Adam, January 2007
From Tribewanted
Well, first off I have to apologise for the delay in getting my write up of my time on Vorovoro done and posted. I know there haven’t been many posts from people who have visited the island up until recently, but to be completely honest with everyone, I can absolutely understand why people haven’t posted about their experiences in the past, because it is extremely difficult to describe (and compile) in just one post how special Vorovoro is and the experiences you have there. If the people who have been there so far are anything like me, I can understand, because I can’t do things in halves, so I either do it properly or I don’t do it all. Just the thought of sitting down and compiling my thoughts and memories was very overwhelming (and I was only there for 8 days) but I’ve decided to bite the bullet and take it on.
Starting from the beginning then – the plane ride from Nadi to Labasa. You get into a small, roughly 15 seater, plane after having your luggage weighed, and even getting on the scales yourself (I flew with Sun Air). It was funny though, just to look at the difference between the way Sun Air and Air Fiji operate (their check-in counters were side-by-side in Nadi Airport). Sun Air as a whole seemed to be very laid back (they didn’t even have a proper staff uniform for crying out loud), which was cool, because that could never happen anywhere at home, and it was just a nice reminder of how different the Fijian culture is as a whole. It was easily the smallest plane that I’ve been on, so it was definitely a bizarre feeling to have the plane fish tailing down the runway as it picked up enough speed to take off. I know it’s been said before, but the views on the plane ride to Labasa are spectacular at the worst of times. The route pretty much follows the coast so you have the mountains and the landscapes to your right, while you have the ocean and its islands to your left. Either way you’re going to come out a winner. The turbulence was fine while we were flying normally, but as soon as they started to bring the plane down to land it was insane. Objectively it probably wasn’t any stronger than what you’d get in a bigger plane, but being in such a small plane, it really throws you round quite a bit. Anyway, we landed, and in one piece, so you’ve got to be happy about that.
I was greeted at Labasa Airport by Kimbo, who had a few odd bits and pieces to do in Labasa, so we headed back to High Street in one of the local taxis, which was about a 15 minute drive from memory. Probably the first thing you notice when you get in the taxi is that it has seat belts, but nowhere to plug/click them in. Given some of the driving that goes on in and around Labasa, that probably isn’t the best thing if you are at all concerned for your safety and well being. The roads are generally in pretty good condition (a few pot holes here and there), but don’t be surprised if your driver pulls the odd overtaking on the wrong side of the road while going round a blind corner move. I think they must teach them that move at taxi driver school, because it’s probably about as common as a set of traffic lights is at home.
Labasa is pretty much what I’d expect if I planned on going to India; there are a few limbless beggars on the side of the street, it’s hot, it’s dusty, the Indian music playing in the background, but also, everything is very cheap. Beware of out of date food in the shops though, as Kimbo pointed out when he was shopping for snack foods like chips/crisps and the like. Also, if you’re in Labasa you have to check out the Vodafone shop; after spending about 20 minutes walking around High Street, stepping through the doors of that shop is like stepping into another world. After all the shopping and bargaining was done (Sulu – check, Kava – check, Other Supplies – check) you head off to the Grand Eastern Hotel and the jetty which backs off the hotel onto the Labasa River.
We were met at the jetty by the guy who was probably my favourite local of the whole trip; Api the boat captain. Api is an absolute legend and is such a friendly and helpful guy. Anytime we wanted to do something Api would be into it 100%, and would pretty much drop everything he was doing to go where we needed to go or help us do what we needed to do. I can’t speak highly enough of the bloke. So Api picked us up in the boat and we headed off to Vorovoro but we had to make a stop off at Vuli Muli to look for a carpenter by the name of Peter, who had been recommended to us by Tui Mali to work of Chief Stu’s accommodation project. Luckily enough for me, that meant we got to go a different way to Vorovoro, which involved taking a shortcut through what looked like a man-made track through the mangroves, meaning that there wasn’t much room on either side of the boat or above our heads. In fact, a couple of times we had to duck or move our heads out of the way so we weren’t hit in the face by a dangling piece of mangrove, however, that didn’t stop Api from putting his foot to the floor, so to speak, and going as fast as he could through this track. I’ve never been on one of those racing speed boats before, but I imagine it would be something similar to that experience.
