, a world where spirit and attitude are everything and the very best can be brought low by the wrong kind of person. The kind of person who tells you a joke and then explains why it is meant to be funny - and the joke wasn't funny anyway. The kind of person who will talk at great length but do so just a little bit too quietly, so you are forced to pay attention, and you find after twenty minutes of your life have passed that you'll never get back that he has said the same thing he did yesterday, in four very slightly different ways, and it was never worth saying in the first place.

A stater of the extreme obvious, a crude and crass misfit with the social skill of mucous, the antithesis to the salesman and a cringingly bad communicator who could not read a dissatisified look if you wrapped it around his neck and pushed him from a gibbet, which is of course the kindest thing to do to these people.
I had to share a car with him for up to two hours each way every day for three weeks, to then be informed he was being made the permanent field sales manager. I quit the next day.

This big boring man with his big boring introduction was exactly like Bret, and any high spirits we may have had on entering the boat were taken from us and disassembled slowly and painfully before our eyes. That there were only nine guests on board, and that of these there was an Aussie girl with in infection of a dark nature and everyone else set to bitching and moaning about the food at another resort as soon as they sat down (and like I discussed with someone just the day before, it amazes and saddens me that a lot of people only seem to travel for the food; this is the most terrifying form of madness) only really made things worse.
I did my valiant best to rectify things though getting hugely drunk as soon as it seemed acceptable, and took part in the evening games and generally made the best of it including adopting (and subsequently killing, natch) my very own racing crab, but in reality I would rather have been almost anywhere else.

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Anyway besides that, and the annoying fact that drinks were expensive throughout, and that the brochures and staff lead you to believe you will not have to pay for anything extra but you do in fact rather have to, it was a bloody good week. And now I have done all my complaining in one post, all the good stuff is coming in another. Hence the fluffy

I lied slightly about the delayred post thing. I ahve managed to transpose this much. Don't expect any mroe favours though

Obligations, I still feel I have a few. This blog being my favourite one, it has become strangely difficult to fulfill lately, not because I'm necessarily too busy but because I rarely find myself in quite the right mood for it; you need a touch of peace and privacy for this sort of gig (not as easily found in Fiji as you would imagine), but of course one can't be so far out of things as to feel like the only human left alive.
That said, deserted beaches are just fine. I haven't been to one yet for more than half an hour, but still. I should be on my first sometime today with a bit of luck, or at least one I only have to share with a few dozen people.

On the other hand, deserted parts of decidly low-rent backwater town are not so fine (and often, in fact, no-rent, what with that marvellous Fijian habit of lying down to sleep anywhere you might feel like it; on grass verges near the road, slightly out of the way on one side of the bar, perhaps at the bus stop or on the beach: and why not?). It can be surprisingly tricky to find such a place, but of course I wouldn't want you to think I was complaining
Either way I'm seriously looking forward to having my own space back in New Zealand, some true lasting peace and quiet, but not so....how shall I put it? Barren dark uncomfortable and shitty. Yup, that sums up just about every hotel room I can afford at the moment. Oh and food that isn't fundamentally related to lard by less than 1 degrees of seperation is gonna be pretty sweet too.

Now I'm sorry if that last post was a touch negative, actually very much so, and I just had to start out this one with a whinging session too. My hackles are up this morning after being summarily failed by a taxi driver, an ATM, a large part of the southern Pacific international banking network and the very first unhelpful Fijians I've yet met. It is not even 9am, so you might imagine how I would get this nonsense sentence off my chest rather than nurse it for any length of time and get on with the bright new day ahead Needless to say a taxi driver who is late by a factor of 5 (or is minus 500% effective, or who failed by a ratio of 5:1 if you prefer) will not and never shall deserve my custom.
ATMs apparently not connected to the international financial network and unable to recognise not just the money I know to be in my account, but not even the most elementary mathematics or trials of logic either also deserve nothing less than being struck repeatedly about the processing unit with extreme prejudice (and a big hammer). When such a technological charlatan claims that I have no money when I have at least, well, considerably more than the amount I was after, let us just say, but which then allows me to take 500 of these phantom simoleons from its greasy recesses yet then fails to make the deduction on my receipt, and still after refuses me to repeat the process even though the advertised limit is for twice the total I was aksing for, well, I'm just happy that I had those chicken feathers and all that superglue on me at the time. There's a machine who wont want to piss off its customers again in a hurry, I can tell you.

