Once we had settled into Vuda Marina, the next job was to get the boat out of the water.
With a normal monohull, that is a fairly routine operation. With our catamaran, it was a little more complicated. We needed a special lift, so we could not simply turn up and say, “Alright, pull us out.”
We had to wait our turn.
And waiting, as we were about to discover, would become our main activity in Fiji.
When our slot finally came, the boat was hauled out and only then could we properly see what we had done when we hit the reef.
Luckily, it was nothing catastrophic.
The damaged fiberglass had to be repaired, the paint redone, and everything checked properly. Since the boat was already out of the water, we decided to take care of a few other jobs and services that had been piling up as well.
So the plan was simple: fix the boat and move on.
Except that “fix the boat” ended up taking almost a month.
While the work was being done, we had time. A lot of it.
Most of the workers around the marina were Indo-Fijians, spending their days covered in resin, paint, oil and fiberglass dust. And once again, that image of Fiji that had already started confusing me began to settle in.
Before arriving, I had my own version of Fiji in my head.
Palm trees. Traditional Pacific culture. Villages. The people I had seen in travel magazines, documentaries and tourist brochures.
And, of course, all of that exists.
But the Fiji I saw while travelling around Viti Levu was very different from the postcard I had built in my imagination.
Especially in the towns.
Lautoka was the closest city to us, so we were there all the time. Sometimes by bus, sometimes by car, and very often, in my case, on foot.
My leg was still weak after almost three weeks of barely using it, so I decided to bring it back to life in the simplest possible way.
By walking.
And I walked.
From Vuda Marina I would sometimes do ten or fifteen kilometres in one direction. It did not even matter where I was going.
I just walked.
Most of the time I followed the narrow-gauge railway used to transport sugar cane. The tracks run through greenery, past villages and fields, and if you follow them long enough, they eventually take you towards Lautoka.
The little cane trains still used the line, loaded with sugar cane.
Those tracks became my personal walking trail.
Walk, exercise the leg, look around, and when a train comes, step aside.
About a kilometre from the marina there was also a small local beach beside the railway.
Nothing touristy.
No sun loungers, no cocktails.
Just a small beach, a few trees, sand, sea, and the railway behind it.
To be honest, I liked places like that more than most of the official “attractions.”
Sugar cane is not just scenery on this side of Fiji.
Between 1879 and 1916, the British brought more than 60,000 indentured labourers from British India, mainly to work on sugar plantations. The system became known locally as Girmit, from the English word agreement.
Many of those workers stayed after their contracts ended. They built families and new lives in Fiji, and their descendants have now been there for generations.
That part is important.
These are not people who arrived from India yesterday.
They were born in Fiji. Their parents were born in Fiji, and often their grandparents and great-grandparents as well.
They consider themselves Fijian, because they are.
At the same time, they have retained a great deal of Indian culture.
The music.
The clothing.
The food.
Religion.
Shops.
Language.
And for me, that was the part that kept pulling my attention.
It is not that Fijian identity is absent. Far from it.
You see “Bula” everywhere. You see shirts with Fijian patterns, tikis, traditional details, local food, villages, i-Taukei people and Pacific culture.
But especially in the cities, all of that somehow stayed in the background for me.
The Indian cultural influence was what kept jumping out first.
And that was where my disappointment started.
Not because there was anything wrong with those people or their culture.
It was simply because the Fiji I had imagined and the Fiji I was looking at were not the same place.
Lautoka was a perfect example.
At the entrance to town there was a large sign:
BULA & WELCOME TO LAUTOKA CITY
Flowers, palm trees, bright colours, the city crest.
Everything looked cheerful and tropical.
Next to it stood a fountain that looked as if the urban planning competition had been finished on a Friday at 2:55 p.m.
Even our idiots could not have designed something that stupid.
Then you go a few streets further and suddenly you are in complete chaos.
Especially around the market.
People, noise, produce, music, smells, traffic, everyone going somewhere, everyone selling something.
Nothing bad happened to us there. No incident.
