(written on February 21st and 23rd from notes taken previously)
Holy moly, what a day!
It was a long night for me last night, but incredibly, I managed to get a reasonably decent sleep, despite waking up a bazillion times both from physical discomfort as well as out of concern for all of my charging devices that were near me.
🙏
After getting up for the last time, my first order of business was to find my way over to the domestic terminal, which turned out to be a teeny tiny terminal at the far end of the airport complex. 😆
I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that the overwhelming majority of flights in and out of the main airport are international.
So off to the domestic terminal I went, getting my boarding pass and then sitting down in the waiting area prior to going through security (it was my understanding, based on what I thought I heard the lady say, that once through security, you’re not allowed back).
I noticed a few LDS missionaries were there in the waiting room as well, apparently two missionaries sending off a third.
I hung out in the waiting area there for a little while and then finally decided to go through security, which was… a piece of cake. 🙃
They didn’t care at all about my oversized bottle of sunscreen nor my water bottle already full of water. 😎
I had hopes they wouldn’t care, being so small, and they didn’t. Or they just didn’t notice? 🙃
I parked my little butt on the ground next to the power outlet, so I could continue keeping my phone and other devices charged, and gratefully, it was functional.
The missionary that was being dropped off by the other elders sat near me, so I stuck up a conversation with him, and we chatted for a good little while, mostly about his mission and where he had been and was going, and also a little bit about the gospel itself.
Good stuff.
There were two flights leaving at about the same time, one going to the airport in Savusavu on Fiji’s second biggest island Vanua Levu (where the missionary was headed) and one going to the airport in Matei, on the island of Taveuni, where I was headed.
The other plane left first, seemingly barely before mine, and then just before boarding, I was grateful to find that somehow I’d been mistaken about there being no bathroom on the security side of the domestic terminal (that had been the main reason for staying in the lounge area prior to going through security, as I wanted to be sure that I had a bathroom if I needed one (no bathroom on the plane itself).
So I used the bathroom and then walked out onto the tarmac and up the steps of the plain into our small 19-seat? airplane.
It was such a cute little thing 🙃. 🛩️
I don’t know why, but I’m not really ever nervous on airplanes. Doesn’t matter how much turbulence there is, how much the plane shakes, I just sort of always expect everything’s gonna be okay.
I suppose it’ll be quite the shock if I’m in an airplane and it turns out that everything’s not okay. 😆
But hey, maybe I’ll survive because I’ll be completely relaxed if we crash. 🙃
The flight to Taveuni was short but beautiful, first flying northeast from the airport across the length of the big island (which appeared, nearly entirely, to be remote, forested hill country).
After passing over the mainland, we continued the same course over the ocean, passing other islands and gazillions of reefs on the way to Taveuni.
The color of the ocean and the view of the reefs from above was marvelous. 😊
As we approached the airport in matei, it seemed like we did a really big loop (though I’m not really sure why because it seemed like we ended up coming back in at just about the same trajectory as the beginning of the big circle? 🤷).
The loop allowed for a greater view from above, so… great. 😊
Conveniently, the car rental guy was there at the tiny, open-air airport waiting for me. I paid him for the first day of the rental, and he gave me a quick rundown of the vehicle and the gas level before handing me the keys and heading off in his own vehicle.
My first stop was to the nearby grocery store, which was teeny. 🙃 There was not much of anything. 🙃
But I bought some water and some canned fish, and some baked beans? I think?
I also had a handful of granola bars left over from New Zealand, which was nice.
I thought about getting gas, but the gas gauge read just barely below a half a tank, and this is a pretty small island (even though it’s the third largest in the entire 300+ Fijian archipelago), so I decided not to bother just yet.
My first impression as I drove away from the grocery store around the northeast end of the island toward the east coast was that now I was on a real tropical island. 🙃
Hot. Humid. Banana trees. Papaya trees. Coconut trees–everywhere.
I snapped a picture to send to my brother Jared, as he spent nearly two years of his life living on tropical islands in French Polynesia. I thought he might get a kick out of seeing what I guessed were similar-looking islands.
