Once we were on the path, the disorientation we had from approaching the village from an unfamiliar direction vanished. The whole village layout snapped into alignment with our memories from our last visit.
Seeing that Maryanne and I were new, possibly because we were carrying a gift-wrapped bunch of kava for sevusevu, one of the village men intercepted us and made sure we found our way to the correct house for the Chief. That we were struggling with, because almost all the houses in the village are the same shape and size.
We arrived just as a large group from at least two other boats were finishing their sevusevu. The chief must have to do this all day each time the weather allows the next wave of visitors to arrive.
For our sevusevu, it was just me and Maryanne. We recognized the Chief, Simon, from our last visit. When he was done with the ceremony, we talked with him for a bit. He clarified to us that he had not in fact been Chief in 2019, merely Acting Chief. He's the real deal now, though. We congratulated him on his promotion and he welcomed us warmly to his island with a smile.
A trip ashore with a walk through the jungle to the village for Sevusevu (the request/welcome ceremony) - followed by refreshments at 'Qele's hosue as we reaquiant ourselves with the village of Moana-i-cake
In Vulaga, visitors are assigned a host family. This arrangement is not per visit, but for life. Our 2019 hosts, Jone and Mareh, were off in Suva at the moment, so Mereh could take exams to increase her teaching qualifications. We were given a new, temporary host for this visit named 'Qele (Pronounced something close to Gail).
'Qele was nice, as all the villagers are. Over pancakes and tea made from freshly plucked lemon leaves, we learned that she was Jone's mother, so our reassignment kept us in the family. 'Qele's friend, Salote was there as well as her son, Noah and his wife, Uni. We invited them to visit Begonia the next afternoon. In the meantime, we were keen to get back home and to start reacquainting ourselves with our anchorage.
Since the trip from Begonia to the trailhead was a short one, and since the dinghy is easier to beach without it, we had opted not to install the electric outboard and instead go for the simplicity of rowing. Despite this, when we got back, rather than head straight back to Begonia to get the motor, we couldn't help but make a few detours on the way to see one cool thing or another. In the end, we stayed out for a few hours and rowed miles and miles in the process. It wasn't difficult – think rented rowboat on a pond with a date, with lots and lots of stopping to take photos or to stretch our legs on a beach. It wasn't until we were back to our anchorage that we realized how far our wanderings had taken us.
Exploring the crazy teetering rock formations in the main lagoon, and visiting our neighbours aboard Vision
We stopped to introduce ourselves to our neighbors Jan and Ina, on Vision, their 17m Moody 54DS monohull. Their boat is beautiful, clean and roomy, and looks like the glossy magazine dream of yachting in style. When Jan offered us cappuccinos, it seemed in keeping with the theme.
Jan admitted that he was looking forward to the 'yachting in style' part, which he and Ina were hoping would arrive any day now. They had arrived in Vulaga earlier the same day we had, only theirs was after a three-hundred-mile round-trip to Savu Savu from Vulaga to collect parts. Jan's tales of his journey since collecting his new boat in his home country of Germany do have a few nice cruising moments, but they are also generously peppered with frustrations about equipment failures and delays for repairs. Their 2022 boat, for example, is already on its fourth engine, after three warranty replacements, which the engine company fought against each time.
The cappuccinos were lovely, but I think after hearing Jan's story, that Maryanne and I felt a little better about Begonia's obvious lack of complex, expensive systems, even if it does mean we drink instant coffee.
The next day, we were visited by Noah and Uni. I was a little relieved by this, since the Pudgy can't generally carry more than three people, particularly when allowing enough room for oar swing. This way, picking up our guests would only require one trip. Since I beat them to the beach, I rounded out the time by walking the village trail until I intercepted them to join them for the walk. Poor Noah had broken a flip-flop and was trying to navigate the sharper parts of the trail with a shoe that was constantly falling off.