Onward to Vuli Muli, the one house village, and I had my first experience with the “month of happiness” and the related shenanigans that go on with it. Apparently the Fijians celebrate New Years for the whole month of January, and they do so by wetting each other and throwing/dragging each other into the sea. Little kids are the worst though, because they can sneak up behind you without you noticing and dump a bottle of water on your head or back before you even know what’s going on. It was a lot of fun anyway. We had a quick chat with the locals there before heading off round the corner to Vorovoro for the first time.
There’s nothing quite like driving up to the beach of Vorovoro for the first time. The tribal village is well disguised by the trees that are dotted around the beachfront, so you wouldn’t even know anything was happening on Vorovoro if weren’t intentionally looking for it. Then you see people moving about, in and around the trees, coming toward the beach to greet you and give you a hand with your bags. Even at this stage, you have a clear sense that Vorovoro is a special place and that the people on it will be very easy to get along with. During my time on Vorovoro, it was pretty much a week for the lads. When I arrived, the island was inhabited by Dan, Kimbo (staff – island gapper), Murray (staff – island gapper), Chief Stu & Marco (tribie). All great blokes, very easy to get along with, and helped make my week as great as it possibly could be. Before I went to Vorovoro, I felt that I would be disappointed if not many people were on Vorovoro, whenever it was that I decided to book my stay. Having been there now and having shared the experience with such a small group (a few days later we had John & Holly from Shine TV arrive, and SJ came back a day or two after that) I got the feeling that anything over 15-20 people at the one time would make the whole experience very different. Sure there might be more partying, but having a large group fundamentally affects the way you interact with both the locals and your fellow tribies. Because there were so few of us when I was there, it meant we were able to interact with local ladies working in the kitchen and they knew each of us by name (both standard and the Fijian version – I believe mine sounded something like Atumma), which was one of the best things about Vorovoro. Having a large group would basically destroy that close relationship, as the kitchen ladies (and other locals for that matter) would not be able to remember so many names (unless we all wore name tags). The other thing was that because we were a small group, there was no us & them divide – we could do everything as a group (TW) and we could easily integrate into anything the locals were doing without worrying about there being too many numbers or it being too hard to organize the transportation. Generally the boats would probably hold around 10-15 people (although I’m not sure exactly as we never had it that full!) so once you go over that point, you either have people breaking away from the group and doing their own thing, or you need to make two trips. Either way, it’s not really ideal in my opinion, but I just thought I’d share my thoughts on the issue of numbers, because being on the island gave me a change of perspective.
Once you get to Vorovoro, you’ll learn very quickly that time doesn’t serve any real purpose on the island. The only things that matter are the tides, the sun and the food bell. Anything you want to do will be dependent on one or all of those three things rather than time. Lucy (I think it was Lucy, anyway) did a brilliant is describing the day to day routine and activities, so I’ll just share some of my more memorable experiences, which hopefully should save a bit of time (and less reading for you guys; not much less though).
The first day I got to Vorovoro, Murray and Marco decided they were going to go for a run, so I thought I’d go along and get some exercise, because I didn’t have plans to do much more exercise over the course of my week and I thought it would offset my laziness in some strange way. Anyway, we decided to do the 4 Peaks Challenge, which I had been looking forward to, but soon learned that it was way out of my league, shortly after making my way down Peak One and starting the run up Peak Two. It’s not so much of a run, as it is a rock climb, in some parts, but still it’s a great challenge for anyone who wants to test their fitness. You’ll almost certainly need a guide with you though, as it’s very easy to get lost when there’s no obvious track anywhere. Anyone who can run the whole thing has to be super super fit, and I think just finishing the course would be an achievement for most people. Beware though, if I were a injury forecaster (rather than weather) I would say the likelihood for rolled ankles and broken legs is high if you’re running the whole thing, so take it easy a little bit (at least Murray gets to keep his record then). After getting flogged by the 4 Peaks Challenge, I was able to bounce back and win my first game of ‘****head’ after dinner, which was definitely a favourite card game of the guys on the island, and I can see why (it is addictive). Also, there was Marco’s tea tree oil incident – think, bad case of chaffing around the groin region, a bottle of tea tree oil, combined with some not necessarily applicable anecdotal advice and you should be on your way to piecing together the puzzle. Needless to say it was quite funny at the time (well, I don’t think Marco was laughing, but everyone else was laughing for him).
