The life aquatic

Encounter with the teeming waters and welcoming people of Fiji.

- Maggie Shipstead

I was expecting to spend most of my time in Fiji, a nation of over 300 islands, on or in the water, but I'd mostly been thinking of the ocean. Yet on a warm morning in May, I found myself deep within the mountainous interior of Fiji's largest island, Viti Levu, roaring in a red jet boat down a winding, mud-brown river, past dense jungle, and gentle banks where locals watered their horses or fished for tilapia or mud crabs. The river was one of Viti Levu's longest, the Sigatoka, whose fertile banks are known as Fiji's "salad bowl".

After a while, Captain Nox, the boat driver-an indigenous Fijian-steered us into the shallows and cut the engine to share some local history with his 14 passengers. He pointed out a nearby mountain and told us that because it was sacred, the Sigatoka chiefs had resisted many lucrative bids to quarry its marble deposits. In the 19th century, he said, one tribe lived in caves at the top and would rain rocks and spears on those who tried to invade via the only trail that snaked up the mountain's sheer face. He beamed. "But now Fiji is the friendliest island, eh?"

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, to the western edge of Polynesia, which was inhabited later, by people who migrated from Southeast Asia. A little more than half of Fiji's 9,00,000 people are indigenous, or iTaukei, and nearly 40 percent are ethnically Indian, descended from labourers brought to work on sugar plantations during British colonial rule. Nox motored us to our next destination, Mavua, a typical iTaukei village of brightly painted cement houses, populated mostly by subsistence farmers.