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Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Back from Fiji

Been back in-country for more than a week now but it's been a hell of a busy week, so here are the highlights of the trip, edited for brevity to avoid sucking up too much of my now-increasingly-precious World of Warcraft time. After I finish this, I have to eat dinner, hang out the washing and review a dozen CV's before I'm can allow myself some play time, so this is going to be brief:

What I done in Fiji - an essay in dot points

Monday morning. Caught a thank-god-it's-not-six-o'lock flight to Sydney. Waited in an emigration queue with approximately two thousand other people for over an hour to get out of Sydney airport. Read two entire newspapers.
Flew to Suva, business class thanks to being on government travel. Sat next to a guy who turned out to work at the Australian High Comm for Foreign Affairs. He gave me the drum on raising Australian kids in Suva (his conclusion: don't let them mix with other diplomat's kids, because they're all spoiled brats. Hmm.)
Arrived on small, short, badly lit Suva airstrip in pitch darkness, owing to horrific monsoonal downpour. Note that monsoon weather does not typically occur in Western Pacific. Note also that common knowledge contends that it is always bloody raining in Suva. Empirical evidence supports contention. Taxi ride from airport to Suva is long, smelly and slow – this last part is fortunate because roads are in bad repair, rain is getting heavier, dim headlights are only source of light and there are pedestrians wandering at the sides of entire length of road. Terrified, though not so much for self as the many endangered by my thoughtless need for transport. Collapse exhausted at hotel, discover that Fiji television sucks worse than you might imagine.
Tuesday morning. First day of three day conference. Everyone in the room introduces themselves. When I announce that I'm managing the project to develop a system to replace the manual processes they have been following for ten years, I get a round of applause. Oh no, no pressure there.
Rest of the day goes well. Hits a highlight when I discover that the program for which we will be writing the application has a set of process guidelines. Six months I've been preparing for this project, and this is the firest time anyone has mentioned that there are guidelines. Bonus.
Tuesday evening. Delightful little soiree at Stacey's place. Stacey is the Suva Posted Canberrite working on the Pacific scholarships program. She's a friend of Fi's friend Jo. I haven't seen Stacey for a couple of years (the Posting to Suva, obviously) so it's fun to catch up and meet her partner Dmitri. They have a beautiful, enormous house ('inherited' from the previous Postee, who had five or six kids and needed a mansion, apparently) which is infested with overly friendly cats and millions of cane toads. Apparently the wild mongoose are smart enough to ignore the todas, so they're out of control there as well. With the insanely heavy rain and the steamy temperature, it was just like being back in Townsville in summer.
Late Tuesday evening. Get back to the hotel and realise that I am not now feeling ill because I am quite drunk on some very good New Zealand sauvignon blancs and gin (though I am) but because I am, in fact, bloody sick. Commence a spectacular purging marathon that continues through a sleepless night and into the next morning.
(I like travelling. That doesn't mean that I'm any good at it.)
Wednesday. I miss the second day of the conference. As the only item on the agenda is a discussion of how closer ties can be forged with our Kiwi counterparts – a subject that fills my IT masters with horror for a variety of technical reasons – I am not missing out on anything important. This is just as well, because the intestinal hilarity is not over yet.
By the afternoon, my worried conference colleagues have checked up on me about six times to make sure I'm still alive. Since by this time I am convinced that I must be dead, my tone is undoubtedly less than reassuring. Finally they drag me to a medical centre, but by then I'm actually feeling better. Eeventually my stomach is prodded (hurts), my blood is taken (doesn't hurt – not bad for a doctor) and I am prescribed panadeine and mylanta. I crawl back to bed and fail to get more than two hours' sleep due to lingering discomfort and raging cyclonic weather.
Thursday morning. Not feeling great, but it's the last day of the conference and I have a presentation to make. Naturally I haven't had the chance to revise what I'd prepared before the trip started, so I just kind of winged it and answered questions. Managed to stay standing through the entire hour or so. Have no idea whether anyone got anything out of it, but I think I came off as at least coherent. Of course, I may not have been the best judge of that. At any rate, the rest of the conference passes without incident or further requirement for my contributions.

