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.
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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
