Photos Credit: Jack Johns. Retrieved from cntraveller.in.
It’s true; nothing compares to the plosive enthusiasm of the Fijian greeting: “Bula!” It’s a word that floats like a bubble. Everyone says “Bula!” to everyone, even passing strangers. And historically, many have passed through here. A crossroads in the heart of the South Pacific, Fiji spans from eastern Melanesia, the region populated in prehistory by ethnically African people, into the western edge of Polynesia, which was inhabited later, by people who migrated from Southeast Asia by outrigger and double-hulled canoe. A little more than half of Fiji’s 900,000 people are Indigenous, or iTaukei, and nearly 40 percent are ethnically Indian, descended from indentured laborers brought to work on sugar plantations during the British colonial rule.
Captain Nox steered the jet boat back out into the middle of the placid Sigatoka, and we roared off. We were now on our way to the village (1 of the 17 this excursion visits), and someone asked—due diligence—what tabus we should know about. All the women had been given sarongs to wrap modestly around their waists, so there was that. And still no head touching, Nox said, and no hats. But things seem to have relaxed since the day of those ill-fated colonialists because as soon as we arrived in the village of Mavua, our guide, a local who said to call him Jerry, told us we could leave our hats on. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s hot today.”
Mavua is a humble place, typical of a rural iTaukei village: a few dozen brightly painted cement houses with corrugated roofs, a church, a community hall, and roaming chickens and children. Its residents are mostly subsistence farmers. On the weekends, women take surplus produce to local markets to sell, while the men hunt for wild pigs using dogs and spears. “We are trying to live in the life of our forefathers,” Jerry said.