Thursday night. So by this point I have been in a foreign country for three days and, apart from one house and one medical centre, I haven't seen anything outside the hotel. The rain has actually been dyinf off during the day, so I take the opportunity to go for a walk. Wander down the streets, looking at people, buildings etc. Look like total tourist, except that I don't carry a camera. My overwhelming impression of Suva is that everything is permeated of diesel fumes. The whole place reeks of it. Suva's basically just a port with a national administration tacked on. The CBD is within five minutes' walk of a mountain of shipyards and container lots. Everything is grimy and streaked with rust. The whole place looks worn out and painted over with bright colours. I'm sorry to say it's really a bit of a hole. Chris Flynn probably warned me about this at some point.

I ate at a small bar run by an Italian ex-pat with an Oxbridge accent. Was served and chatted at by about half a dozen extremely gorgeous Fijian women. Came to assume that I had accidentally wandered somewhere with a dubious character, but was offered neither illicit substances nor inappropriate services, so I may well be doing the place a disservice. At any rate, the food was excellent, so I'd definitely go back there if I'm ever forced back to Suva.

Having walked up and down several streets and realised that Suva night life consists of karaoke and dodgy bars, I decided to go and watch Sin City, which isn't going to play in Australian cinemas until August or so. It's good. It may actually be great, depending on how you feel about the violence. It is, however, literally true that the only difference between this film and the comics on which it is based are that the former has movement and sounds. And Mickey Rourke with an outrageous prosthetic chin, easily worth the price of admission alone. See it, whenever it makes an appearance.

When I emerged from the cinema, it was raining again. I walked back to the hotel. Despite the soaking, it was rather pleasant. I think the rain might have suppressed the smell a bit.

Spend another night having difficulty sleeping. At some ungodly hour of the morning, I arrive at the stupendous insight that midnight in Suva is only 10 pm according to my Canberra-synchronised body clock. Likewise, a 6 am wakeup call is physiologically a 4 am start. These and many other intellectual contemplations keep me awake most of the night. Interestingly, the stunningly crap TV lineup does not have a soporific effect of any kind. Not even the local advertising.

Friday morning. At breakfast, I stumble across two people I know through work – one of them my director from my time in the Philippines section – who no longer work for the government. I find the smallness of Earth freakish and oddly reassuring.

After a brief stop at the High Commission, I spend an awful lot of the day tramping around the grounds of a Suva university, hunting aimlessly for their IT department. None of the students I ask have any idea where it is. Turns out that it is Graduation Day. Fortunately I eventually meet the guy I'm looking for and spend a couple of hours chatting about databases like I know what I'm talking about. I'm able to get out of there before I see anyone wearing a mortarboard. The rain's stopped, it's an extremely hot day and I pity anyone that has to spend it in academic robes and a stupid flat hat.

At the High Commission, I join a very awkward lunch where the head of the department tries to get her charges to open up and discuss the recent suicide of one of their colleagues. Everybody clams up. I get the distinct impression that none of the staff like her very much and are not particularly inclined to share their feelings with an intruder. That was a fun meal, you betcha.

My flight doesn't leave until late that afternoon, so I have a lot of time to kill. Read and reread the guidelines and am just starting to get bored and wonder what else I can do with my time when the fire alarm goes off. Assembling in the designated area outside, after a comically non-hasty evacuation, I catch up with the guy I met on the plane. Just as the fire engines arrive and declare it a false alarm, the rain comes back. In about two minutes, it's impossible to see more than about ten metres. Luckily by that time we're allowed back in the building.

In my whole time in Suva, I saw fewer dogs than mongoose. The locals see nothing exotic about this, and why would they?

