30 Jun 2008, Posted by Cat in News, 2 Comments. Tagged fiji

Fiji

Bula!

We’re spending a week in Suva with our friends Kaaron & James. Their home is very swank, overlooking what I presume is Suva Bay. You can see right across the water to a set of multi-toned hills in the distance.

This is not the Fiji of travel brochures and resorts. Suva is a dusty, dirty place with potholed roads and dilapidated buildings, hand painted signage, unfiltered exhausts. Foliage is thick and lush and there are many palm trees. Traffic is chaotic. Fijians don’t differentiate much between the footpath and the road so its best to drive slow. I’m told the drive from Suva to Nadi is dangerous at night because of all the people who’ll be sitting on the road holding kava sessions and whatnot. The sound of kava pounding has a distinctive ting ting ting to it. I’ve heard it several times since we’ve been here but haven’t seen any yet.

Kaaron has been taking us to all the excitement hot spots. First there was Fun Day at The Chanel House of Compassion, a local old people’s home where for 20c I bought 2 books: Miracles of the Gods, a hard look at the supernatural by our friend Erich von Daniken, and The problem of Doing Your Own Thing by Bob Mumford. A quick perusal reveals that the Von Daniken is boring and the Mumford is a shocker, all about the innate nature of rebellion and disobedience in the face of god’s authority. Its not often you can spend twenty Fijian cents and feel so thoroughly ripped off.

After that, Kaiyum, our taxi driver, turned down a dusty road and delivered us to something akin to a $2 shop back home. This one sold a variety of beauty products including ‘Hair Food Wax: Broccoli Seed Oil’, His Sexiest Musks, Bod Man which comes in the options of Hard Rock or Tekno, The Ritz Oil of Beauty, Cute & Curly Crème Relaxer, Stylin Dredz Mouldin Gel Wax, Lusti Carrot Oil hair & scalp conditioner, Organic Hair Mayonnaise. One entire stand was branded ‘Design Impostors, parfums de Coeur’.

When we’d had all the beauty enhancement we could take, we visited Flash Entertainment: an Indian-run DVD shop. Rentals filled the centre, for sale stuff lined the walls. Everything was covered in a film of grimy exhaust pollution. The uneven cement floor was patched with sheets of ripped linoleum, china blue and floral brown. There are two types of movie for sale: original copy and cinema copy. You can buy eight movies for fifteen Fijian dollars. There’s a Hindu shrine behind the counter, featuring silver and gold coloured plastic deities, a burning candle and half a glass of milk. Fans swirl uselessly suspended from the ceiling. Two heavily made up Indian women serve behind the counter alongside two hip young dudes sporting gold earrings and large watches. Darling, that’s a cinema copy, the woman in the bright yellow sari tells me whenever I pick the wrong one up. Cinema copy means someone sat in a cinema with a video camera and filmed the movie from their seat.

Rob is in dodgy DVD heaven. Every second title seems to have either zombies in it, or a giant snake.

Creased and folded posters for movies I have never heard of flap lazily in the aircon breeze. Movies with names like Partner, Good Boy Bad Boy, Mr White Mr Black, Kraazy 4, Bombay to Bangkok, Heyy Baby. Rob tells the clerks he’s after a copy of Zombie Strippers. A paper taped to the wall informs us they have religious movies for sale too. Ramayana, Krishna, Maha Shivpuran, Mahabhrat, Vishnu Puran Om Namoh Shivay.

We seemed to be the only white folks in the city today, which surprised me. Somehow I expected a contingent of scruffy backpackers at the very least. Kaaron says the place floods with tourists whenever a cruise ship berths. We wandered in and out of shops checking out the kaleidoscopic array of kitsch on display. Lurid plastic trash from Taiwan and beyond, everything from kitchenware to Ganesha idols. A mix of Bee Gees, bangara and Bula music blared from speakers. People are pretty friendly. No one seems to be staring at us. We stopped for lunch in an exceptionally fine curry house. It helps so much when you’re staying with someone who knows a place and don’t have to take pot luck with restaurants.

I bought some nasty little items for my bar back home. Rob bought a huge Ultraman doll and a game of Transformers Monopoly for Kaaron’s kids. They’re playing it now as I sit on the deck staring out across the water, wondering if it’s coconut shell daiquiri-O’clock yet…