My first impressions of Taveuni were also very much in line with what I had read online, that despite being the third largest island, it was much more remote and gave a much more laid-back, sort of authentically Fijian island-life experience.
There were kids playing and goofing around in the creek just down the road from where I had stopped for groceries.
As I drove down the east coast, I saw more kids playing in the rivers, sometimes their moms (presumably) with them washing clothes by hand in the same river.
When I saw men, they were by themselves or with other men, often carrying machetes, presumably going about the day’s work.
It seemed like a nice, quiet, simple kind of life. 😊
(Clearly, I have no actual experience being on islands like this one, but it felt like what I imagine daily life for a more remote-island dweller to be.)
I hadn’t gotten all that far before my fuel gauge ticked down a notch 😅, which led me to go ahead and turn around and go back to buy gas.
I think I didn’t understand how buying gas worked, so I pumped it myself without thinking much of it. It was only then that I realized that I accidentally jumped ahead in line of the other guy who was there at the pump. I guess he had been waiting for the person whose job it was to pump the gas to come out?
And I had just gone ahead and pumped it myself. 😅
The setup was old enough that once I finished pumping, the total for both the amount of gas and the money I was supposed to pay disappeared, so I think what I ended up paying was the pump operator’s best recollection of what the pump screen had indicated before clearing the data for the next pump.
Oops. 😅
I paid at the counter in cash and apologized to the man that I had accidentally cut in front of (who was super cool about it) and then headed on my way.
The dwellings that I passed on the east coast, way out in the country away from town were super basic. Tin roof, sometimes no doors or windows. Sometimes the houses were by themselves, and sometimes they were in a little cluster.
And everywhere, jungle.
My first stop was to the Bouma National Heritage Park, a place I had learned about by watching some other travelers documented experience via a YouTube video.
The heritage Park had three waterfalls, but the YouTube people only had time to go to two of them.
I paid the entrance fee and parked my rental car and started heading up the path, snapping pictures along the way as I had done periodically on the drive south down the coast.
I started texting my brother Richard back and forth a fair bit, as he also had spent some time living in tropical islands–for him it was the Cook Islands.
The walk to three Bouma-area falls (lower, middle, and upper Tavoro falls, I think they were named?) was… hot and sweaty. 🙃
But also beautiful.
The lower falls was beautiful and was the most popular of the three for swimming (and also supposedly for cliff jumping), but I didn’t stop to swim just yet, thinking that I would go to all three before choosing which one I wanted to hang out at.
That… turned out to be a bad idea, as I lost so much sweat during the hike to the first falls and from the first to the second, that I was already getting dehydrated.
Between the first and second falls, I started picking up trash, as there was a fair bit along the trail. 😕
There had been a bit of trash at the first falls that I didn’t pick up, but as I walked up the trail from there, I started picking up all the trash that I saw.
After the steepest and hardest part of the hike, but still between the first and second Falls, there was a sort of a gazebo lookout point next to either a lemon or a long tree with a beautiful view.
And lots of trash. 😕
So I picked up a bunch of trash and continued texting my brother Richard back and forth a bit and then continued walking along the path, picking up trash as I went.
Once I reached the second falls, wanting to reduce my water-intake requirements by reducing the volume of water pouring out of me via sweat, I spent a fair amount of time swimming and cooling off in the water.
I had hoped to maybe stay in the water long enough to get chilled, which would allow me to warm up on the next leg of the hike, but I grew impatient waiting in the water, gave up, and headed off up the trail toward the third falls. 🙃
And below is the very last picture I got to take with my phone today.
Why?
Weeeeell, still concerned that there might be water inside that, once removed, might allow the power button to function, I set my phone out on a rock in the Sun to heat up and hopefully expel any last moisture that might still be inside.
That… was a mistake. 😬
After setting my phone up on a rock, I swam a little bit in the upper falls’ catch pool, scrambled around the rocks a little bit to see if I might want to do a little bit of cliff jumping (which I decided against because, though I hadn’t heard of any concerns with dangerous parasites in the water in Fiji, and though it made logical sense that there weren’t any problems because other people were enjoying those kinds of activities, I also hadn’t done any research specifically on that matter and wasn’t in a place with reception to be able to do research and wasn’t interested in risking my health and safety for a few cliff jumps.
