Spending more time with D' and P' I can really appreciate their continued support and advice, always looking out for me and doing their best to entertain me even though we are stuck in a rain drenched house unable to have internet, television, telephone landline or radio signals, relying on the few dvd movies that we have and the occasional mobile cellphone text or call from the outside world.
News reached us that Nadi is still half under water and the water level is still rising as the rains continue to fall almost constantly under monsoon type conditions. A brief excursion to get buy some more matresses is all that D' will suffer going out in the bad weather as she has heard that the young couple and the Spaniard who were here the other day are due to return back here, as their trip to the islands ended up being a washout, just as we predicted.
I am still having to take at least two cold showers a day, just to cool off, and D' still says that a third is best though I just can't be doing with being that wet that many times during the day, especially as a shower should mean a change of clothing and I just dont have 15 changes of clothes to swap into.
Unlike its neighbouring island of Hawaii, which had the help of the American money and industry, Fiji is still very much behind the times, with it everything being done to Fiji time which is another way of saying its gets done when it gets done and there is no way to rush things. Most Fijian houses do not have such luxuries as beds, sofa's or washing machines, favouring instead to wash them by hand and hand them out to dry.
Being european D' is very used to getting things done in either hours or at the most days, but so far she and her husband have been waiting months for an internet or telephone cable to be installed so that they can have a proper link to the outside world that does not rely on crackly radio messages on a cellphone every few hours.
Each time I go into my room I can smell the mustiness and the mildew growing all around and yet with the constant driving rain if I open the windows it will just let in more rain and moisture and without the heat there is nothing to dry out the room, my clothes or the bedding. I am still very glad that I have a roof over my head and know that in the airport there are still many stranded passengers desperate who would be happy to trade places with me, so I am not ungrateful, but still I am allowed at least to think and dream of better conditions.
Midway through the day a happy go lucky australian guy G' comes along and with him comes fresh news of the weather, the conditions at the airport and someone new to talk to. It is not that we have run out of things to say, but a fresh perspective on things and a different face is always a welcome. He has some good stories of his time in Fiji, his first ever time he has travelled outside of Australia despite being at least ten years older than I am, but still he has tried the local food, local drink and been chased away from the fishing spots by locals once which was enough for him to think twice about being there a second time.
One of P's cousins or uncles turned up with yet more dvd's and so we spend the best part of the day watching Clint Eastwood movies, which meant lots of guns, blood and lead bullets flying all over the place.
Around 5pm I had my second shower of the day, and wondered decided to write up a few more lines for entries in my blog, even though there is little to say in terms of travelling, but Aussie G' has enough news, jokes and stories to keep us all amused for a few more hours yet.
As we talk P's cousins and other extended family are hereabouts and join in with the stories and news as they can. English here is heavily accented but almost everyone can speak good enough English to get by and all the movies that we have been watching are all English, as is the most of the music that we have been listening to over the past few days. The admit that few fijians actually own or run anything here now, it is all controlled or lorded over by Indians, and one store actually has a bigger sign saying that they are"owned and operated by fijians" than they do displaying the actual name of the shop.
It would appear that Australia is very much becoming a full part of asia, complete with some towns or districts being controlled and mostly populated by Indians, Chinese or Muslims, proof that the expansionism of the white man acros the world is now in reverse with every part of the once powerful british empire now suffering so much imigration from other countries that despite English being the worlds first language ( officially recognised or not ! ) very soon there will be no country left that is governed and populated by its own native people.
I do not often make sweeping religious or political statements, but I am not sure that all this mixed influences is such a good thing, as culture, heritage, traditions are all going out the window.
Everywhere I go and everything I see shows it more and more than although the technology, the geography and the weather might be different in each country they are all heading the same way, and in a couple of hundred years those three differences will indeed be the only things that seperate one country from the any other.
D' managed to speak to L' at the airport and the news was that rivers all over Fiji were bursting their banks and with continuing rains it looks set to only get worse.
Aussie G' has already spend three days trying to get back home near Sydney as his wife had to go to hospital while he was here but with the storms and the flooding it is next to impossible to get an earlier flight than what you have booked. He managed to speak to his wife and the news over in Australia is that the rain storms have hit the east coast there too, ending the long drought with more rainfall in one night than they have had in eight years, nice for them but for me just another place to get rained on.
I am so glad that I stopped off in Mexico and got a few good days of sun as without that I think I would be just trying to get a flight home and forgetting the rest of the trip, having given up on hope.
G' told us stories about a few young children in Australia who did not believe in rain, thinking that it was similar to Santa Clause, just a thing that adults tell children to tease or amuse their kids.
After dark I wanted to thank D' and P' for them putting me up for a few nights so I asked if we could order a pizza, but D' said that that would cost a fortune so instead we took a drive out to the pizza place to pick one up. As we didnt have the telephone number we could not order in advance and once there we had a wait of almost an hour before it arrived and on the way back we passed a pothole in the road that was so huge it was bigger than the car and would not have looked out of place on the moons surface.
We also passed a few of the big hotels in the area, all were full, and P's cousin is a chef working in the Sheraton and he told us that this morning he had to prepare breakfasts for over 2000 people, now thats a lot of stranded people as normally when people come to Fiji they dont hang around Nadi but stay for a night and then move on over to the islands where it is more rural and cultural, plus has better countryside and areas for camping out under the stars or fishing.
No comments:
Post a Comment