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| Natadola Beach, about 1 hour drive from Nadi |
We had gone to Fiji with absolutely no plans, simply flights booked and a hostel in Nadi for a couple of nights so meeting Kris was just as much a stroke of luck for us as it probably turned out to be a profitable venture for him. On our first day, he drove us to natural hot pools, including a mud pool. Below is a picture of us 7 with Sussu and Amma who helped us coat ourselves completely in mud. Face, hair, right down to our very toes. After clambering out of the warm and somewhat slimy pool, we were shown stalls of souvenirs while the sun dried the mud to a clay on our skin.
Every time you moved you felt your skin crack.
We rinsed off in a far hotter pool - to the extent I actually thought I might burn my skin. The best way I can think to describe it is as a bath that you've run too hot so you whack the cold tap on. There are no cold taps in natural hot springs, they are just holes dug into the ground.
To continue our theme of relaxation, we each followed up the natural spa treatment with a full body massage under the coconut trees. The ladies whispered and murmured to each other in their sing-song language while kneading us with coconut oil. As I said at the beginning, this is a ridiculous country - idyllic doesn't even seem to cover it.
Kris had not finished our adventure for the day as he invited us back to his own home where he cooked us a traditional Fijian meal. All we had to do was buy the food for the feast (and we bought about twice the amount necessary to feed us - Kris's enterprising nature at play. But when you can get a whole string of fish for 20 FJD, who would really complain about him buying extra with our money for his family). We had our first encounter with kava, the traditional drink of Fiji, that afternoon. After teaching us the simple ceremony that goes with the sharing of kava, we each downed bowls of the stuff in turn. Quite frankly, it looks and tastes like muddy water. As for its effect, on this occasion I discerned nothing more than its numbing qualities, like throat spray. For all that, though, it wasn't actually unpleasant.
Lunch consisted of fish cooked in coconut milk with bok choy and kasava, the Fijian potato. It was delicious and, dare I say it for fear of sounding 'gap yah', I would guess pretty authentic.
After our day of successfully exposing ourselves to a less backpackery side of Fiji, we enjoyed a very typical travellers' evening of hanging out in the hostel pool, drinking cheap beer and finally finding some locals with guitars to head down to the beach. Bizarrely, they opened with Ronan Keating 'When you say nothing at all' - we never stopped hearing that song everywhere we went.
We met Kris again the following day for him to show us a beautiful beach called Natadola. Surprisingly, great beaches are not that common on the main island, Viti Levu, but this one was quite simply stunning. We frolicked in the sea, sunbathed and generally enjoyed paradise with just a few other tourists, despite the nearby resort. We once again got to enjoy Kris's cooking, this time through his ingenuity of constructing a makeshift barbecue on the beach so we could have sausages and steak. Unsurprisingly, we never really got round to making the salad we had planned and instead enjoyed the delicious fruit - mangoes, grapes, passionfruit... In short, this day was less of an adventure but simply one of gorgeousness. We were utterly surrounded by beauty - between impossibly white sand, clear blue warm water and palm trees. You just couldn't help but feel enveloped by a strong sense that everything was right with the world. I don't think I have ever felt further from London, from real life.
