Tribewanted: Vorovoro

Coming to the island on noting much more than a whim inspired by a rather excitable paragraph in The Feejee Exerience brochure I had no prior expectations of Vorovoro. I had never even heard of tribewanted before looking inside that deviously brightly coloured magazine. Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised with what I found here.
One of the first things that struck me about Vorovoro was the sense of a rushed history. There is barely an item on the island without a date or a past tribe member’s claim to fame/kava induced philosophy etched onto it. Something I looked upon with an odd sense of competition. They carved a flag next to their name – I shall carve two, and I will write something even more nostalgically reminiscent so that everyone will see my name and know that I am wise beyond my years.

So I reluctantly found myself on a secret mission. I may be the 1600th(ish) tribe member but I shall be the greatest. A second floor for the tree house shall reinforce my immortality! Already nearly finished you say? Then I shall be the one to complete it and it will be wonderful with bamboo guttering, flower boxes and a bathroom ensuite made only with good intentions, half baked ideas and a truck load of sticky back plastic. Of course my somewhat ambitious plans didn’t really pan out once I realised just exactly how much work my tree house masterpiece would require. Fiji, or Vorovoro to be more specific, has a wonderfully nasty habit of melting my brain until I am reduced to nothing more than a lump of tanned flesh blissfully soaking up the rays in one of the numerous hammocks. The cogs in my head only turning quick enough to allow me to follow direct orders, eat, excrete and drink kava.

One day in a rare moment of clarity the cogs in my head started to grind a little faster again. I was suddenly inspired to make a board game. So with saw in hand I took to the tool shed and for a few hours I was nothing but a flurry of sawdust, varnish and paint. Then I hit a snag. When nailing one of the final pieces to the board the wood gave a groan of protest and promptly split. Well how rude. Upon reaching my first problem of this new project my brain decided it had done enough work and it wasn’t long before I was mindlessly topping up my tan again on the pontoon. I remember reading somewhere that genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perseverance. How right they were.

However it was those wonderful sessions floating mindlessly away on the pontoon, toe in water, that really caused me to fall in love with island life. I wasn’t completely useless here – I did my bit to help. The odd splash of paint there, the odd sweep here I even risked life and limb helping to separate the pigs to cure them of their incestuous ways. But still I did nothing remarkable to leave my mark.

After retiring too early from one of the nightly poker games (such is my luck) I found myself sat on the tribewanted laptop being forcefully informed in that birthday card style of writing (you know, the fancy writing reserved for special occasions only) that ecotricity has been energising the tribe since August 2007. Interesting and useful – everything I want to achieve, but not really helping me with my quest. I want to give something back to the tribe – all I’ve really managed so far to give (very generously I might add) is my special donations to the compost heap.

It was in the latter half of my stay here that I managed to drag the bashful conclusion of my island dilemma into the cyberspace spotlight – a blog, written in my semi-comatose state on the beach. Perfect. What better way to sum up my lazy days on Vorovoro? It may not be original, useful or particularly fun – but at least it’s accurate.

So after many failed attempts of creating something useful or fun to be remembered by I instead find myself fighting the ants (they get everywhere) for the computer mouse. Vorovoro it seems does not want me to leave my mark, even a digital one. The best I’ve done so far is piss up the side of a tree. I had hoped to achieve something a little more dignified then that. But perhaps that is all is needed. No one is going to really care about my bizarre little struggle to become the most memorable and no one is really going to want to read another blog about how another tribe member has found the stars breathtaking, the Fijian culture so addictively loving or how the mosquitoes and sandflies are the embodiment of all evil. Still a little part of me just wants to let the world know that, if only for a month, I lived in paradise and I at least tried to help keep paradise running smoothly. So perhaps a simple, “Jon woz ‘ere”, will do.