Day 6 - Friday December 14, 2001 - 4:20pm

Met Chris at 9am coming out of the registration office - good thing too. “Whatcha doin’ fer the day?” he says in his best Aussie accent. “Biking around the island,” I says. “You…?” “Well,” he says, “a bunch of us are goin’ island hoppin’. Cost ya $50 to join us fer the day - whaddya say mate…?”

I say yes of course. And therein begins my first true Fijian adventure, if you don’t count the ‘waiting hotel’. And the ‘police action’ at the bar the day before (I’m not really anti-American, not by a long shot, but these guys needed to hear an alternate view!).

Seven of us converge at the “Jetty” at the appointed time and exchange pleasantries. I am going out into the deep ocean in search of smaller islands to conquer with that young couple from Aberdeen, Scotland I mentioned earlier, an older couple from a small town near Wellington, New Zealand, and another older couple originally from the Australian outback. Oh, and me of course, your dutiful scrivener.

Tony and Janice Young (older couple - small town - Wellington) used to run a small motel but sold it to travel the world when their two sons grew up and moved away. Half the year they travel to new ports of call, the other half is spent fishing for trophy Tuna, Marlin, Sailfish, Walu, Wahoo and Hawaii’s favourite, Mahimahi - Tony’s a professional trophy fisherman. There’s an insightful story here on staggering amounts of money to be made in the business of professional game fishing (later).

Chris (older couple - Australia - outback) is a bit of a “PT”, Perpetual Traveller, who’s moved around a fair bit over his life. His wife’s a waitress he picked up in a bar on a small island near Perth several years ago.

“We few, we happy few,” as Henry 5th once said. Mind you he also said, “Once more into the breach!” in the same play! Born leader, that man.

We set out in the 20ft Dolphin Star with cameras, fins and masks at the ready. Did I mention that it was raining — still — and a storm was coming in? Thought not. So you’ll understand why the refrain “a three hour tour… a three hour tour!” is going through my head as we break tide and head into open sea.

Mana is the first island on the rather hastily planned and loosely adhered to itinerary. It is here that Tony decides that the eighth member of our ‘crew’, a young Fijian who actually captains the boat, isn’t as good a driver as once thought. “About as welcome as a Muslim in a cockpit, I reckon,” was his response to docking the Star at Mana. Quite the card is our Tony. Never quite sure throughout the entire affair whether he’s being straight or spouting bullshit. Good storyteller though.

Mana’s quite beautiful and also quite different from Malolo Lailai. My island (possession is nine-tenths of the law even over here - old British custom again!) is relatively small and flat where Mana has a rather large mountain in the middle of it and is home to a large resort - ten times the size of Musket Cove. Loads of Japanese tourists here - apparently a favourite of Japanese newly-weds. The north side of the island where we sit at the pool bar for beers is positively stunning. Great snorkeling too. The clouds lift here and afford us a terrific view well out toward the Yasawa Island chain to the north where some of the most exclusive US$500 per night and up resorts were located. Gotta remember that Fiji is made up of over 330 islands - they’re bloody everywhere.

A couple of beers and several travel horror stories later and we’re back on the Star and heading over to Castaway Island. This is great for me since I’m staying there for a week beginning next Monday. I was looking forward to getting an advance peek.

I’m not disappointed. First off the food is amazing - a big step up from Musket Cove. Lunch is wonderful and they have a huge menu to choose from. The resort is well laid-out with a couple of pools and plenty of comfortable seating areas where you can relax, read, count the waves… whatever. Seems to cater to a younger, European clientele. I’m looking forward to next week already. The sun sticks with us through lunch.

We have to swim back to the boat because our ‘captain’ had run it aground slightly and disturbed some of the coral, which is a HUGE no-no here. They told him to wait offshore (well, it’s a boat - what else are you going to do?!)

Anyway I volunteered to swim out to the boat — a couple of hundred yards away — and get the captain’s attention so he could sneak back and pick up the rest. Swim out to the boat I could do. Climb into the boat once I got there I could not. I tried to swing my feet up onto the back deck only to have the captain start the bloody engine thinking I’d gotten aboard. I could feel my feet getting way too close to the propellers on the twin inboard engines… then he took off, leaving me in fifty feet of water choking on diesel fumes!