Now the last time you heard from me I had a minor cold/insanity combo going on, which is my only excuse as colds always make me a pissy little bitch, I'm afraid to say. Again, traveling and living with no-one but me for company (and I can be such an ass to live with ) tends to bring that sort of thing to the fore as well, plus I was, of course, probably having my man-period. It happens about once a month, or, as often as one realises how long it's been since the last one.

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Not incidentally now, my travel plans have changed a little bit, most notably I have now fixed Canada as a definite destination even at the cost of almost all the US of A, if necessary. The only parts of Unitedstatesland that are exempt being those where I am either obliged to visit because, well, it's the bleedin' Grand Canyon or it's freakin' New York, for instance, and of course there's a certain place in Kentucky to view if Mr. Gregory is back home at that time, because if nothing else that flimsy bitch owes me free digs for a while
Gosh I hope he isn't reading *trembles*
I also have a possible diversion in Idaho and I would dearly love to see something of New England in the Fall, or `Autumn` as we so much more sensibly call it
Honestly they may as well rename them New, Hot, Fall and Chills, jesus shitkicking christ...

Canada is being added so emphatically because of the stark difference in attitude that have come to my attention lately, and while it was always there under the surface, a few folks I have met recently made it all clear to me.
I went whitewater rafting on Monday, as anyone who knows me on Facebook might have noticed, and was involuntarily elected to chuck my lot in with a family from Toronto, although it should be noted that I expected as much, going to the thing on my lonesome and all. As it turned out I was rather lucky and, not merely because I know they might be reading it has to be said I was really impressed by the manner (and manners) of all hands on our vessel, save perhaps my unruly self (mind you I was pretty well behaved for once. No-one got pushed in and I don;t think I caused any lasting injuries, unless everyone was being supremely polite..) and it reminded me of a little undercurrent of thought I'd lately been subconsciously sculling, namely; Canadians are just so much easier to be around than Statesians

I will use that term because, a) a guy from California really pissed me off the other day and I would like to get back at him in some tiny way, not having taken the opportunity to rake his eyes with a comb while he was there, and b) there are at least 22 countries in the New World and it has always seems rather selfish - not to mention self-important - for people stemming from the former British colonies to assume such a title on behalf of all people's and countries across two whole continents. Touch greedy, what?
It was even more rude when they manipulated half of them for, ooh, shall we say fresh fruit profits or guaranteed cocaine production to fuel various lucrative `countermeasures` or for good old fashioned power, greed, or a paranoid sense of national pride, but let us not get bogged down in petty name-calling Yes we Brits did it too, but the keys things here are i) we did it better than anyone else, so nyerr nyerr nyerr, ii) we started off genuinely disadvantaged from a tiny island rather than based upon the most resource-rich country on Earth, and iii) we gave it all back.
And the next Irish guy who tells me I invaded his country is gonna get a potato somewhere personal.

For the lazy type who'd rather not live the high-powered life in the crazy world of work in America, this seems to me a damn good reason to spend more time in picturesque, unhomicidal Canada rather than in a country obsessed with work to the point of insanity, insanity to the point of rationalising therapy, and meals so formidable as to be capable of inflicting paralysis or death at a single sitting.
Not that I wont love the United States of Lovely Lovely Dollars Please Now, but I think the people will get on my tits rather more quickly than the denizens of Canada.