It was simply crowded, noisy and constantly moving.
Lautoka itself is historically tied to sugar. The entire western side of Viti Levu grew around sugar-cane cultivation and processing, and Indo-Fijians and their ancestors played an enormous part in building that industry.
One day I had a pair of tracksuit bottoms that were too long.
Since time was something we had far too much of, I decided to find a tailor.
I found a shop with “tailor” written on the door and walked in.
The first thing I saw was a barber.
I asked:
“Tailor?”
They pointed further inside.
“Just keep going.”
The shop was maybe six metres long.
Barber chairs at the front.
Tailor further back.
So you could bring in your trousers to be shortened and get a haircut while you waited.
Damjan immediately took advantage of that and sat down for a haircut.
While I was waiting for him and for my tracksuit bottoms to be finished, somebody brought us a pile of DVDs and asked whether we wanted to buy any new movies.
Tailor.
Barber.
DVD shop.
All within six metres.
Maximum efficiency.
There were other little gems around town.
One hair salon had stretched a huge red banner across the front:
BOSS NOT HERE
Below it was the discounted price of a treatment.
I assume the logic was simple: the boss is away, so everything is cheaper.
Local Black Friday.
Except you do not have to wait for Friday.
You just wait for the boss to leave.
Later, in Suva, we found a fast-food place called:
JEKI CHEN FASTFOOD.
Jackie Chan has probably never heard of them.
But the name works.
Another thing that kept catching my eye was the signage.
It often looked as if digital printing had simply never reached the islands.
Advertisements, signs, public notices, even some official-looking boards seemed to have been painted by hand with a brush.
In Suva, even the cinema had hand-painted movie characters on the façade.
Batman.
Spider-Man.
All done with a brush.
Like old cinema posters from another era.
Sometimes it was charming.
Sometimes it looked as if the entire visual identity of Fiji had been designed by the same guy with two tins of paint.
Still, the greatest everyday mystery of our life in Fiji was neither history, sugar nor politics.
It was salami.
We wanted ordinary salami.
Nothing exotic.
You walk into a shop:
“Do you have salami?”
Blank looks.
“Salami.”
Nothing.
We showed them a picture.
They looked at the picture.
Then at us.
As though we were asking for a spare part for a spacecraft.
Apparently, in a surprising number of shops, the word simply did not exist.
Then, in the small shop at Vuda Marina, we finally found pepperoni.
A packet of around 150 grams.
Almost twenty dollars.
Twenty.
For 150 grams of salami.
The first day we saw the price, we laughed.
A few days later, it was less funny.
A few days after that, we bought one.
Then another.
Then another.
People can get used to anything.
Once we finally had the stuff, we made a pizza with pepperoni and mushrooms and did not exactly use the pepperoni sparingly.
If you are paying for salami as if it were made of gold, you want to see where the money went.
The local pizza place in Lautoka, meanwhile, had a wonderfully simple menu.
Tuna pizza.
Chicken pizza.
That was it.
No four cheeses.
No Quattro Stagioni.
No questions about rocket leaves.
Tuna or chicken.
Make your decision.
The good thing about the marina shop was that certain purchases came with internet vouchers.
So we started splitting our shopping into separate transactions to collect as many Wi-Fi hours as possible.
At least the twenty-dollar pepperoni was useful for something.
And the internet actually became useful.
Because I had far too much free time, I started properly sorting through the video clips I had filmed during the voyage.
I cut them, edited them and uploaded them to stock-footage platforms.
At the time, I mostly did it because I had nothing better to do.
It turned out to be one of the better decisions I made during that whole period.
Seven or eight years later, those same clips still occasionally make me money.
So at least something useful came out of the boredom in Fiji.
And there was plenty of boredom.
When we were not travelling somewhere by bus or rental car, I had my walks.
Local buses were a category of their own.
Many barely had windows at all, just open sides.
When the road was paved, it was fine.
Once the asphalt disappeared, everything started jumping, shaking and rattling so much that after ten minutes there was not much difference between travelling by bus, riding a horse or sitting in a carriage.