Ironically, when I jumped in from just a few feet above the water, I managed to not get my nose plugged properly, and had water shoot deep up into my sinuses anyway. 😅
And then it happened.
Literally the moment that I got back to my phone and picked it up, did its little vibration and shut itself off as a safety precaution from having overheated.
😶
And no, the power button didn’t suddenly start working. 😬
So now I was without a phone.
No clock.
No maps.
No communication of any kind.
No ability to research anything.
No camera to take pictures.
And silly me forgot to bring the backup phone with me to Fiji.
More fallout from my stupid decision the other day.
Play stupid games. Win stupid prizes.
😕
[sigh]
So I gathered up my stuff, put my phone in my day pack, grabbed my trash bag, and started heading down, picking up little bits of trash that I missed on the way up, stopping at the little gazebo place again and gathering up even more trash that was underneath the gazebo.
Once down at the lower falls, I chatted briefly with an Indian woman who lived on the other side of the island (there’s an absolutely enormous number of people of Indian descent in Fiji).
She offered me lunch, which was very kind of her, and I think I said something like ‘maybe after I go for a swim.’
I picked up the trash that I didn’t pick up on my first pass by the waterfall, and then I swam out into the waterfall catch pool with the lady’s family who were also out there enjoying the refreshing dip on a hot day.
I swam all the way to the other side, behind the waterfall, finding a half-filled water bottle inside a little mini cave that I then chucked out into the catch pool to grab later, which I did, swimming around with it for a little bit.
I noticed an empty bag of potato chips in the rocks beside the waterfall, so I swam over and grabbed the empty bag.
I chatted for a little bit with the people who were swimming along with me, two guys and a girl, a couple, and I think a relative of theirs?
Though married, she looked like she couldn’t have been more than 13 or 14. 🙃
I bid them all farewell and headed back down the trail, where I ended up gathering up the bulk of the trash.
I hadn’t really noticed any trash along the way on the flat portion of the hike, but when I started looking for it, gosh, it was everywhere.
If you just walked a few feet over to the slope down to the creek, there was trash all over the place, and so time and time again between the lower falls and the little visitor center by the road, I scrambled down the steep slope to pick up a whole bunch of trash.
By the time I was done, the reusable grocery bag that I had was stuffed completely full to well over overflowing.
Much to the surprise of the lady at the little visitors center to whom I gave the bag of trash. 🙃
But hey, now everybody walking to the waterfalls will have a nice clean path without trash. 😊
At least for a little while. 🙃
The on next adventure that I had on my list was to do the Lavena Coastal Walk, and I drove that direction, but once in the little visitors office, after seeing the price and contemplating the fact that I didn’t have enough water for the walk and was already pre-migraining from dehydration (headache already starting), I decided against going on the walk, instead simply beginning my drive back up the coast.
As I started driving back, I tried opening the can of fish that I had bought, and I got it open, but it popped open with some extra internal pressure, perhaps from being inside the hot vehicle? spraying fish oil all over me and the inside of the vehicle.
😒
[sigh]
Ugh.
Frustrated, I looked for a place to stop near water to try to clean myself up and clean the car off.
I ended up stopping at a place right on the ocean, where I tried to rinse off in the ocean water that was basically the temperature of bath water. 😅
Definitely not refreshing. 😆
I had my dish soap with me, which was the only way I was going to be getting oil out of my clothes, so I lathered myself up with a bit of dish soap, filled an empty water bottle full of seawater, and then tried to rinse myself off (biodegradable dish soap, at least according to the bottle 🙃).
It was about that time that a local man whom I had passed earlier caught up to me and asked me for a ride to his work which he said was just up over the next hill.
I obliged, opening up the back hatch and putting his equipment inside, and then driving him down the road.
We chatted a bit as I drove, and I kept thinking that we were going to arrive where he needed to go any second, but he kept saying further, further, further.
He said a phrase that I would hear again later that night, something like ‘on the top.’
Clearly I had no idea what he meant by that, nor what the other person meant by that, but eventually, after driving for a good while further than I had expected, we arrived at his stopping place, and I grabbed his stuff and wished him well.