The snorkeling is amazing on Vorovoro. Pretty much anywhere you go, you will hit some spectacular coral and a wide assortment of brightly coloured fish. If your not a strong swimmer, you can go about 10 metres off the shore (no waves there and it’s shallow enough to stand up if you need to) and you should find coral all the way up and down the main beach. Later in the week we got a bit more adventurous so we organized a snorkeling trip with Api, to check out a few spots by boat. We went to one spot about 100m off Vorovoro, and it was probably about 5-8m deep there, and the coral structures were absolutely amazing. I think John from Shine did a bit of filming from the boat while we were snorkeling, so you might even see it on the doco if you’re lucky (probably not though). After that, we headed out to the section where the inner reef meets the channel, known as the Mali Wall, which is where the depth drops from around 5m to over 30m. It’s like looking into the deep abyss – completely black and you cannot see a thing. We chose to go to this spot because there were no breaking waves (as compared with the outer reef) and Dan was saying that it’s where you get sharks and sea snakes, and what do you know, as soon as we stopped the boat the first thing we saw was a 5ft Reef Shark swim underneath the boat. I think Dan was the only one of us who had swum with sharks before, so it took a bit of encouragement for us all to get into the water, but once we got in we didn’t see it again, so I wasn’t complaining. A word to the wise, make sure you take sun cream with you if you go on a snorkeling trip because, you will get burnt on your back, even if you can’t feel it. I think pretty much everyone who got in the water that day ended up which some level of sunburn on their back, even though we all were wearing suncream before we left.
Listening to the Fijians play guitar is an amazing experience. I think every single Fijian I met could play guitar and sing at the same time, which is more than I can say for myself. They tend to play the same religious songs over and over again, but still, some of the songs are really beautiful and are a treat to listen to. Keep your ears out for Raijelli strangling the cat too (we couldn’t work out if she was serious or not about her singing).
The day we got to release the turtle was also a very special experience. I heard one of the other lads say that the Fijians had a turtle down in the other village, but I couldn’t have been bothered going down there, so I didn’t actually see it until Dan had done all his persuading and they had loaded the turtle into the boat and brought the boat up to our beach so we could get in. It was very random, but given Vorovoro is apparently a known turtle breeding ground, it makes sense that they would have found the turtle on the beach. I think we got to the turtle just in time, as it didn’t look to be in the best shape while we had it in the boat on the way back to where we heard it had been found/laying its eggs. I think Kimbo caught some of the action on one of Shine’s loaned TV cameras, so I’d say some of that footage might actually end up on the documentary. After we released the turtle we decided that we’d trek back up to the same spot at night to see if the turtle had come back to the beach for the eggs, or if we could even work out where the eggs were. We didn’t find the eggs, but we did find a ton of crabs anytime you would shine your torch a few metres ahead of where you were walking. We also found a massive swarm of sand flies anytime you turned your torch on, as they headed towards the light. It was times like these I was grateful that I didn’t decide to bring a headlamp. Lastly we came across a couple of sea snakes, which was about the only time I saw them during my whole week (unless you go looking for them around the rocks, you probably won’t see them). Apparently one of them was one of the biggest Dan had ever seen, but I was more worried about the fact that the tide was coming in, which meant that they were actually in the water and would able to move around if one of us were to slip on the rocks.