The main advantage of the bus was that at least it had a roof.
From Lautoka, the bus did not go all the way to the marina.
It stopped at the Vuda Road junction, and from there we still had about a kilometre to walk.
There was a timetable, so it helped to know when the bus was coming.
Miss it, and you walked.
By then, I did not mind.
My leg was getting better.
The wound had healed very well. I was left with a scar and a strange numb sensation around part of it, but I could walk normally again.
Little by little, I learned nearly every road around Vuda.
After a while I knew where most tracks led, where the villages were, and how long it took me to walk to different places.
And the locals started recognising me as well.
They were probably wondering who this idiot was who kept walking ten kilometres along the same railway line and then coming back later.
But I had time.
Suva was too far away to visit every day, so we went to the capital roughly once a week.
Suva has been Fiji’s capital since 1882, when the colonial administration was moved there from Levuka because it had a better harbour and more room to expand.
Today it is Fiji’s largest and most cosmopolitan city, a political, administrative and commercial centre for much of the South Pacific.
And it looks nothing like what most people imagine when they hear the word “Fiji.”
A proper city.
Traffic.
Shops.
Chinese signs.
Indian businesses.
Offices.
Canals.
Old colonial buildings mixed with newer ones.
Sacred Heart Cathedral standing seriously in the middle of it all with its two stone towers.
And somewhere between all of that:
Jeki Chen Fastfood.
I did not think Suva was ugly.
It just was not the Fiji I had carried in my head.
Perhaps it was the real Fiji.
I simply was not ready to accept that yet.
That is probably the problem with places you imagine for years before you finally see them.
When you arrive, they have absolutely no obligation to be what you imagined.
The streets of Suva and Lautoka were full of used Japanese cars, especially Toyotas.
Fiji drives on the left, and a lot of the cars are imported from the Japanese domestic market.
On many of those cars, the indicator and wiper stalks are on the opposite sides from what European drivers are used to.
It sounds like a tiny detail.
Until you sit behind the wheel.
You want to turn.
Your hand moves automatically.
And the windscreen wipers start scraping across a perfectly dry windscreen.
After a while you stop getting annoyed.
The wipers simply become an alternative Fijian turn signal.
Right next to Vuda Marina was First Landing Resort.
It had a small artificial island shaped like a foot, connected to the shore. The idea was linked to local tradition about the first arrival of Fijian ancestors in that area.
For us, honestly, it was mostly another place to go when we no longer knew what to do with ourselves.
And that problem was becoming increasingly common.
The best proof of how bored I was is that I started photographing the same sunset from the same spot, minute by minute, and then turning the photographs into composite images.
When you wait long enough for somebody to repair your boat, even the sunset becomes a project.
All else aside, when the sun starts to set in Fiji, that is when the magic begins. The sky changes colour from one minute to the next — from pale yellow and gold, through orange and red, into purple and deep blue. Sometimes it feels as though you are watching several different sunsets at once. The clouds catch completely different shades, the sea reflects them back, and every few minutes the whole scene looks different again. The colours can be so intense and varied that at times it hardly feels real. And however much Fiji may have disappointed me in other ways, its sunsets always managed to bring some of the magic back.
Those photographs also showed the tidal range very clearly.
The water level changed enough that places which had been underwater a few hours earlier suddenly became exposed coral, stones and shallow pools.
At one point I even made a time-lapse of a blue sea star slowly moving through the shallows as the tide went out.
Eventually it was almost left completely dry.
That is how far the boredom had gone.
I was tracking a sea star on its commute.
Since we knew there would be plenty more diving ahead, I also found a very good deal on an underwater camera.
I bought a Nikon COOLPIX W300 and immediately mounted it on a rig with two handles and an underwater light.
At least I had a new toy.
While the boat repairs dragged on, little things happened that annoyed you at the time and later became some of the best stories.
One day I washed my shoes and my leather flip-flops and left them outside the boat on the dock overnight to dry.
In the morning, the shoes were still there.
