Miasmic time travel and other miscellany

Miasma. Now that's a word that doesn't get used very often in the 21st century. However, sometimes it's the only word that can be used to describe the atmosphere here.

We had a very hot sweaty walk at Colo i Suva park with Mike and David on the day before they returned to the UK (squeezed in between lab treatments - they were working!) Anna finally got her chance to go on the rope swing which she did with grace. I declined the offer -  having had three frozen shoulders in the last five years, I have to choose my thrills carefully. The last part of our walk was a slog uphill at which point, Anna began to feel a little poorly, which I put down to the heat. David also looked like he might collapse from heat exhaustion, though this was almost certainly due to the rum consumed the previous night. The air was thick with what the Victorians would call vapours. We finally reached the waterfall, took our shoes off and cooled down as much as we could while eating tuna sandwiches. Anna should not have eaten that sandwich, poor poppet.

The most flattering shot - no one looks great while swinging on a rope, arms and legs akimbo.

In the taxi on the way back, David fell asleep and Anna tried to cool herself down by leaning with her head partly out of the window to catch the momentum-generated breeze. She went straight to bed when we got home and appeared around two hours later to be sick in the most spectacular fashion on the stairs (and up the wall - I had to stand on tip-toes to clean it). Poor thing was sick on and off the rest of the night.  I was a little alarmed the next day when she woke babbling about time travelling when I put my hand on her warm brow, but she explained that she'd been dreaming after watching the Time Traveller's Wife to distract herself the night before.

Of course, as soon as she got sick, I was going through a mental list of tropical diseases. Malaria? Yellow fever? Some sort of parasite from the swim? Fortunately it turned out to be a 24 bug - probably  just a bout of food poisoning, which was overdue as we've been eating out an obscene amount.

We had a day of rest, then went into town to look for a ukulele and a school bag for Anna (both unsuccessful). You have to understand, the shopping opportunities are limited. Outside of the bigger department stores, there are little streets of small Indian-style shops. Some selling beautiful saris, others selling miscellaneous stuff so that it difficult to categorise them. What do you call a shop that sells bleach, sponges, plastic pinwheels and Jesus candles? There are also street stalls, selling locally grown fruit, vegetables, fish, flowers, crafts and some tourist tat (but not much - this is not a tourist town).

The flower stalls.

There is also a multiplex cinema, where Anna and I can get two tickets, plus share a small drink and popcorn for the princely sum of £7 total. While Mike and David were here, we went to see my first Bollywood movie, called Heroine. It was quite an education. First, even though it was subtitled, about a third of the dialogue was in English. It went something like this: "Hindi, Hindi, Hindi...You look sexy, babes...Hindi, Hindi, Hindi...What are you doing this weekend, babes?" They called each other babes a lot in this film. Also, despite having a lot of pressure on the industry to be chaste, the lingering shots of writhing scantily clad female bodies appears to be okay as long as they are dancing. David pointed out that if they'd played the slow-motion shots at regular speed, it would have been half the length (which was very long and included an intentional intermission). The shocked reaction from the audience during a mild (suggested) lesbian scene was definitely liked travelling back in  time.

You can see the poster for Heroine - very risqué indeed.

From the bridge between the flowers and the cinema looking out to Suva Harbour.

Most of the stuff in the supermarket is recognisable, though not always desirable (farmer's tinned mutton? I don't think so.) I still haven't provisioned the kitchen properly and won't do until our shipment arrives from the UK arrives at the end of October. I didn't send any food (except Rington's tea bags), but have sent knives, measuring cups and things like that. My neighbours had a tombola to split up our liquor cupboard (with the proviso that they have to come up with a dish for each of the bottles they take home) and our friend, David, said that he had to built an extra cupboard in his kitchen just for the condiments that he rescued from ours. I'm looking forward to a time when ramen isn't a normal meal option, I've got more than three spices to season with and I can actually measure quantities with something other than the cup that came with the rice cooker...when it doesn't feel like we're camping in our own house any more.

Laundry soap in a fascinating format. 

 Anna demonstrates size of laundry soap (and, no, it doesn't work, according to Mela).

This aisle is for the very old, very young and very bored.

A weekend of sharks, snakes and bats

We’ve been very lucky to have one of John’s colleagues, Mike, and his MPhil student, David, here since before Alex left. Mike is a post doc that did his PhD with John, so we’ve known him for a long time. He’s slotted into the big brother role quite naturally – he definitely should have had a younger sister.  With them around, we’re still in sightseeing mode, though the list of sights to see around Suva, which was short to begin with, is growing shorter.

Mike demonstrates how to use a cannibal brain fork.

On Sunday, Mike, David and John went on a shark dive. This is where you go out on a boat, don scuba gear with lots of extra weight and drop to the bottom in around 30m of water to see bull sharks being fed tuna heads. The extra weight keeps you from bobbing around in the water column like a tasty morsel. Once you’ve used up your allotted time at that depth, you come up to a shallower water to see black tips, then shallower still to see white tips. Anna isn’t a certified diver and I’m not certified crazy, so we went to the Holiday Inn in Suva and had lunch by the pool before lounging next to it for the afternoon.

Not as attractive as a pina colada by the pool (thanks for the photo, Mike).

Because John had rented a car to go on the shark dive, we had a car for the entirety of Sunday. We’ve pretty much exhausted the tourist attractions close by, so we set off to Wailatua, north on the King’s Road, home of the Snake God Cave. The condition of the roads here are variable. None of the taxis appear to have any suspension left. Neither did the rental car. The road west out of Suva is called the Queen’s Road and is paved at least all the way to Nadi. North is a different story. The King’s Road has sections that are gritted, some that are paved but with enormous potholes, some that are under construction in variable states and one stretch, around 5 miles long quite a way up north that is paved to a standard that any developed country would be pleased with it.

We stopped just out of Suva to get some kava root for a sevusevu for the chief of Wailotua. Kava root is from a pepper plant that is ground and made into a drink that is associated with a strict social ritual. A sevusevu is the presentation of a gift to a village chief, the acceptance of which confers certain privileges or favours to the giver. It is the polite currency for accessing areas of Fiji that are close to villages.

On arrival to the village a group of children ran out to greet us, one of which wiped out on the gravel and gave himself a nasty gash. Fortunately the rental car had both a first aid kit and a roll of toilet paper in its glove box (for the consequences of not have having suspension, I guess) and Mike put a plaster on the boy’s knee. I missed the giving of the sevusevu as I was parking the car.

Chief Bose is the chief of five villages and played for the Auckland Chiefs for three years as a winger. He led the entire tour barefoot. I think that he probably could have done it without the lantern as well. Despite its name, the cave is full of bats, not snakes. There is the brothy, roast chicken smell of bats, particularly in the bigger caverns. The name of the cave refers to a formation of minerals that look like six adjacent snake heads. The floor of the cave was either slick, wet earth or dry crumbly bat droppings, which I had to put my hands in several times to help myself up particularly steep bits.

The Chief was very attentive to me, either because I was John’s wife or because I looked like the most likely to slip and break my ankle. So while I got polite chat about the possibility of holding weddings in the largest cavern, Mike and David got to see where they used to sacrifice people.

Unlike caves that I’ve been to in the US and Europe, this one was very hot and sticky.  Though interesting, I’m not going to go back in a hurry - at least until our UK neighbours the Bevans come for a visit. Richard can bring his bat detector (Richard is a zoologist – most of my UK neighbours do not have bat detectors). Mind you, you don’t need one of those here – the bats are the size of small turkeys.