[Kyle]We left the crowds at Musket Cove and had a short, but pleasant sail to the oasis of Denarau for some peace and quiet. Those who are familiar with Denarau will understand the irony in this. Denarau is nuts!
We needed to come to complete our clearing out process with Fiji immigration, and despite several phone calls and emails we still were not sure exactly if we'd be able to complete the process at Denarau. We were unable to make a booking for a berth or mooring ball (everything was full), and we'd have to be able to take officials to and from the boat if we were to clear out there (and the anchorage was a LONG way out especially for our 3hp electric motor). The only advice we had was to ask once we arrived - so we crossed our fingers and hoped. Other possible areas to clear out had different issues for us: Lautoka has nowhere decent to anchor and Vuda was booked full of rally boats, so Denarau it was.
It was a bad third option. It was also perpetually full and the anchorage was a LONG way from the dinghy dock. We needed food, fuel and water and were not looking forward to spending our stay there shuttling back and forth in the dinghy to get everything.
We lucked out, though. While milling around waiting for the fuel dock, the marina called us on the radio to say they had a cancellation and we could have a dock for a single night. That gave us twenty-two hours to do a lot of work. We gave up on the fuel dock and headed for the berth. I would shuttle jerry cans of fuel while Maryanne got started on the laundry.
We had trouble finding our dock. The numbers seemed to end before we got to the one we were seeking. Then we realized we had been assigned a 60-meter mega yacht slip. When we entered the berth, we had time for a little snack before we got to the deck cleats at the far end. We got to do my little Smart Car trick of pulling into the front ¼ of a parking space, leaving it apparently empty to passersby. We were surrounded by walls of polished powerboats that rose above the top of our mast. We looked like somebody’s cute little sailing tender, except that nobody had a tender that small. That, plus we were looking a bit grubby from our month and a half in the sticks. Mega yacht crews pretty much do nothing all day every day except clean. None of their tenders was covered in salt and sand. Most looked right out of the box.
Despite only having six boats on the far side of us, we had little privacy. Those boats all had big crews who were constantly trundling down the dock in carts full of detailing gear. There were electric buffers going all of the time. I hoped night time would bring some relief, but then the deck floodlights came on and some of the harried, “We’d better get it done before the boss gets here” conversations were replaced by the insipid monologues of scantily-clad twenty-somethings with Gucci bags dangling from the crooks of their elbows. The boat next to us apparently needed more power than the substation they were plugged into could deliver, so they ran their generator all night. The exhaust was right by the hatch in our berth.
The entirety of Denarau Island had been converted to a complex of cookie-cutter beach resorts for the tourist crowd that doesn’t care about the bill because they have people to deal with that. These types of places are everywhere, from Fort Lauderdale to Cancun to the Costa del Sol and they are pretty much all the same. The idea seems to be to take the nice neighborhoods the guests came from, add a few palm trees and a few waiters with foreign-sounding names and, viola! Paradise.
Fijians are generally very warm, accepting and friendly people. The sort of unabashed commercialism in which places like Denarau swims seems decidedly un-Fijian to me. That sort of system requires people to be thought of as marks to be relieved of their cash through adulation proportionate to the bill. Fijians want to be nice to everybody, which must drive the developers nuts.
It was good for us. We made pathetic faces and the office scrounged an under-the-table mooring ball for Begonia from a guy who was leaving for a few days. The mooring was about twenty oar strokes from the dinghy dock, versus half an hour with the outboard. That made it only slightly less convenient than the dock, but without the constant foot traffic going by. Factor in that it was also cheaper and it was an overall win for us. We could pop back and forth to shore on a whim without having to plan for an all-day excursion each time.
During our last hours at the dock, I washed Begonia and filled our water tanks while Maryanne made a mad dash to the stores in Nadi, the nearest proper town to Denarau. I met her at her taxi with a dock cart and we just managed to get everything aboard Begonia before we were supposed to be out of the slip. Twenty minutes later, we were enjoying the comfort of swinging on a mooring where we could turn with the breeze. Those giant yachts blocked all of the wind at dock level, leaving us with no relief from the tropical heat.