The flip-flops were gone.
So the thief had taste.
No need for the shoes.
But the flip-flops were worth stealing.
For the next few days I discreetly watched the marina workers to see whether my sandals would appear on somebody’s feet.
Leather ones like mine were not exactly common around there, so I knew I would recognise them immediately.
Nothing.
I assumed somebody had hidden them away somewhere and planned to bring them out only after we sailed.
They were not stupid.
Then there was something parked almost next to us that was so ridiculous I initially assumed it was another marina legend.
A catamaran.
Large.
Wrapped in yellow police tape:
CRIME SCENE – DO NOT CROSS.
The name on the hull:
SHENANIGANS.
Naturally, after a few days in the marina we had already heard ten different versions of the story.
Drugs.
Cocaine.
The skipper.
The owner supposedly knowing nothing.
Police.
Court.
The boat being seized.
Everything sailors can add to a story when they have too much time and enough beer.
But one part was not a marina legend at all.
In June 2018, police found almost thirteen kilograms of cocaine aboard Shenanigans, along with other drugs, firearms and ammunition.
The owner was later convicted.
The yacht remained under government control while the legal proceedings continued.
And there we were, parked only a few metres away.
After the reef, the overpriced salami, the stolen flip-flops and a month of waiting, a drug-smuggling catamaran was really all we were missing.
And so the days passed.
The same shops.
The same roads.
The same marina.
The same railway tracks.
The same people.
Occasionally Suva.
More often Lautoka.
Sometimes by bus.
Sometimes in a rental car.
Sometimes ten or fifteen kilometres on foot simply because I could.
And little by little I realised that Fiji had disappointed me mostly because I had expected too much from it.
It was not an ugly place.
It was not unpleasant.
Most people were perfectly normal and often extremely friendly.
The nature was beautiful in plenty of places.
But I had arrived with a completely fixed idea of what Fiji was supposed to be.
And the real Fiji had absolutely no intention of respecting that idea.
Instead of one simple Pacific culture, I found a country made up of several different worlds: traditional i-Taukei Fiji, the Indian legacy of the Girmitiyas, British colonial history, Chinese shops, Australian and New Zealand influence, tourism, sugar and the modern Pacific.
All of that is Fiji.
The problem was that I had not come to see “all of that.”
I had come to see the Fiji that existed in my head.
And I never found it.
Eventually the work was finished and the boat went back into the water.
We checked everything.
Completed the servicing.
Sorted out the final few jobs.
And finally reached the point where we could leave.
We went for one last supply run and stopped at the marina shop.
The people who had seen us almost every day asked:
“When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
The next day, as we prepared to sail, people from the marina and the shop gathered on the dock.
They brought guitars.
And started singing Fijian farewell songs for us.
After all my complaining, disappointment, boredom, expensive salami, windowless buses and stolen flip-flops, Fiji managed to say goodbye in a way that left me with nothing to complain about.
We stood on the boat.
They stood on the dock.
Playing and singing.
It was an incredible farewell.
Fiji may not have been what I expected.
But the people at Vuda made sure the last image I took with me was a good one.
There was still one more thing we had to do before leaving Fiji completely.
Because there were not actually two of us travelling.
There were three.
We had Wilson with us.
Yes.
That Wilson.
The ball.
Cast Away.
Tom Hanks.
The plan was to leave Wilson where, in our opinion, he belonged: on the island where Cast Away had been filmed.
Most of the island scenes in the movie were filmed on the small, uninhabited island of Monuriki, in the Mamanuca group west of Viti Levu.
The plan sounded simple.
Sail to the island.
Leave Wilson there.
Say goodbye.
Continue to Vanuatu.
By then, of course, we had travelled long enough to know that any plan which sounds simple is usually the first one to cause trouble.
We were not sure how close we would be able to get, what the landing would be like or where we could safely anchor.
But Wilson had already crossed half the Pacific with us.
We had to try.
If we made it, Wilson would stay on his island.
If not, he was coming with us to Vanuatu.