He picked up everyone else and then returned for me once he’d seen his mistake. As he reached down to help me onto the boat it was then that I saw for the first time his t-shirt: Disney’s “The Little Mermaid”. Ha - fucking - ha!

By now it’s raining again and no longer a soft, warm drizzle. It is teeming buckets and it’s cold. Having left my ‘gulley jumpers’ and parka back in Vancouver, I weather the storm as best I can for someone who is now positively drenched.

The third island is where it gets surreal… Matamanoa.

There’s this scene in the film Apocalypse Now where Captain Willard arrives ‘up river’ in Cambodia at Colonel Kurtz’s stronghold. It’s absolutely pissing out. Willard and what’s left of his boat crew are drenched to the skin and worn out. The only sound is that of the rain pelting the palm trees. Out of the jungle looms this structure looking like something out of “The Land That Time Forget”. I swear I was in the middle of that scene.

As we wade ashore, no one else in sight, out of the ‘jungle’ there slowly appears a structure made of stone and timber. Beside it, an ornate swimming pool. Is it a resort of some kind…?

As we approach in silence wondering just what the heck we have stumbled upon, an immense smiling Fijian woman dressed in a festive red ‘sulu’ (traditional body wrap) ‘floats’ out of nowhere with a tray containing seven bottles of beer. We must have looked a fright. The kicker to all this: this isn’t even a resort. It’s an American timeshare and they haven’t seen another boat in weeks!

Back on the boat Tony tries his hand at catching a marlin - no dice. So we all head towards Musket Cove and dry clothes.

It’s moments like these that make cherished travel memories - where chance meets opportunity. Had I not decided to go left instead of right on my pushbike I wouldn’t have run into Chris who had just left the registration area. Ten seconds either way… no island hopping. Thank you Chris. And fate.

By the way, it’s called a ‘push bike’ because the tires are practically flat and you end up pushing the goddamn thing for most of your journey! True story!

Same Day - 8:25pm

I choose to have dinner at Plantation Island Resort, a fifteen-minute walk around the island from Musket Cove. Both are on Malolo Lailai Island separated by a dirt-covered airstrip.

Plantation Island is the larger, more sophisticated cousin to Musket Cove and the concrete sidewalks leading to the modern restaurant are the first indications of this.

The menu is quite diverse - several pages in length as a matter of fact with all manner of seafood, pork and vegetable dishes. I pick a spicy mango soup (gotta love those mangoes!), a concoction of crab, prawn and whitefish stewed in coconut milk and lime juice and served cold in the half shell of a fresh coconut. (Kokoda, as I later learned.) Very yummy.

It’s with the main course, and this one guy in the band (it’s always someone in the band!), that things get weird.

I order what I think would be a fabulous dish, based on my successful experience with the soup and the appetizer. I order the Thai Mixed Grill, but I did so without benefit of actually looking at what this particular restaurant thought constituted a Thai Mixed Grill.

What eventually arrives at my table is a large plate containing (in order of sampling): honey-glazed carrots, Chinese fried rice, green beans with slivered almonds (all three considered stalwarts of any seasoned Thai kitchen!), a breaded pork cutlet, a fish filet of some description (also breaded), a corpulent sausage of unknown lineage, and a small serving of caramelized onions. This entire dish is then covered with two fried eggs, sunny side up! WTF?! I have clearly entered another dimension, one beyond sight and sound. Certainly beyond any sense of kitchen restraint! “Mixed” I get. “Grill” I understand. “Thai” not so much.

The strange thing is… it’s really tasty. Drop the “Thai” appellation and call it the Fijian Grand Slam Special and I can buy into it.

While I’m digging through this dinner, three guys in the middle of the room attempt to play instruments and sing together. ‘Attempt’ and ‘together’ being the operative words. What is it with places like this that insist on having a “Rhythm Ace”? Dreadful, absolutely dreadful.

After listening to them butcher several Christmas carols and segue into their Elvis songbook, I bid a hasty retreat.

As an out-of-tune and offbeat phonetic vocalization of the King’s “Love Me Tender” echoes in the distance, I round the cove, take a shortcut through the airstrip, dodge a few disgruntled sand crabs and a thousand frogs (the reptiles, not the French!), and come home to bed.

Thai Mixed Grill… what were they thinking?!