Fiji: The Meke

This is the last post about our adventures in Fiji. Life in Maine has been moving so fast that the Fiji photos have gotten pushed aside by all the cool stuff happening right now. It's late spring, the birds are mating, baby barnacles are settling over everything, the lilacs are almost over and the lupines are starting ... which makes it hard to focus on amazing things that happened three months ago on the other side of the world.

 But I really wanted to show you the meke. One evening, a troop of boys and girls from the Ratu Varani School (you saw it a few posts back) came over to perform for us as a school fundraiser. I think most of the boys were between 8 and 13 years old, although as I've mentioned before I stink at age-guessing.  Here they are with their teachers, coming across the mudflats from the village, partially in costume.

I think the skirts are made of banana leaves.

The meke is a combination of song and dance that tells a story, but I never figured out what most of the stories were. One particularly wonderful dance had George (the guy who brought us the baby boa, who is fantastic at the traditional dances) imitating the animals of the jungle, and the audience guessing which ones. 

Boys and girls danced separately - unfortunately I didn't get any good pictures of the girls, who looked like they were in their early teens.  They wore white shirts with red sulus, which was charming but not nearly as picturesque as the boys' banana leaves. I've seen videos from the main islands that show girls dancing in outfits that look more like my sterotypical image of a hulu dancer, with grass skirts and skimpy tops, but Kadavu is more isolated and fairly conservative, so it was shirts and sulus for the girls.

I've attached a video (not mine) at the end to give you a rough idea of what this sounded like. You'll notice there are limited instruments, but amazing vocal harmonies. Richard, one of Matava's owners, said that if you get four Fijians together, you get four-part harmony, and if you get ten Fijians together, you get 10-part harmony. My ear isn't good enough to really sort out what I heard, but everyone I met could (and did) burst into song at some point, and never alone. Every night a group would sing around the kava bowl until the kava ran out. I would listen from my bure (my young daughter made sure I got to bed very early every night) and savor the music.

[Warning, a full paragraph of photo jargon follows, for those who are interested.]
It was dusk when they began, which presented a few challenges photographing the dancers. The only lighting was kerosene lanterns. I had my Nikon on  a tripod (which makes me insanely self-conscious because I look like a TV news crew and am not nearly at a skill level that lives up to my gear) and just kept upping the ISO as night came on. By the time it was fully dark in the photos below, I was at ISO 5000. I confess I hardly saw the dancers, I was trying so hard to photograph them! I shot in RAW and cleaned up the noise in post-production. I also took about 800 shots, of which I kept 139 (so far) and of which only 9 are worth showing you. TGFD = thank god for digital.
[End of jargon.]

 

The dances look and sound something like this:

Video courtesy of YouTube.

Fiji: March 19, Kadavu Koro

little girl, Kadavu Koro, Kadavu, Fiji

Our last day on Kadavu we visited the local school and the village of Kadavu Koro (I think Koro means village, so that must be kind of like saying we visited the city of New York City.)

 

Our first stop was the Ratu Varani school. 'Ratu' means 'chief' or something like it. The ratus seem to be both cultural and political VIPs. Ratu Varani was a famous Fijian leader. Same idea as  'President Washington Elementary School.'

 The landing area at the school. Many of the children are boarders, which is typical for schools on Kadavu. They spend the week at school and go home on Friday afternoon. There appeared to be about a hundred children at the school, but that's just me eyeballing the size of the school assembly. The youngest looked like first-graders, and the oldest might have been high-school age, but I found the older  Fijians were the harder it was to guess their ages. Partly because I stink at guessing ages, and partly because they seem to age very quickly by my standards. People who looked to me like they were in their 60s and 70s turned out to be in their 40s and 50s. Always assuming that I understood everyone's answers correctly! Traveling to a country where you don't speak the language is always a bit like falling into Wonderland.

School, Kadavu, Fiji

 A classroom building.

UNICEF tent, Kadavu, Fiji

 Another classroom in a UNICEF tent. I think the double-layer roof must help keep the heat down.

students at Ratu Varani school, Kadavu, Fiji

The girls' uniform was a blue dress with white belt, and the short haircuts are required by the school (check out the rules in the photo above.) The boys wear a white shirt and the traditional sulu, which is sort of like a tailored wrap-around skirt with pockets.

Peeking into a classroom.

Peeking into a dormitory. Those are bunkbeds.

 

 

The bridge on the way to the village.

 

We stopped at an enormous waterfall to cool off. Some of the boys from the village jumped off the cliffs to astound us. This is only the lower portion of the waterfall.

After we splashed around for a while, most of us climbed up the cliff, where there was a cleft in the stone through which the river ran, then swam about two hundred feet back to another waterfall, much taller and more powerful. I couldn't manage the climb with a camera, so I have no photos of that part! The upper waterfall wasn't climbable - we just looked, then floated back down stream to the 'little' falls.

 After our swim, our guides (some of the crew from Matava) made sure we were properly dressed for village society (shoulders covered, skirts for the women, no bags carried on the shoulders, no hats), and we walked back through the village.

 Again, I found it very hard to assess what I saw. I assume that the village is poor, at least in the way that I understand wealth, and the only industry I saw was drying kava. It was much cleaner than villages I've seen in other parts of the world, though. There was a little trash blowing around, but no visible piles of rotting garbage. The houses were built of bits and pieces, but they seemed to be neatly kept, and the owners came to the door to wave and smile as we went by.