I attempted one last adventure toward the coast (having a mental picture of another place on the map), but since I didn’t have my map, I chose the wrong road and ended up basically at a dead end. 😕
I decided it wasn’t really worth trying to do much more exploring without having a clue where I was going, so I drove back up the east coast and around the north coast until I got back to the grocery store, where I once again went inside, this time buying several bottles of water.
Now to find my hotel… which I wasn’t even sure I remembered the name of. 😆
No map. No address. No name that I could recall. And no way to look up my reservation. 😆
The only thing I remembered was that it was right there in Matei, and Matei isn’t a very large town, so I figured it was probably right along the main road because it wasn’t just a homestay: It was more of a resort.
As I was driving along the main road, I peeled my eyes, looking this way in that, hoping to recognize the name on a sign.
As I rounded the northern point of the island, beginning to make my way down the very beginnings of the west coast, it seemed like I must have gone too far, but right about then, I saw a sign with a name that I thought maybe I recognized.
Maravu Taveuni Lodge
🤔
I wasn’t 100% sure, and the entrance to the place was super awkward– a single Lane road winding around a well taken care of property before arriving at what I thought might be a main desk, but there was no sign at the building indicating the name of the place, so I kept going right on by, following the road down a hill a little bit, before realizing that the place that I had passed was probably the main building
So I did a little bit of an awkward three-point turn, and drove back up to that building, parking next to it, and walking over to the desk of the open-air entrance to the place, where I asked if, by any chance, they had a reservation for me there. 🙃
They did! I was in the right place! 🥳
Wahoo!!! 🥳
I explained that I no longer had a functional phone, and I needed to figure out my car rental situation. Gratefully, the lady behind the counter explained how to get to the car rental place, which I recognize by her description from earlier driving.
So I drove over to the car rental place, which looked a lot like a junk yard, 🙃 letting him know that I no longer had a phone to communicate with and that I was going to drop the car back to him that night.
He told me not to worry about it but to just leave it at the lodge, and he’d come by and pick it up in the morning while I was off on my snorkeling adventure.
Great. 🙏
Since I still had plenty of time left in the day, and since it was just a small island, I decided I might give a go at trying to find the local natural waterslide place I’d heard about from that same YouTube video.
It was supposedly a little confusing to find because the Google map doesn’t show the right place, but I didn’t have any map and was going to need to rely 100% on locals to tell me where it was. 🙃
So off I went down the west coast, stopping several times along the way to ask kids and adults alike how to get to the natural water slides.
That’s when I again heard the same phrase, something like ‘on the top,’ which doesn’t mean anything that I would think it would mean. 🙃
Eventually, when I felt like maybe I was starting to get close (the instructions that people gave me were just… Not much more helpful than pointing a finger in a direction as far as their actual usefulness in figuring out where on Earth I was and where I needed to go. 🙃), I ran into a young man (probably 20 something) who looked like he could use a ride, so I pulled over and asked if he needed a ride, and as we were talking, I told him that I was trying to find the natural slide. He actually offered to take me there, but we were almost already to where he needed to go, so I didn’t want to inconvenience him, so I just took note of the instructions that he gave me for how to get there and dropped him off.
That was a mistake. I should have taken him up on his offer. 😅
What followed was a bigger mistake.
Just as I dropped off the first guy, there was another guy who asked if maybe I could give him a ride, and he said it wasn’t going to be very far, so I agreed.
Just like with the previous young man, I mentioned that I was on my way to the natural slide but wasn’t 100% sure how to get there.
This man (said he’s name was Steven, but I didn’t know that I believe that at all) also offered to take me to the slides, and without knowing any better, I accepted his seemingly kind invitation.
But it wasn’t long before I regretted it.
At first, it was just that he was kind of… gosh I don’t even know how to describe it. He talked super dirty. He started talking about how he wanted me to sponsor him to go to the United States. He talked about how he wanted to join the military in the United States so he could become a sniper and kill people.
It was really creepy.
Then he started asking me about money, whether I had money, how much I had, what I had at my hotel.
😶
I was totally creeped out.
I lied, telling him I didn’t have any money with me.