On the short, 16-minute reposition from the dock to the mooring, we passed a big milestone for us. We have now been underway in Begonia for more than 10,000 hours total since we bought her just over seven years ago in 2012. That works out to three hours and forty-nine minutes per day for every day we have owned the boat, just over 15% of the time. Since then, we have sailed her just over 48,000 nautical miles (55,000 statute miles, 86,000km), about 44,000 of which have been in the Pacific. Even so, we’re still a few more thousand miles from making it to the other side. We’ve clearly been meandering around a bit. For comparison, in all of our previous boats combined, mostly Footprint, we have sailed about 23,000nm in around 6,000 hrs. It helps now we are both retired.
The craft market at Nadi we met Salote, a lovely lady from the Lau group
At the main market we were easily able to provision
After getting to the mooring, we decided to go back into Nadi to change some money in anticipation of our trip to Vanuatu. The bus made the rounds of every hotel in Denarau and it felt like it took forever to get to the guard station at the entrance. Then the bus must have been going really fast, because it only took us fifteen minutes to drive from Daytona Beach to Fiji. We were back in a laid back land of friendly people. We had two whole lunches for less than the cost of an appetizer in Denarau. Plus, the ladies who made our meal kept bringing out more and more food for us over and above what we had ordered.
Sri Siva Subramaniya Hindu Temple in Nadi
Before we got back into errand mode, we took a tourist break to go visit the Sri Siva Subramaniya temple in Nadi. This temple is the largest Hindu temple in the southern hemisphere and it is absolutely incredible. Every part of it, apart from a few wall and ceiling panels, is covered with intricate carvings. These are all covered in a rainbow of bright colored paint. All of the flat wall and ceiling panels were covered with giant frescoes highlighting one story or another from the sacred texts. The amount of detail in even the furthest nooks was impressive.
That took a bit longer than expected, so by the time we had finished all of our in-city chores, the day was coming to an end. We got back to Denarau after dark. As we were walking to the dinghy, we heard music playing and went over to see what was going on. At the stage in the center of the shopping complex, a troupe of dancers were demonstrating various dances from several different South Pacific island groups. The Polynesian dances brought us right back to the big Heiva in Papeete. They finished with a good fifteen minutes of energetic Samoan fire dancing. Wow! We thought they might be buskers, but they never even asked for anything other than applause. They must have been hired by the complex. The best thing was that they did the show every night, which quickly became how we capped off our days there.
The nightly pacific and fire-dancing was unexpected entertainment for us
We decided to spend the rest of our Fijian cash on an all-day tour along the Coral Coast of Viti Levu. Knowing this would be our last day in Fiji, and that we were all provisioned, we made a point to spend our last Fijian dollars before departing, and the cost of the tour left just a few coins we spent on an ice cream. We were definitely not in the Lau anymore. Our tour turned out to be less about seeing the sights than making the rounds of where we could spend our money. We had several very uncomfortable encounters where we had to sheepishly turn out our empty pockets at requests for donations or tips we hadn’t expected. We visited one village known for their pottery. They demonstrated how it is made and did a lovely welcome dance for us. We reciprocated by demonstrating the Gay Gordon, a traditional Scottish dance. They were delighted and it was laughs and smiles all around. Then we were asked for a donation for the village and shown a selection of stuff we could buy. They seemed noticeably crestfallen when we tried to explain we had no cash left to spend. The smiling faces of our new friends suddenly looked as if we had betrayed them by stepping on their new puppy (at least that is how we felt). They seemed convinced that if we looked like spoiled tourists, we must be and that we were just holding out on them to be petty. I was a little upset with our tour operator for putting us in this position. Maryanne has specifically asked if we’d need any cash during the day, and the woman who had booked us made a big point of saying everything was included and we would only need money if we asked the driver to make an unplanned stop along the way for snacks or something. It was actually a relief to get back to Denarau, where we could buy our last meal ashore by plunking down a credit card at an overpriced restaurant and enjoy free fire dancing.
Our tourguide and driver shared a long day with us
Scenes from our touring of the MOMI WWI Battery Historical Park, the Waterfall at Biausevu Village
Traditional pottery making and a warm welcome from the ladies at Nakabuta Village
The spectacular Sigatoka Sand Dunes (Fiji’s first national park) was the tour's final stop