I think this was a kitchen, but there wasn't an architectural 'type' that I could decipher, at least not on such a short visit. I couldn't tell, for example, if every house had a separate kitchen, or even in fact which were houses, which were workshops, and which were outbuildings. Again that feeling of topsy-turvy disorientation, like trying to navigate in a language you don't speak. Not an unfriendly feeling, just a strong sense of not understanding what I saw.

 Laundry was done in the river.

 There were flowers everywhere. Orchids grew in the main lawns, and they seemed to be grown on purpose. Another sign that I didn't understand life here. Most of the poverty-stricken places I've visited were dirty, crowded, and very interested in getting money from visitors. They don't typically have flowers in public areas. They have more pressing issues. So I just didn't know what to make of Kadavu Koro. Subsistence farmers who get plenty to eat and are content with that? Poor but happy? What American stereotype would apply here? It's so hard to read a culture through my own biases, many of which I only notice when I travel. I came away humbled by my ignorance, reminding myself that I shouldn't be quick to judge even in my own country.

 

The only things I'm pretty sure I read correctly were welcoming smiles on every side, and plenty of pride.

 Like this.

Fiji: March 18, Underwater at Two Trees Island

Two Trees Island, Kadavu, Fiji

This is Two Trees Island. The reason for the name is more obvious from the landward view.

Underwater photo of coral reef near Two Trees Island, Kadavu, Fiji

I'd gone snorkeling a couple of times, and it was beautiful, but the reef was so far down there was no point in trying to take photos. 

At Two Trees, though, the reef came right up to the waves at low tide, so I finally gave my little Lumix a good workout. 

Cabbage coral, Kadavu, Fiji

A lush cabbage patch! This wavy green stuff is called Cabbage Coral. It really is lime green, even brighter and greener than these photos.

Our fearless leader, Diver Ed.

The starfish - oops, I mean sea stars - were gorgeous, deep, ultramarine blue. They are Linckia laevigata, the Blue Star. The last time I saw a blue like this was at the Jardin Majorelle in Marrakesh.

This is a White Bumpy Coral. I don't know the names of most of the things I saw on the reef. If you know, chime in please!

Look at the marvelous gold pinstripe around the eye.

I spent a long time hovering over a coral head these little blue fish had staked out as their territory. When a predator (or photographer) gets too close, they dart back into the coral arms.  It was hard to stay in position because the waves and the tide kept pushing me away. I had to swim ahead fast, and then take photos as quickly as I could while being floated past the coral head!

Fiji, March 17; Circumambulating Waya Island

(Fiji Beachcombing series No.8):   Fluted Giant Clam shell (Tridacna squamosa), Spider Conch (Lambis sp.), Top Shell (Trochus sp.), sea glass, pumice, and several species I couldn’t identify, including a cowrie, coral branches, scallop, and Cone Snail.

The stars of today's still life are a (small) Fluted Giant Clam (Tridacna squamosa) and some sort of Spider Conch (Lambis spp.) There were lots of the clams in our area, and their lips have the most psychedelic patterns:

Video by Marine Life Europe via YouTube.

Here's where we found these beauties:

My daughter and I headed back to Waya Island. This time, having learned the difficulty of navigating a strong tide through a deep and narrow channel in a two-person kayak with one adult, I asked George to drop us off in the skiff. Wimpy, but I planned to beachcomb all the way around the island, so I needed to save a little energy.

It was hot, humid, and sporadically rainy, which did my hair no favors but made for some beautiful clouds.

This time I got to study the unfamiliar geology a little closer.  I wish I had a way to show you the scale here. See the carved-out tip of the island?

Here it is a little closer. It's roughly 8' tall. The ferns seem to be clinging to bare rock.

This is just a little past that point. The cliff is layered like a sedimentary stone, but the layers are made of a volcanic-type stone set in what looks like mud.

Doesn't it look like you could just pull one of those stones right out of the mud? It's more like concrete, though. We actually had to climb over a bit at the other end of the island, and we used these like handholds on a climbing wall. They are quite solid.

 

And yet that muddy-looking matrix must be pretty soft, because the whole coastline is sculpted like this, with the volcanic stone lying loose on the beach.  Doesn't that island look like something Dr. Seuss would have drawn?

 The patina on this giant clam was so beautiful...

A small Trochus. I think these are called Top Shells. The outer covering had been eroded off, and the nacre looked like silvery pearl.

This beauty had a hermit crab inside, so I photographed it underwater and left it alone. Can you see the tip of a claw peeking out?

Big fat sea cucumber in the shallows!

My second Banded Sea Krait! Not bad for a non-diver. We'd been in Fiji long enough to become relatively cavalier about sighting dangerous creatures. Like the wasps in our bure, they just don't seem interested in us, so we felt free to watch them (from a safe distance.)

A plethora of kraits! When he came to pick us up in the skiff, George brought a baby water snake in a Fiji Water bottle. He let it go after I took the photo.

What do you think - crustacean or not? It's on a mudflat and looks like a trilobite, so I'm leaning toward crustacean, but it could be some other kind of insecty arthropod... I don't even know where to begin looking for IDs.

 This beautiful beetle landed on my leg during cocktail hour. Such amazing iridescent greens! I have a dozen photos of it because the colors shifted with the angle.

 One last bit of cultural education - don't walk under the coconut trees when the nuts are almost ripe. Bonk!

(Fiji Beachcombing series No.9)