Searching for Real

Fiji
April 2017

Tropical dawn peers across the landscape of fluttering palms as I emerge from the customs office, barely awakened by the unharried entry to Fiji. North American tourists squawk in cheery circles of delirium outside the airport. Half the white buildings are under construction; the other half continue aging for forty years more in the temperate island sun. The voices shock my senses. I whip my head left, then right. They gawk at their smartphones searching for answers to endless questions. I have no service. I don't want any.

"I mean, we saw this cheap flight and we just HAD to buy it, but like, where ARE we actually? What city is this? How do we get to the hotel? I thought this was just a small island! We are in Fiji, right?" A dazed laughter bounces off the white walls and down the concrete corridor. Joking, but only mostly.

I evade eye contact. An Aussie couple echoes the laughter as they take the phone and begin tapping the map.

"Right, so we said the exact same thing the first time we came to Fiji. Now we know. So the airport is here, near Nadi. It looks like Na-Di, but it's pronounced Nan-Di. There's nothing in the town. Dirty, rubbish in the street, shops, you know. Your hotel is over here - you said Hilton, right? Now this is the real Fiji. Blue waters, beaches. But Suva, Nadi, there's nothing there. Suva is the capital but it's just a grimy city. These little islands - the Yasawas - that's real Fiji too. But the rest of the main island here isn't worth visiting." Real Fiji.

We convey so much of language, of communication, saying nothing at all. What did they imply about Fiji? The rest is fake, insincere, wrong, or ignorant? Or that there is a mistake of geography or a legislative anomaly? No, they meant that it wasn't all beautiful Fiji: the easily glorious and glamorous. The Fiji of effortless delight: lapis waves lapping soft shorelines below perfectly arced palms next to brightly blooming hibiscus. The curated Fiji: the Disneyland Fiji. Resort Fiji. Exclusive Fiji.

The rest of Fiji is not proper for outside eyes, they sneer. Maybe they sneer too at the ugly produce in a market, manufactured powder on a ski hill, and the laboratory glow from a bulb that are still real vegetables, snow, and light. This false Fiji lacks a package, so we of wealth are unsure of it, the unlabeled, free from manufacture. As visitors we unconsciously coast into sterile curated locales. We want foreign because it's fashionable, but without discomfort. We want places designed to fulfill a contrived image. But if half the country's population is in the dirty city, that's what I seek, not the Hilton. The celebrated Fijian beachfront may not actually be Fiji at all, instead in the private hands of Aussie or European or US hotel conglomerates and property magnates. Maybe wealthy tourists are the wrong people to decide what's real.

So I avert my eyes toward another definition of real. And it comes immediately. Waiting in a sagging overhang near the Suva boat terminal, a young man sees my backpack and offers his grandmother's phone number in case I need a place to stay. No charge, of course. Once onboard, a chatty woman with short curls promptly inquires also. "I'll find a guest house or something when we get there," I reply casually. No, she insisted. I should stay with her family in the village instead. And so we went to Aditamana's Real Fiji.

A yellow school bus from Oregon gains a second life as it transports us from the jetty, and the village paths squish with sandy soil among scattered identical three-room homes balancing on stilts. We eat cassava, stewed greens, and fish from a can for dinner. A woven mat converts the floor to a table and then to a bed. With our lives aligned by light, sleep arrives early, maybe 8 pm when the village generator sputters. In daylight we read and walk to a trickling creek to bathe after a breakfast of tea and biscuits. Lunch resembled dinner, with fried eggs in place of fish. The humble meals fill me and silence me. We sip kava - a bitter brown slurry of ground tree roots acting as a mild sedative - in the dusk and murmur about the day.

I also occasionally crave the luxuries of the wealthy world: fast transport, culinary variety, currencies that don't collapse. But I don't waste much energy seeking these things in a foreign place: fantasy tourism façades are candy or crisps or Coke, a fleeting ease of hunger, but I'm left empty and sullen later. The life less curated satiates me more. So a few days at a time, I continue searching for real. But as a visitor, I defer to someone else - someone local - to show me the way. Their way.