So back in the real world of today, well, this week at least, I found rafting on the Navua river from more or less the centre of the main island, Viti Levu, down to somewhere nearer the South Coast via the most incredible canyons and narrow, vastly high gorges cut through moss-trewn limestone one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to. The water was clear and, where required, fast and bubbling or flowing and falling, taking our little inflatable over rocks and rapids and even the occasional small waterfall (very small, but it did tip someone out of every boat but ours. Yeah, we were that good), all the while showing us the real interior of the island and a kind of jungle and bamboo forest I had never seen before. There was something in the richness of the greenery and the stateliness of the bamboo thickets as it shot out over the river that seemed more full of life than anything in India or Borneo.

And if I do it again (read: when I do it again with bigger, stronger rapids) I will have to get an underwater camera sorted, as I will be doing anyway for further diving, which I am growing rather fond of I must say, even if the more recent outings have been a touch frustrating. Still, it has to happen now and then and I'm very much looking forward to going just with a buddy rather than a whole boat-full of people, and not least because they are all bewilderingly more qualified and experienced than I am

After a couple of hours paddling only on the command of our skipper, Joe 2 (and yes, there was a Joe 1 as well, on another boat) and listening to his stories about the scenery, history and culture, most of them probably even true we fetched up at the mouth of an adjoining tributary and five boats-worth of us unloaded ourselves onto the shore, largely fell over a bit on the ludicrously slippery stones and, as our head tour guide Moses stepped across the water, watched him instantly disappear before our eyes.
Quite a trick, he walked onto a patch of water in the stream - which was, let me be clear, merely a stream over some small rapids, not more than 8" deep anywhere it seemed - and dropped completely from sight, plummeting vertically into a sinkhole to reappear seceonds later in an adjacent pool, having gone through an underwater hole connecting the two. Of course we all had a go, even me with my fear of water and drowning and seeing anything on the surface let alone beneath the icy liquid, and after just a few seonds of mortal panic I managed to step off, sink with the best of 'em and grapple my way through the hole which was strangely lower down than I had thought. I can't imagine why I thought it would be a bit shallower as that would have meant it was less threatening, guess I must have some unbridled optimism left in my soul.

One of our boat, Stef (or Steph) the daughter of John and Robyn; and I bloody hope I both remembered the names and spelled them correctly by the way; who between them made up the other three quarters of our crew's tourist quota, threw herself into the pool maybe half a dozen times, or at least quite a few, and rightly seemed pretty impressed. Fair play to her; I was playing the odds and allowing myself some freewheeling cowardice myself, reasoning that the more times I went in the lower the chances of my not smacking my head into gaudily coloured shards on some rocks was going to be. I know my limits. I am exactly the kind of guy who does something once just fine and then breaks something important doing the exact same thing again.

After that, and lunch, and more paddling and rapids which Joe, bless him, managed to mostly throw us through at least sideways and more often than not spinning rapidly so as to maximise the splash, we arrived at what they called Free Massage Falls, where one could indeed get a free massage of sorts by laofing about in the waterfall, assuming you didn;t mind not seeing anything for the duration. I have photos to prove I was there and everything, and in about a thousand years you might get to see them too

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I had been wasting time, money and small parts of my liver for 5 days at the resort I was at already, so I had decided to make good use of my time and get out of there and do stuff. Stuff isn;t cheap, explaining in part my reluctance to get out of the groove for the best part of a week, but stuff also doens't happen everywhere and I'm unlikely to be nack in Fiji for a good few years, possibly (but hopefully not) ever, so if nothing else I had to do some more diving. This meant I had to be able to see, a rudimentary question many of you may not appreciate, although many of you will.

Wearing glasses can be such a pain, if you don't have 'em you might not appreciate or if you have been able to wear contact lenses you might not appreciate so much either. I cannot wear contact lenses, or rather I can but it takes three people to put them in, and no I'm not joking at all, in the slightest, whatsoever. I have, bizarrely, and somewhat uselessly, extremely good reflexes and can avoid hidden obstacles and catch falling objects and otherwise twich my porky body in unlikely displays of dexterity should the need arise.
This is wonderful if someone accidentally drags a Discman off a table and I can grab it before it is yanked all the way to a splintery end, or when walking in darkness and finding myself facing imminent facial trauma at the convenience of a low bridge or tree branch - I manage to twist myself either out of or into the right position to deal with such things perfectly, and I deeply wish I could do this sort of thing in a social context.
This is disastrous when trying to insert contact lenses as the blink reflex overpowers all, and the fact I have a very low threshold for irritation and a barely suppressed kind of animalistic rage is waiting for me whenever I try anything so futile as an hour attempting to wear one contact lens, it really isn't the thing for me, not unless you dope me with valium and give me a litre of rum. Tranquilised and thoroughly sloshed, I suspect a good diver I would not make.

