We were about halfway back downriver from the village when it really hit me. I had been almost sulking, angry with myself, squatting in the bow of the boat and trying to keep from getting completely drenched by the rain and the spray from the choppy waves, mentally replaying the last hour or so over and over. After a half-hour, I finally figured out a way to justify things, at least inside my own head.
I and a handful of other intrepid travelers had climbed nervously into the 20-foot-long boat, basically a canoe with a motor, covered ourselves as best we could with our bright yellow raincoats and motored up the Navua River to a tiny village called Nukusere -- "singing sands," in the Fijian tongue. No roads go north from Navua, our jumping-off point on the south shore of Fiji's largest island, Viti Levu, even though the metropolitan capital of Suva is barely an hour's bus-ride down the coast. Right in the middle of the main island of the chain, Nukusere is the rural, isolated backwoods Fiji.
The boat ride itself was breathtaking. The boat's captain guided us expertly around the river's small rapids, not even needing my panicked warnings of rocks ahead. We left the laid-back bus-stop town of Navua behind, everything going quiet but the birds and the water, and wound our way north between green, rocky cliffs. Waterfalls, flush with the recent rains, poured down the cliffsides into the river on both sides. We passed people on bili-bilis, essentially three large bamboo poles lashed together, working their way downriver to the Navua market and watched as one man jumped off the cliffside to catch a pigeon, while the rest of his family stood on their tiny raft and clung to the rocks nearby. The modern world had passed this part of the planet by altogether.
SINGING SANDS
When we reached the village and headed ashore, it seemed almost deserted. A young girl, the captain's daughter, ran down the muddy bank to meet us, grabbed bundles of supplies for the village and started carrying them back up the hill, where a small group of children had gathered. Our guide, a big, boisterous, politically-minded guy named Kim, led us to the main assembly hut of Nukusere, the interior of which was adorned with plastic "Welcome!" flags, and gave us a quick rundown on etiquette: sit cross-legged, as stretching out is an insult to the chief; don't reach for the kava bowl until the chief offers it to you; save the questions for after, etc.
The chief came in, and we sat cross-legged on grass mats and drank kava together -- it's the national drink of Fiji, a bitter, semi-narcotic beverage that looks and tastes about like muddy water and puts your tongue to sleep after a bowl or two.
After the ceremony, lunch was served, tray after tray of food brought in and laid before us by the women of the village. The children slowly started to filter in, eyeing us curiously and smiling at us as we ate. We finished our meal, and the women gathered together to perform a traditional dance for us, dancing and clapping and trying to teach the women in our group to follow the movements, as the chief accompanied the clapping on his guitar. It was nice, and quite educational, as well, with Kim giving a running commentary in English (few of the villagers spoke English, at least to us.) The strangest moment came at the end of our visit, when all the women laid out their own assortments of trinkets and handicrafts for us to browse and hopefully buy; we all sheepishly meandered about the large hut, loading up on what trinkets we could and feeling guilty for not buying everything there was to be had.
As the rain started to fall, we suited up and said our good-byes, heading out into the wet just as a second group of tourists came up the hill from another small boat. The villagers gathered their wares and left the hut, and the cycle started all over again. We spent our last few minutes in Nukusere wandering around and gawking quietly at the thatched bures nestled amid the greenery. Walking through the village in the rain, I felt like an actor in a movie; a few village children watched warily through the windows as we bumbled about, six aliens in bright yellow uniforms. With the rain, everyone had vanished inside, leaving Nukusere a ghost town, silent but for the sound of water on the leaves and a tinny radio hidden somewhere in one of the huts.
Our little tour done, all of us clambered back into the boat for a cold, somber ride down to Navua. No one said much, mostly because we were all trying to concentrate on keeping as dry and warm as possible in the downpour. We motored steadily downriver to Navua, then disembarked and waited for the bus from Suva to take us back to our resorts and hostels in Nadi.
TOURIST GUILT
The whole afternoon gnawed at me as I sat there in the boat, trying to stay dry. When we had first reached the village, I suddenly felt horrified at what I myself was taking part in. It felt like a human zoo: "here, come watch the Fijians dance, try to communicate with them, and laugh at how not like us they are!" I felt sick. These people were on display for us, a kind of living museum exhibit, like re-enactors who don't ever go home for the day. The whole trip was billed as "ecotourism," but in the end, it seemed much more like package-tour tourism, albeit in a fairly remote location. While we were there, even the villagers themselves seemed bored, going through the motions automatically, shills for the tourist dollar. And why shouldn't they be bored? I certainly would have been, if our positions were reversed.