I realised sometime during Friday evening, as I took a cramped, vomit-inducingly diesel-smelling light plane from Suva to Nadi, that I missed both Jill and Alan's birthdays again. Well, at least this year I actually had a valid excuse. I am making this exceedingly unpleasant flight because Suva airport doesn't do international flights on the weekend, and if I want to go home before the following Monday – and I do, very much – then I need to go from the other side of the island. I assume the logic of this is that the tourists tend to travel on weekends, and Nadi is far more likely to be a destination for tourists than Suva is. I spend Friday night being kept awake to all hours by a screeching pack of graduate nurses on some sort of bender (pretty sure it was that and not some sort of epic mongoose war in the room next door). I found this less amusing than it probably sounds.

Saturday afternoon. Home again. Smooth flight back to Sydney, though you would never know it from the passenger seated next to me, for whom every minor bump and jolt was a premonition of certain fiery death. As she was making a connection to Dubai and then London from Sydney, and therefore had the better part of another day aboard aircraft, I tried to be as confident and cheerful as I could manage in my semi-vegetative state. May not have worked, to judge from the deathgrip she had first on the armrest and then on my hand as we landed. I'm glad I like flying. The alternative appears to be completely horrible.

And since then...?

The rest of the week since then has been a complete blur. Evan was here, attending Conflux (a local spec fiction writer's con – I'd put in a link to it but the internet seems to have vanished as I write this). I hardly got a chance to see him though. Work was mayhem, so I didn't get any time off, and he disappeared for a couple of days to go sightseeing with his writer friends (or possibly just one writer friend, who is smart and attractive and who can blame him?). Listen to that, I'm too tired to even gossip properly. Damn.

Ev went home this morning, so I assume things will start to get back to something resembling normality here. I probably won't notice, though. There's still too much work to do. Got to get to work on those CV's. Can't even post this up to Lexifab before I do, due to the aforementioned distressing lack of internet.

In fact, no, bugger it, I'm going to bed. Sleep's more important.

3 smartarse remarks Post a Comment

3 Comments:

You missed your true vocation. You should be a travel writer.

Or maybe working for the Fiji Tourism Department.

By winstoninabox, at 8:28 AM

Hey Dave,

Thanks for the rememberances - despite the fact I've probably (no definitely) missed the last dozen or so of your birthdays.

On the up side, I guess that means you're still 23 to me.

By Alan, at 9:02 PM

a) I don't think the world needs another travel writer who does nothing but bitch about the weather.

b) Hey Al.

