Tribewanted: Vorovoro

Ni sa bula!

Here’s an abridged version of something I sent to friends and family last week (which included more explanations which aren’t necessary for the initiated!)

The slender boat skips lightly over the stippled face of the sea as we lean into the wide arc thrown by our able captain, Api, skirting the outer headland of our island destination. Vorovoro, a dragon like extrusion of ancient volcanic rock dressed with forest, palms and mangroves, rears up to greet us. It’s the perfect watering hole for me: a stepping stone part way across the Pacific, and a place to sit still for a couple of weeks after a hectic month or two. Well, almost still…

I fidget slightly during the ceremonial sharing of Kava. It’s a solemn and precisely executed ceremony, seemingly at odds with Fijian informality and avuncular humour, though once the sevusevu is over and Tui Mali has accepted us new arrivals as members of his local family, the procedures which govern the passing round of the drink become no more than a context for the kind of banter and gossip you’d hear in any village pub. Beautiful women in bright flowery dresses bring in tea and cake. Someone suggests a singalong; guitars and drums appear, and an impromptu band is formed, the strains of charming, harmonically simple Fijian songs cooed by muscular men in grass skirts. It’s so engaging no-one notices the time, or really cares. After all, the coconuts grow themselves, don’t they, so what else is there to do?

“Api, do you mind if I sleep in the boat tonight?” “As long as you bring her back in the morning.” Later, when I worry about the gathering clouds, Api predicts – accurately as it turns out – that it won’t rain tonight, warning me that it will tomorrow. So while the few survivors of the evening’s grog session are still singing I steal out of the Grand Bure and load my mattress and night things into the little boat, loosen the tie on the guy rope and slide her out a hundred yards onto the sea. Gently rocked by the lapping waters and mesmerised by the glittering heavens I wonder if this place will become the graveyard of any ambitions I thought I harboured before I arrived. Am I really going home in a couple of weeks?

So’a viro!