When we finally broke out of the jungle to the waiting Pudgy, they did well to not break out into guffaws at the sight of a plastic rowboat, rather than the more typical roomy inflatable with a big motor. Imagine ordering a car to pick you up at the airport and instead being met by a clown on a tricycle with a big basket.
They were gracious guests who did not appear to suffer as we peppered them with questions about their lives and gave answers about ours. We even discovered that Noah was in some of the pictures we had taken on our last visit. He was the cool guy doling out kava then. Now he has a wife and three kids and a beard, but he's still one of those guys that looks cool, just when he is sitting there listening to us ramble.
Noah and Uni visit with us aboard Begonia
We had a few days at the anchorage after that. We did a few minor repairs of things that had started to wear since our haulout. Since none was as serious as cutting an engine out of a boat that had been built around it, we felt like we were getting away with something. We weren't really; a lot of that stuff was concentrated into the haulout, but it's a lot easier to deal with big jobs all at once in a boatyard than piecemeal while trying to keep cruising in remote places.
We rowed around some more and did as much snorkeling as we could bear. The water in the lagoon at Vulaga has been unusually cool - so much so that every single villager we met remarked on it. They do a lot of night fishing, when there is no sun to warm them up afterwards. I found I could manage about twenty-five minutes with no wetsuit and another twenty with one on before I stopped caring about the view and just wanted to get home to warm up. Maryanne could tolerate a little more, which allowed us to not have to fight over the shower nozzle on Begonia at the end.
Snorkelling the mini-islands around Begonia at our first anchorage
Noah had given us vague directions about a cave somewhere to the left of the trail on the hill behind the beach. Maryanne and I climbed over boulders and pushed our way through snarls of branches in the jungle for an hour or so without any luck. We were just about to give up and try to find our way back down the steep slope when it just appeared before us.
It was much better than we had expected. We thought it would be little more than a big indentation in the hillside, but in fact it was large enough for us to need our headlamps, with several connected chambers and lots of cool cave features like stalagmites, stalactites, columns and curtains. Afterward, we were able to reverse-engineer much more sensible directions for subsequent visitors. We also, via the dinghy, managed to visit another more easily accessible cave, which was basically a hollowed-out version of one of the lagoon's crazy little mushroom-shaped islets.
Cave on the main island
Cave on a tiny islet (with view from one of the openings)
We were just finishing breakfast one morning when an orange RIB full of men in tactical gear came into the anchorage and started heading right at Begonia. When it got closer, we could clearly see the lettering on the side: U.S. Coast Guard.
What!? That is some next-level getting lost! Fiji is nowhere near any part of the U.S, which was kinda the point for us. What on Earth were they doing here?
Well, it turns out that Fiji, like a lot of places these days, is having a bit of a problem with drug trafficking. The U.S. Coast Guard is helping to train the authorities here and is also lending them equipment and manpower. Our RIB today was operated by the U.S. Coast Guard at the request of the Fijian Navy and thus contained men from each service.
Officialdom can find us even in a remote anchorage in Fiji
They told us they were coming aboard – it wasn't optional – to do what they called a “Safety Check”. We have been boarded before while in the U.S., so we were expecting them to ask to see our fire extinguishers, flares, life jackets, etc. They explained that they were not really interested in any of that today. Today, they wanted to see inside our engine compartments.
Groan. The engines are under the beds, which have to be dismantled and removed for access. Our spare bed also had an accumulation of items on top of it that we had been too lazy to put away properly in recent days. I dismantled everything and when the officer was satisfied with our engine compartments, he told me he needed to see our bilges as well. The covers for those were loaded with all the bedding I had just removed. To get them off, I had to put everything back in its original place so he could see the bilges.
Up in the cockpit, on Maryanne's end, the focus seemed to be on verifying our big sheaf of paperwork. It's not uncommon for some boats to try to sneak in a visit to the Lau group before formally clearing in, as the island group is so far from official arrival ports, but has to be practically sailed through along the way.