So the trials began, two hours on a local bus to Suva, the capital of Fiji, where I saw a real indicator of the level of poverty but also the ingenuity of the people: a bus here is really like a coach, although with 6 seats squeezed into each row normally occupied by 4 and most of the windows don't open, and has arrayed along its length below the cabin a series of luggage compartments a la the standard coach model, and these are accessed from outside and at all times left unlocked.
When a bus pulls into the mess of stalls and angled pull-ins that function as lanes at Suva's man bus terminal, and especially when, I suspect, white passengers can be seen at the windows, the last few hundred metres of its journey are accompanied by a small army of young men with wheelbarrows, running alongside the vehicle and fighting each other - all but coming to blows - with their wheelbarrows trying to edge in and be closest when the bus halts and they can cease treadling the potholed road to throw open the baggage lockers, and load up anyone's belongings left inside.

This was pretty disconcerting as hardly needs explaining, even though I had nothing in there myself it was certainly something to note for future adventures in public transport and it soon became slightly impressive in my mind, even if it did come from a desperation for money and lack of other prospects. At least these guys are out there, trying, although quite frankly if you are both unable to carry your own gear and are willing to let a strange man with a wheelbarrow take it for you; almost certainly guiding you by his own route to his own friend's hostelry; then you are probably not suited to travel.

Finding an optician and paying an inflated premium for just 10 pairs of lenses later, and after a cursory saunter into the only McDonalds for just a meagre few Big Macs and a slimming chocolate milkshake, I got back on board the Bus of Infinite Stops and wound my way back to the resort, a place called Tsulu where the staff are fantastic, and the surrounds are wholly artificial. It was a nice enough place and I paid for a dormitory bed yet got a small room all to myself, but there was absolutely nothing real about the place, and no cooking facilities either so it was either restaurants or starvation for me the whole time, and even McSinburger with cheese is a welcome break after the same kind of ghee-based, triple-fried meals day after day.

So, at length, I was almost ready to see the world without glasses and thus be able to dive, but first I had a tuesday appointment with the ziplines of doom, althoguh they be know by the rather better title of `deathslide`, and the infinitely more lame one of `flying fox`. In any case it's a bit bit of metal string stretch out between two tall thing and you in a pulley sort of affair rattling down it.
It's pretty cool but hardly super-mega-uber-thrills entertainment, even though the lines are long and the heights are impressive: 200 metre long lines up to 30 metres above the ground, and twice in each run you cross the lower reaches of a river at the fullest limits of the course's height.
Eight lines overall and I have video to prove all this as well, some of which might one day find its way here. It is a lovely jungle scene and I got footage of me zipping along a couple of times, and after all was said and done I only cut my hand on the wire about three times when I got stuck and managed to just about avoid the nasty mid-air collision, although possibly a video of that would have been funniest of all.

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The shark dive..... yes, I was looking forward to this a bit. Really, it was the main reason I had come to Pacific Harbour in the first place - as I say I'm here now in Fiji, of all places, and unlikely to return for a long time, and so the opportunity to dive with up to 8 species of shark (including bull sharks and the formidable tiger shark) was just too much to resist. But first we had to go to go through the circus of getting me visually up-to-scratch, and by we I mean the three people as well as myself required to get my contact lenses in.