When we got to the natural slide, I was beyond creeped out.
But it would get worse.
As we walked up the creek toward the slide, I was trying to figure out how to get away… what I could do to keep myself and my stuff safe.
I had the car key with me, but I didn’t want to have my key with me for him to potentially steal and run off with while I was in the water.
So when we got to the bottom end of the natural slide, I told him I needed to go back to my car really quickly.
I probably should have just driven away and left him there. 😬
But I didn’t. What I did do was hide the car key on the driver’s side strut tower. And then I went back up to where I had left the guy.
We then scrambled up the rock to the beginning of the natural slides, and started going down, slide by slide.
It was fun. Not spectacular, but fun. My concerns about the guy I was with definitely took away from the whole experience. 😅
I did want to go one more time down the slide, now that I knew how to do it myself, but he didn’t want to, and I certainly wasn’t going to push it.
Once back down at the vehicle, I didn’t want him to see me take the key from the strut tower, and he wasn’t in a hurry to leave anyway, wanting to smoke, which I had asked him not to do in the vehicle since it was a rental.
He continued making his dirty comments, talking about sleeping around and talking about finding me a woman to hook me up with, including a woman who is there that he said he knew.
It was worse than how I’m describing it. 😅
Once he was done with his smoke, we finally headed out, and he continued making all sorts of comments that were just… freaky.
He wanted me to give him my phone. He wanted me to give him water. He wanted all sorts of stuff.
And the way he looked around my car, like an eagle searching for prey, was just… disconcerting as well.
I discreetly moved my valuables from between the two seats to being in the door compartment next to me.
On the way back, he actually started grabbing the shifter, like he was wanting to take over the vehicle.
I wanted him gone.
He wanted me to take him to his house so he could get changed and then to take him somewhere else, or so he said.
I said no, that I would drop him off at his house, but then that was going to be it, so suddenly he didn’t want to go to his house but wanted to go back to where I had originally picked him up.
But once I got there, he didn’t want to get out of the car, and said he wanted to go somewhere else.
So I started driving to another place, but he didn’t want to get out there either. He asked me to pull over on the side of the road, but then all he did was just talk to a few women who were walking down the sidewalk.
Such a creepy dude.
Finally, he had me stop at a place where he actually got out of the car.
Holy. Freaking. Crap.
I’d been running through scenarios in my mind, how to react to certain things, what I would do if he did certain things.
Oh, how grateful I was for him to just. be. gone.
Very few times in my life have I had such a sketchy experience with somebody.
That first guy I gave a ride to seemed like such a cool dude. I totally should have taken him up on his offer. This other guy… Everything just fell off I think just about from the moment he got in the car.
But he was gone now, and I was free. 🙃
On my way back to the lodge, I saw a couple of missionaries walking down the road, so I pulled over and chatted with them and offered them a ride. I don’t know what the rules are for missionaries right now, but they declined the ride, though we did chat for a little bit before I bid them farewell and drove back to the lodge.
By the time I got back to the lodge, it was pretty much dark outside, so it was hard for me to see the inside of the little SUV to make sure that I had gotten all of my stuff out.
After having left my rain jacket on Nacula Island at the Blue Lagoon Resort, I was a little paranoid. 🙃
Eventually, after probably my third time feeling around the vehicle by Braille, I figured I probably had everything, closed up the van, locked it, and headed to my dorm room to get settled.
There were four of us in the little eight-bed dorm room (for bunk beds), a girl from Switzerland, a girl from the States, and a guy from the Czech Republic named Dominick.
I got to know Dominick pretty quickly–super nice guy, super easy to talk to, and we ended up chatting for a good little while.
My introduction to the girls was much less lengthy 🙃 (They weren’t in the room when I first got there and was chatting with Dominick). I think I chatted only just briefly with the Swiss girl, and the American girl I think came in while I was already lying down, so there wasn’t much more than a ‘hello’ exchanged. 🙃
I chose my bed because it was close to the door, but it was also a tad broken, tilting to one side. 😆
Oh well.
I put my headphones in, again just to use as ear plugs, and called it a night.
Man it’s been a crazy day. 😅
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 