All of the guys were really nice – like Fijian Nice. They had a job to do, but they were nothing but patient and courteous with us the whole time, and never seemed the least bit threatening in any way. That is no easy job if you are literally covered in lethal weaponry. When they all left, I was almost glad we had them onboard, because it calmed down the scarier what-if worries I had before. We weren't breaking any laws, but these days, you can never be sure that they know that.
Then it was time for a day ashore. We hiked the trail into Mauna-i-cake, waved to and chatted with a few people we recognized, and then continued down the path to the village of Muana-i-ra. Along the way, we met lots of people headed the opposite direction for a day in Muana-i-cake. We promised to meet up with them again later. Our plan was to head to the beach at Muana-i-ra and then walk along it back to Muana-i-cake.
We hacked ashore looking for access to a pond we could see in a satellite photo (we gave up as the terrain prooved a little dangerous and we feared if we did injure ourselves we might never be found!).
At the main village (Muana-i-cake), we collected a made-to-order hair band holder from Tui, one of the the local craftsmen; the island is famed for their carving skills
And visiting the village of Muana-i-ra (there is a nice grassy connecting trail between the it and the main village)
As we were walking through the last clear area between the houses and the beach at Muana-i-ra, the first person we encountered was Tagi!
Tagi, which is pronounced “Tangi”, but with such a subtle g that it almost sounds like “Tiny”, was one of our favorite people from our 2019 visit. I remember her always having a big smile on her face. We were secretly hoping we might see her by going to her village, but it's been a while and we knew she might be off island at the moment, or even have moved away entirely. We were trying to figure out if the woman we were approaching might be her when she recognized us and let out a big laugh that carried out across the whole village. That was Tagi alright! You couldn't help but smile at the joy of her beautiful laugh. We caught up pretty quickly after determining that we had all been doing the same thing as last time, only more of it. Then she gifted us a lunch of casava for some walking around food.
The beach
We joined the beach, walked the wrong way as far as we could, for the views, and then turned for the long walk to Muana-i-cake. We arrived in the middle of some incomprehensible sporting match that was being played. We took seats on a mat behind some protective netting and then were immediately piled on by children who had been let out of school to watch the game, which, based on the jerseys, was between Nasavu and Muaninuku. These seemed to be factions from villages with even different names, which only added to the confusion for us. Mostly, the children cheered at what seemed to be random times to me, but they were very enthusiastic when doing so. Maryanne studied the game for a while, decided she knew it, and then started explaining the rules to the rest of us. This was funny because, as I said before, the game is incomprehensible. The only thing I was able to figure out for sure was that when the guy they call the bowler hits a stick they call a wicket, the whole crowd goes nuts with loud cheers and dancing. {Maryanne:Yes, it was cricket}.
The village has a large green space, but isn't quite large enough to match a regulation cricket field. So the boundary included a few houses. If the ball went under a house, the game continued as the fielders scrambled under the structure for the ball.
We wiled away the afternoon spectating at cricket, and supping on kava
With most of the area around the Malakuia anchorage explored, Maryanne suggested we move further west, deeper into the less well-known side of the lagoon, away from our edge of the crowds, to have a look there (and making a shorter dinghy ride to the 3rd village of the island).
Our new anchorage, like our first time in our last one, required sighting our way in, while ignoring sections of the chart that indicated our chosen route would be too shallow for a surfboard. We found our anchorage, then very gingerly checked our intended singing circle for hazards, before dropping the anchor in the middle. Then we made a note not to jump off the boat willy-nilly, especially at low tide, as the water was not deep enough to not hit bottom.
Our new anchorage, called Vatumulomulo by the locals, was reminiscent of the last one. We were surrounded by crazy-shaped islets, only this time with an unobstructed view of the sunset. As the only boat that would fit, Begonia was also the only cruising boat within a mile or so. At most states of wind or tide, the nearest other boats were blocked by intervening islets, making our own anchor light and the dim lights of the distant village of Naividamu the only artificial lights we could see at night.