We received a letter from Vesi village early on in the week; it was addressed to the tribe, but it was completely written in Fijian. I was able to get a picture of it for anyone that’s interested:
We were going to get Kessa (who works in the kitchen) to translate it for us, but I think we got the gist of it – Curry night, 11/1/07 at 7pm and bring $3. Everyone was happy to go along, as it was a fundraiser, and not many of us had been to Vesi yet (the most distant village on Mali). It was also the first chance I had to try out my sulu, which was a lot bigger than everyone else’s for some reason. Just as we were getting ready, it started to rain pretty hard, but we got our rain jackets and decided to soldier on. We got about 10 minutes (probably 10 of the most miserable minutes of my life) into the 30 minute trip, driving into the pelting rain (the sun had already gone down so it was pitch black as well) and we were absolutely soaked (even with rain jackets) so we decided to turn around and head back home. We were all really looking forward to wrapping our jaws around some goat curry, but it wasn’t to be, so instead we had to settle for Chief Stu’s gourmet delight that he whipped up in the kitchen once we got back to our village (which was not a bad deal at all).
The fishing trip with Api was one of my favourite things of the whole week. We teed it up with Kimbo, who spoke to Api, and the same day we went down to the village to have an impromptu lesson in tying knots and make lures from scratch. We were up at 4:30am the next day to beat the sunrise and before too long we were all kitted out and set of on our trip. Fishing trips on Vorovoro use a different technique to what most people think of when you talk about fishing, in that all you use is fishing line, the lure (no bait needed) and your hands. It’s very primitive, but at the same time, also a lot of fun. Basically, two of you feed your lines off the back of the boat while Api drives around for a couple of hours. I was using the small fish line, while Marco had the big fish line, and we ended up tied on 2 fish a piece – I had two salmon, while Marco had a 5kg Sanga and a small barracuda (apparently we could have got $40 if we sold them at the markets, but we decided to eat them instead). Once we got back to the beach Api gave us a lesson in gutting the fish, which was a bit of an eye opener for someone like me who hasn’t exactly done a lot of fishing in their life. Just when we thought Api was going to throw the fish guts away, we learned that they actually eat the fish guts as well as the fish (separately though). So off he went into the kitchen, and about half an hour later he came out with a plateful of cooked fish guts which he offered round to everyone. I tried the fish eggs, which actually tasted pretty good (well, a lot better than it looked anyway) but I wasn’t too keen to try any of the fish organs. That was probably the first and last time I’ll ever eats fish guts, I think it’s safe to say.
On my last night most of the crew were staying in Labasa, and it was just Kimbo, Chief Stu, myself and Api at camp, so we decided to do a bit of night-time spearfishing. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any equipment except for a few torches, but Chief knocked up a few pieces of bamboo with a nail tied to the end and we were in business. We spent probably over an hour floating around the shore in the boat, to no avail, but we did see a lot a jumping fish that were either attracted to the torch light or repelled by the torch light (we couldn’t work out which). Eventually Api & Stu decided to get out of the boat and walking around while they were spearfishing, that was until Stu almost stepped on an Eagle Ray, so that was pretty much the end of our night time adventure. And no we didn’t catch anything, although Api managed to spear one small fish with a left over piece of steel rod.
I could go on forever describing my experiences (not that I haven’t done so already) but I think I’ve covered the main things that made my time on the island as good and as extraordinary as it was. On that note, I have to endorse everything Dan/Taniela has said on his post “Experience Vorovoro” and make sure you do everything he recommends on the list. Trust me, when I say that you’re experience will be all the better for it. Make sure you spend some time with Api (boat captain), Frances & Va (the head chefs) as they are all absolute legends, and you will not regret spending time with these people. The great thing about Vorovoro is that you don’t have to do anything, so what your experience/adventure involves is completely up to you. I can’t wait to get back there later in the year, but until then you can check out some of my pictures on my Flickr page:
www.flickr.com
I tried to photograph the main facilities so you guys at home can at get some kind of idea what to expect when you get out to Vorovoro. Enjoy!
Vinaka
Adam
