INTO THE DEEP

At the crossroads of the South Pacific, Fiji is a nation of wild interiors, cerulean blues, and locals whose warmth knows no bounds

- Maggie Shipstead

was expecting to spend most of my time in Fiji, a nation of more than 300 islands, on or in the water, but I'd mostly been thinking of 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, mudbrown river, past sheer cliffs, 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, farmable banks are known as Fiji's "salad bowl."

After a while, the boat driver, an Indigenous Fijian who introduced himself as Captain Nox, steered us into some shaded shallows and cut the engine to tell his 14 passengers a story. Missionaries and reverends, back when the nation was first ruled by the British, in the late 1800s, met their violent deaths along these riverbanks at the hands of the island's tribal members, at times for committing acts of tabu (or taboo, as Captain James Cook imported the word to English in 1777) like touching people's heads. "Fiji was the worst cannibal island," Nox said. "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, 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.