We had intended to save our first exploring here for the day after relocating, but the place was too pretty to resist, so we deployed the dinghy for a quick reconnaissance. Like the last place, we ended up rowing all over the place, chasing views.
Exploring our 2nd anchorage
As we rounded our last islet homeward, we detoured slightly to visit some locals who were fishing in a takia (a smaller version of a Camakau, the Fijian name for the traditional outrigger canoe) . As we approached, we couldn't believe what we saw. Up on the bow was Tagi! With her was her husband, 'Pele, and their dog, Ranger. We had never met either and she had never seen either of our boats, so she had no idea it was us aboard when she waved at our arrival earlier.
Meeting up again with Tagi
Of course, a big smile came over her face now. We gave them a few treats we had squirreled away for just such an occasion, and spent a little time chatting with them before leaving them to their fishing. We were aware that we might be inadvertently scaring away their fish, and that the real reason they were out here was to feed themselves, not yuk it up with a couple of clueless vegan cruisers.
Exploring and snorkelling around our 2nd anchorage
The next day, we had an exploratory snorkel. The lagoon is definitely still cold, but we found a couple of interesting seamounts to poke around. Since the lagoon to our southwest is expansive and also dries at low tide, we decided the best thing was to go to the trouble to dig out the kayak and inflate it for extended paddling.
On the next morning's high tide, we paddled two miles to Naividamu. This village rarely gets visitors due to its remoteness in the very shallow part of the western side of the lagoon.
We did our sevusevu with Moses, Naividamu's Chief. Then another man, whose name we didn't quite get, took us to the trailhead for the cross-island trail to the big beach opposite. We were a bit confused when he was still with us well past the halfway point. Perhaps we had misunderstood and he was planning to guide us the whole way?
He was not. At about the three-quarter mark, which was also the highest elevation, the trail made a precipitous descent into the jungle. Our guide pointed out the correct path, bid us a good afternoon, and said he would see us later when we got back to the village.
We could see why he left us to our own navigating at that point. What up until then had been a shady stroll was about to change into hands-and-feet climbing. It didn't look too treacherous, but at the very least, the trip back up was going to be very tiring and ruinous to any lingering feeling of refreshment from previously splashing around in the sea.
While the trail was steep, it was also short. In no time at all, Maryanne and I were back at sea level stepping over palm fronds and banana leaves for the short transit to the blinding white sand. This beach is the longest on Vulaga, and also the most remote. Of course, we understood how it came to be, but Maryanne and I never cease to be amazed every time we are the only two people occupying miles of gorgeous tropical beach. Being who we are, we walked as far as we could to the near, northern end, and then did an about-face to see how far to the south we could get. When we got to what looked like the end, we dove into the trees and managed to pick our way through to the next big stretch of sand.
In this manner, we made it all the way to Vulaga's southwest corner before deciding to turn back. With a bit of wading, we probably could have continued all the way around the corner into Muana-i-ra, then Muana-i-cake, and then along the path to our last anchorage. While that would have given a nice sense of satisfaction for completing the loop, it also would have left us stranded, with no dinghy and no way to get back to Naividamu until the next low tide at midnight.
The beaultiful long beach - all to ourselves (and the wildlife)
Still, the long walk back gave us more than enough to see. One of our favorite spots was a shallow lip in the lagoon where the whole outgoing tide flows to make a shallow but wide section of rapids/waterfall.
After a short sit down for a snack and to marvel again at our good fortune, we dove back into the jungle for the climb/walk back to Naividamu.
The steep climb didn't turn out to be as bad as we had expected. Searching for hand-and-footholds kept us slow enough to keep us from breaking a sweat, and in no time, we were both surprised to find ourselves standing at the top, with nothing but the downhill stroll to the village ahead of us.