I was patrolling the resort with increased agitation for a couple of days before the dive in order to press some unwilling stranger familiar with contact lenses into service for me, typically enough it was about as quiet as the resort ever gets and I could find no-one, and the staff down at the shark diving operation; one Aqua Trek of Beqa lagoon, Pacific harbour, Viti Levu, Fiji, in case you ever want to try it yourselves; were unable to assist or, really, to understand as the subtle linguistics required were not among the vocabulary of local Fijian dive instructors, sadly.
In the end on the morning of the Big Day I scrabbled about desperately in reception as was becoming a habit of mine (the poor staff had been dealing with me and my vast lists of queries for days already, and, stars that they are, had answered of deftly fielded every one) for some help in my hour of need.

This day one of the counter girls called Loni flagged down an Aussie bloke who was something senior in the place (probably owned it all, in fact) and he in turn called upon a Fijian bloke who was a gardener or labourer or something physically demanding, and while he held each of my eyes open with both hands as I lay prone ont he couch in reception the Aussie guy carefully jammed a lens into each aperture through the waves of teary fluid my eyeballs offered in self-defence, and Loni stood about the edge alternately offering tactical eye-poking advice and quietly cackling to herself.

It must have made quite a picture, and I'm left wondering now how many customersmight have tried to check in to the place only to see the manager and two staff members forcibly pushing things into the eyes of a paying guest. I do hope I didn't scare anyone off.

And it all worked. I was collected and taken to the office down the road, met my fellow divees and kitted up, although most of this was taken care of for me and I pretty much just put my gear on and took it off as required throughout the dives (for those of you who don't know it, if you are Scuba diving even on holiday then generally you have a bit of setting up and checking to do, none of which happened this time at all, and in truth if you were self-sufficient quite a lot of setting up and planning beforehand as well, not least of which filling your tanks with air ). After a 10 minute boat ride we stopped in the choppiest waters I have ever been in, and as we pitched and rolled about so much as to make at least three of us feel very sick, we waited an agonising 20 minutes for some other dive outfit we were now apparently sharing the site with to get their arses in gear and get on with it, which they failed to do for quite some time, thus earning them my eternal hatred.

We did get down there of course but the heaving and rolling of the boat was bloody severe, and waddling about wearing the full (heavy) gear (weight belt, bloody steel tank full of compressed air, my ample stomach) on board a small boat with a soaking wet deck, pitching about like an epileptic rodeo bull and all while wearing fins on board the boat which is pretty much against all the rules, it was at least mildly taxing and irksome. For some insane reason I was elected to go in first and I'd never gone in like this before, off the back of a level deck, and while taking one big stride into water is is the easiest of entries - and hardly sounds like a tricky maneuvre - do bear in mind my general dislike of a) falling b) water - but indeed it was a day of firsts.

The first time I had ever worn contact lenses; okay, I wore them for about six hours on new year's eve 2006 for the midnight party on London Bridge, but as we had downed a bottle of champagne and much, much wine on the tube from Finsbury Park, and I was out of my tree on something else I couldn't possibly disclose here, it is fair to say that was not a valid experience. I don't remember my friends forcing them in, nor prising them out at the end of the night either, so that really doesn't count ;P ); the real true genuine first time I'd dived independently without an instructor; first time jumping off a boat in a heavy swell; first time being,/strong> in fucking boat with swell that heavy; first dive with a group; first dive with sharks; and the first time I lost three pounds in pure fear and a further six pounds when I shit myself inside my wetsuit. Okay that last part isn't true, but it could have been. Oh, it was close.

The dive itself, `wow` would be a good word, also `fantastic` and `awesome` spring to mind but, more importantly, it was completely New, and that is my favourite word of all. Now I have to disappoint you all here and admit that I did not, in point of fact, actually see any tiger sharks. This is because there were not any tiger sharks. There were some bull sharks and possibly some smaller white tipped reef, black tipped reef, or grey reef sharks, but if so they were small and generally keeping themselves to themselves. In any case all these interesting predators kept their distance, were so fleet as to be essentially absent as soon as one got out the register and the green biro, and were anything but numerous. No matter.