In planning my trip, I had been determined to avoid standard "tourist" activities; like most of that stubborn breed of tourists who stay in hostels, haggle with handicrafts sellers, and insist on leaving the beaten path, I was sure that I could find a more "authentic" experience than those offered by companies like our outfitter, Rosie the Travel Service (no, really.) I wasn't going to be like the rest of the herd, no sir -- in the end, I only signed on the river tour as a lark, a few days before heading home, and by doing so, I felt I'd shaken hands with the devil. I had fueled the same exploitative canned-culture voyeurism I'd always despised.
The sudden wave of shame and guilt was almost immediately followed, however, by a realization: the villagers of Nukusere needed me. No matter how much they hated it, and no matter how much I hated it, voyeurs like myself were necessary. Perched on a rocky hillside and surrounded by jungle, Nukusere doesn't produce enough in the way of crops to make much at the Navua market; there's just not enough non-mountainous land nearby to farm more than already do, and those crops have to feed the whole village. The farming in the area, according Kim, is largely subsistence farming.
The town is too far inland for villagers to commute to work, particularly since boats are scarce and bili-bilis are strictly a one-way ride -- unless you happen to be Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's impossible to negotiate the rapids and the current back upriver by poling three tied-together bamboo trees -- so it's difficult to hold a regular job and still live in the village. Even if the villagers could make it downstream, Suva is the nearest place for work, and that's another forty minutes by bus.
Even still, many people from the countryside do work in the city, and judging from the fact that most of the villagers we met were women and children, Nukusere is no exception. The down side, of course, aside from being away from home, is that villagers drawn to the city can't farm, which means less food for their families.
So, to the people of Nukusere, tourism is just business; it's a job to them, something they have to do to buy gas for the village generator, clothes for themselves and education for their children. Village life isn't as blissful or romantic as some would have you believe -- children die, often of diseases or injuries that could have been treated in urban areas, and villagers need money, to pay for schools and uniforms and books, not to mention things like radios and rugby balls. Fiji is still a new country, on the global timeline, but the barter economy that used to supply inland villages with tools, seafood and clothing is long dead. Tourism leads the list of Fiji's top business sectors, and although there is a fair bit of industry on Viti Levu (primarily sugar cultivation and processing, mining for gold and silver and logging), most of that industry seem to be confined to the northern part of the island; what can villagers living in isolated mountain areas do to survive, other than offer up their homes for tourism?
THE BIG PICTURE
As can be guessed from the above, my initial plans for my trip to Fiji were quite naive. I, like many other travelers used to traveling in more-developed countries, had this mental movie of myself wandering the country at will, sleeping in the bush and living freely, without any need for "tourist" activities like guided treks. I was determined to make my own way.
The reality of Fiji, however, is a bit different. One thing for visitors to keep in mind is that almost all of the land in Fiji (84%, as of 1999 -- [Country Review Fiji 2000, CountryWatch.com, p. 13]) is owned by someone (generally, by Fijian villagers), and land rights are intensely important to native Fijians. I witnessed a Taukei march in Suva during my stay, protesting the appointment of a Fijian of Indian descent to the contentious Native Land Trust Board, and one protester's sign made a particularly relevant point: "Every inch of land in Fiji is owned by someone."
The slogan sounds like an overstatement, but it's actually fairly accurate -- no matter where in Fiji you go, no matter how remote or far from the nearest village, the land belongs to the natives, and it is considered extremely rude to trespass. Outside of the urban areas of the country (which are basically just Nadi, Suva and Lautoka), travelers should be certain to ask the local chief for his permission before leaving the main road. If you want to visit a particular area, don't just charge off on your own, but instead ask around after a guide to take you there.
On top of all that, there's also the bigger economic picture. Fiji, despite its postcard-perfect image as a tropical hideaway, has been a less-than-secure hotspot for several years, even previous to the coup carried out in 2000 by George Speight and his followers. The dual catalysts for Speight's coup were actually two previous coups, both takeovers carried out by Lt. Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka in 1987 (the second takeover, four months later, took place essentially because Rabuka didn't like what the elected government installed by the first coup was doing.) As a result, the island nation has teetered precariously on the edge of ethnic and political conflict for the better part of fifteen years.