The village seemed surprisingly quiet to us. Our guide earlier had said that over sixty people live in Naividamu. It wasn't until now that I remembered that he also said that over forty of them were children. It was a weekday, so almost all of them were at school in Mauna-i-cake. One notable exception was a young boy (Anthony) who deftly opened a couple of young coconuts for Maryanne and I to enjoy as post-expedition refreshment. The world is a funny place. I distinctly remember getting in trouble with the authorities when I gave my kids machetes to celebrate their first day at school...
After crossing the island from the beach, we were back at Naividamu (and a welcome gift of fruit and veggies)
Visiting the 3rd village: Naividamu
The tide, while coming in now, was still much lower than it had been when we first arrived in the morning. Getting even the kayak out to a navigable depth required a long, squishy walk through shoe-sucking tidal mud. No wonder we have only seen local boats coming and going at high tide, even if it has to be in the middle of the night.
Since we were tired, we decided to pass up on the scenic shore route back to Begonia, opting for the direct, open water route. Along the way, our route was going to pass close enough to a takia that it would have been an obvious snub if we didn't divert a little to say hi. The occupant, like us, was turned away from the blinding rays of the low sun. We approached from behind and hailed with a big “Bula!”
She turned and we immediately recognized Tagi's smile, followed by giggles all around. She seemed surprised that we were so far from Begonia, but then she was even farther from shore in a boat whose only means of propulsion were a big sculling oar and a punting pole. Also, she lives in Muana-i-ra. Most of her trip home tonight was going to be in new moon darkness.
The next day, the morning high tide was late enough that we could take advantage of it if we got up really early to be off of Begonia at first light. Our goal was a paddling exploration of the two big tidal lagoons to our west, Vuata and Mataniwaqa. The lagoons are peppered with little islets, which are separated by mangrove-filled channels; the water is barely ankle depth (or non-existent) at low tide.
We explored another cave on our kayak adenture
Kayaking the inner (shallow) lagoons at high tide
We traced a sinuous path through Vuata, then took the back way through the mangroves to Mataniwaqa for more of the same on that side. At the farthest point, the tide had still not fallen too far, so we made a point of getting back to Begonia via the longest route we could think of that would still maximize new territory. Along the way, we spotted a cave that looked like it could be easily reached at higher tides. One we got inside, it turned out to be much grander than its appearance suggested on our approach. That gave us a sense of really finding a new gem.
After our long day of exploring, we got back to Begonia, hoisted the dinghy, and flopped down on our cabin settee for some food and a rest. It was then that we were amused to discover that it wasn't quite noon yet. This made it feel like we had practically a whole day off ahead of us. That was until we caught each other nodding off after an early dinner.
We gave up and went to bed just after sunset. That allowed us to get up even earlier the next morning for a snorkel of the reefs at the entrance to Vuata lagoon.
Our little expedition had little appeal in the drizzle following un unseasonably cool night. As I mentioned before, the water in Vulaga's lagoon has been much cooler than normal as of late. Going into it without the prospect of bright sunshine for rewarming afterwards took a big gulp, followed by little screams as the water slowly filled our wetsuits.
snorkelling around the pass to the innner lagoons
At the pass, we did find lots of coral, but it didn't turn out to be nearly as impressive as our previous above-water reconnaissance in the kayak had suggested. The main problem was too much silt from the lagoons as they drain on the falling tide. This covered the coral fields and reduced the visibility dramatically to only a couple of meters, which meant Maryanne and I had to keep surfacing to find each other.
We did a lap around the islet bisecting the gap into two channels, which gave us a look not just at the coral in the deeper part of the main Vulaga lagoon, but also the shallow sea grasses in Vuata. Once we finally broke down and admitted to each other that the cold was getting to be too much for each of us, we made a hasty retreat to Begonia, where we shivered our way through our respective deck rinses, and then an hour or so of gripping warm mugs of tea. It is such a strange feeling to be cold in the tropics. Our cabin thermometer read 27C. I guess we had better enjoy it while we can...
A wonderful, relaxing time in Vulaga
Anchorage location - Malakuia/La Escondita Anchorage >> On google maps
Anchorage location - Mid-South Lagoon edge >> On google maps