What there were were hundreds, absolutely hundreds of humpheaded wrasse, a pretty sizeable fish of the blocky and squat school of piscine anatomy, each maybe three feet long and two feet high, and a couple of truly frighteningly large New Zealand Groupers, a fish so large and so stupid as to occasionally take pieces out of divers, such as their calves or half their hands, if particularly unlucky. They are not predatory fish and would never attack anything like a human despite being approximately twice the size and weight of an adult man, but they are just so depressingly dense they cannot tell the difference between dead aquatic carrion and a live, multicoloured biped.

Also in the mix were a vast number of a barracuda-like fish again maybe three feet long, but only around seven or eight inches high or thick. These were fast, curious and hungry, as were all our underwater friends that day, and curiously featured mouths on the upper side of their snouts rather than near the bottom. The top of their heads in fact seemed hinged flat so as to pivot from parallel to the ocean floor and back again when they fed. Funny looking buggers, but fascinating, as were the thousands and thousands of rainbow fish, clown fish, angel fish of a dozen varieties and some amazing creature that was laced with vivid purple and green lines and had, I kid you not, a perfectly day-glo luminous pink patch at it's forehead and looked for all the world as if it had just been coloured in by the people who make Post-It notes. Amazing thing it was, like many of the others it was a sort-of medium-sized thing, about the size on a medium-sized fish

The star of the show, however, were the nurse sharks, and they were massive, graceful, playful, curious and friendly, and there about seven or eight of them down there with us, the largest around thirteen feet long - about 4 metres - and best of all, we got to stroke them, which was amazing on many levels. The really are lovely things, hardly threatening at all except for their size and mostly because they do not have the stereotypical shark's mouth of vicious-looking teeth set under the snout awaiting your arms and legs, but have mouths more like that of the manta ray, although they are certainly carnivores and were devouring the contents of that wheelie-bin full of dead fish like no-one's business. Yes they brought a wheelie bin full of dead fish. As you do.

In fact they do because these sharks - or sharks very much like them, possibly their friends and relatives - get fed every single day at around the same place, which does lend a certain element of unreality to the thing in principal, but in truth it all happens near an ancient reef and the fish are all certainly wild, about as wild as you can get being in the waters of the South Seas. The only thing down there not entirely natural to the environment was us, yet the fish did not mind in the slightest. They are the most amazingly curious creatures, fish, and the wonder of diving comes from the wonderful fact that we as humans have managed to not totally fuck up at least one environment on this Earth, a fact which we can all be proud of I think, even if it was kind of done by default, what with the whole not-breathing underwater thing, and all that.

-

And so I left Pacific Harbour a day or two later and have found myself after a brief overnighter in Nadi - and no, there really is nothing wrong with it at all. It's quite pleasant actually, even the down and dirty parts. I don't know what anyone was going on about - I boarded the Yasawa Flyer catamaran and was whisked away to some distant islands, which is where I write this from, overlooking a vast crystal-clear stretch of water, in an aquamarine bay on an island girdled by a huge coral reef, and as I sit here, finish this paragraph and this beer, I can't help but say to you all: I wish you were here, it really is bloody marvellous

Msg reads - Further service will be suspended until I get to New Zealand and settle down a bit. Where have we heard this before?

I'm in a little group of islands called the Yasawas, on a week-long trip through an awful lot of small resorts full of energetic young party people, in order to see some beaches, do a bit of diving, and punish my naughty liver for some crime or other. I really didn't mean to get smashed last night, but hey, when in Rome and all that jazz.

What this means is that my full posts, written on Le Laptop d'Hippy, cannot be posted at the proper time as WiFi is but a dream in these parts. Internet yes, but it's really all sent by relay smoke signals and a couple of baked bean cans and some string.

So there will be a short barrage of post-dated posts coming at the end of the week. Put your pants back on and try to contain your excitement, please.

All I can say is that I had a bloody busy day yesterday, spending almost all of it in the water one way or another, was set upon by sea lice in a cave and narrowly avoided being churned into a loose meaty paste by boat propellers no fewer than three times.

It was quite exhasuting. Hence the getting smashed.

Hippy out