When Rabuka took power, many of the high-priced resorts were already owned by foreigners -- American, Japanese and Australian investors, among others (at least four of the biggest, most prestigious resorts in the islands are owned by international hotel/resort chains, including the Warwick Fiji, the Sheraton Royal Denarau, the Fijian, and the Fiji Mocambo.) These owners prudently moved their assets offshore, and when the political climate never fully re-stabilized, the resorts kept their assets outside Fiji. At least five of the biggest, most prestigious resorts in the islands -- the Warwick Fiji, the Sheraton Royal Denarau, the Naviti Resort, the Fijian Resort, and the Fiji Mocambo -- are all parts of major international hotel chains (Warwick, Sheraton/Starwood, Warwick, Shangri-La, and Shangri-La, respectively), and the average price per night is around $300. Therefore, although hundreds of thousands of dollars a day move through Fiji's resorts (an average of 300,000 tourists visit the islands each year, spending $297 million US annually as of 1997 [Country Review Fiji 2000, p. 43]), little of it actually stays in the country, being shifted instead to more secure international accounts, and thereby out of the hands of the Fijians themselves. The end product is a tourism-based economy that is of little benefit to the country itself, fueled by high-end resorts and getaways that few Fijians can even afford to visit.
During my stay, one village elder expressed shock and dismay when a traveling companion and I described to him the cost of visiting Fiji's surf camps, particularly those located near the popular Cloudbreak reef (low-end surf camps in the Mamanucas, which boast arguably the best surfing in the country, run in the area of $100 per night.) To him the prices we named sounded ludicrous, and we had to show him the entry in my friend's Lonely Planet guidebook as proof. And the prices must seem ludicrous, indeed, to the inhabitants of a country where the median daily income is $16.2 Fijian (in 1996; this works out to about $8 US) [Country Review Fiji 2000, p. 29]. The disparity between visitors and natives is a painful one.
THE ALTERNATIVE?
In Fiji, "ecotourism" can mean a number of things, some of which would make the average environmentalist furious. Some ventures touted as "ecotourism" are nothing more than standard resort tourism with an environmentally-friendly patina, if even that. A header on the first page of the official Fiji Visitors Bureau literature on ecotourism (which includes a write-up on African-style 4WD safaris inland, by the way) gives an idea of the tourist authorities' definition of the word: "What To See And Do In The Fiji Islands Outside Our Resorts And Hotels."
That's not to say that ecotourism is a completely hollow idea in Fiji; it’s just that there are no real standards, so most serious ecotourism ventures are still in the building stages. Projects like the Abaca village development in Koroyanitu National Heritage Park are a promising step towards less-touristy alternatives that actually benefit the community and don't impact greatly on the environment, but projects of that sort are few in number.
And is even that true "ecotourism"? Definitions vary, even in the scholarly literature. In his book Ecotourism: An introduction, author David Fennell compares fifteen different definitions of the word, and only a few key aspects are shared by all: 1) that ecotourism is based on an interest in nature; 2) that ecotourism contributes to conservation; 3) that ecotourism relies on the use of parks and preserves; 4) that ecotourism benefits the local people in a long-term fashion; and 5) that ecotourism promotes education and study. [Ecotourism, table 2.1, p. 41]
Therefore, applying these ideas to Fijian ecotourism, it should be possible to separate the marketing hype from more "legitimate" activities. And by these standards, my own trip upriver was indeed ecotourism -- it was definitely educational, we impacted the environment pretty minimally (relatively, anyway), and the people of Nukusere certainly see far more profit from river-trippers than the people of Korolevu, down the coast, see from the neighboring Warwick Fiji.
Now, knowing all this background behind Fijian ecotourism should make me feel better, but it doesn't, not completely. I still feel a big twinge of the guilt that hit me heading downriver, even now, and I probably will no matter what. Those of us who feel the insatiable need to travel and explore cannot truly avoid some kind of impact, both cultural and environmental; just our presence in a culture that's not our own makes ripples like a rock dropped in a cultural pond. In the end, all we can do is make sure we keep in mind that ecotourism is still very much in its beginning stages worldwide, that we shouldn't believe everything we read, and that we need to simply keep our eyes open, all definitions aside.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Far & Near, April/May 2002)