By Dave, at 6:24 PM


	Tuesday, May 03, 2005 Back from Fiji Been back in-country for more than a week now but it's been a hell of a busy week, so here are the highlights of the trip, edited for brevity to avoid sucking up too much of my now-increasingly-precious World of Warcraft time. After I finish this, I have to eat dinner, hang out the washing and review a dozen CV's before I'm can allow myself some play time, so this is going to be brief: What I done in Fiji - an essay in dot points Monday morning. Caught a thank-god-it's-not-six-o'lock flight to Sydney. Waited in an emigration queue with approximately two thousand other people for over an hour to get out of Sydney airport. Read two entire newspapers. Flew to Suva, business class thanks to being on government travel. Sat next to a guy who turned out to work at the Australian High Comm for Foreign Affairs. He gave me the drum on raising Australian kids in Suva (his conclusion: don't let them mix with other diplomat's kids, because they're all spoiled brats. Hmm.) Arrived on small, short, badly lit Suva airstrip in pitch darkness, owing to horrific monsoonal downpour. Note that monsoon weather does not typically occur in Western Pacific. Note also that common knowledge contends that it is always bloody raining in Suva. Empirical evidence supports contention. Taxi ride from airport to Suva is long, smelly and slow – this last part is fortunate because roads are in bad repair, rain is getting heavier, dim headlights are only source of light and there are pedestrians wandering at the sides of entire length of road. Terrified, though not so much for self as the many endangered by my thoughtless need for transport. Collapse exhausted at hotel, discover that Fiji television sucks worse than you might imagine. Tuesday morning. First day of three day conference. Everyone in the room introduces themselves. When I announce that I'm managing the project to develop a system to replace the manual processes they have been following for ten years, I get a round of applause. Oh no, no pressure there. Rest of the day goes well. Hits a highlight when I discover that the program for which we will be writing the application has a set of process guidelines. Six months I've been preparing for this project, and this is the firest time anyone has mentioned that there are guidelines. Bonus. Tuesday evening. Delightful little soiree at Stacey's place. Stacey is the Suva Posted Canberrite working on the Pacific scholarships program. She's a friend of Fi's friend Jo. I haven't seen Stacey for a couple of years (the Posting to Suva, obviously) so it's fun to catch up and meet her partner Dmitri. They have a beautiful, enormous house ('inherited' from the previous Postee, who had five or six kids and needed a mansion, apparently) which is infested with overly friendly cats and millions of cane toads. Apparently the wild mongoose are smart enough to ignore the todas, so they're out of control there as well. With the insanely heavy rain and the steamy temperature, it was just like being back in Townsville in summer. Late Tuesday evening. Get back to the hotel and realise that I am not now feeling ill because I am quite drunk on some very good New Zealand sauvignon blancs and gin (though I am) but because I am, in fact, bloody sick. Commence a spectacular purging marathon that continues through a sleepless night and into the next morning. (I like travelling. That doesn't mean that I'm any good at it.) Wednesday. I miss the second day of the conference. As the only item on the agenda is a discussion of how closer ties can be forged with our Kiwi counterparts – a subject that fills my IT masters with horror for a variety of technical reasons – I am not missing out on anything important. This is just as well, because the intestinal hilarity is not over yet. By the afternoon, my worried conference colleagues have checked up on me about six times to make sure I'm still alive. Since by this time I am convinced that I must be dead, my tone is undoubtedly less than reassuring. Finally they drag me to a medical centre, but by then I'm actually feeling better. Eeventually my stomach is prodded (hurts), my blood is taken (doesn't hurt – not bad for a doctor) and I am prescribed panadeine and mylanta. I crawl back to bed and fail to get more than two hours' sleep due to lingering discomfort and raging cyclonic weather. Thursday morning. Not feeling great, but it's the last day of the conference and I have a presentation to make. Naturally I haven't had the chance to revise what I'd prepared before the trip started, so I just kind of winged it and answered questions. Managed to stay standing through the entire hour or so. Have no idea whether anyone got anything out of it, but I think I came off as at least coherent. Of course, I may not have been the best judge of that. At any rate, the rest of the conference passes without incident or further requirement for my contributions. Thursday night. So by this point I have been in a foreign country for three days and, apart from one house and one medical centre, I haven't seen anything outside the hotel. The rain has actually been dyinf off during the day, so I take the opportunity to go for a walk. Wander down the streets, looking at people, buildings etc. Look like total tourist, except that I don't carry a camera. My overwhelming impression of Suva is that everything is permeated of diesel fumes. The whole place reeks of it. Suva's basically just a port with a national administration tacked on. The CBD is within five minutes' walk of a mountain of shipyards and container lots. Everything is grimy and streaked with rust. The whole place looks worn out and painted over with bright colours. I'm sorry to say it's really a bit of a hole. Chris Flynn probably warned me about this at some point. I ate at a small bar run by an Italian ex-pat with an Oxbridge accent. Was served and chatted at by about half a dozen extremely gorgeous Fijian women. Came to assume that I had accidentally wandered somewhere with a dubious character, but was offered neither illicit substances nor inappropriate services, so I may well be doing the place a disservice. At any rate, the food was excellent, so I'd definitely go back there if I'm ever forced back to Suva. Having walked up and down several streets and realised that Suva night life consists of karaoke and dodgy bars, I decided to go and watch Sin City, which isn't going to play in Australian cinemas until August or so. It's good. It may actually be great, depending on how you feel about the violence. It is, however, literally true that the only difference between this film and the comics on which it is based are that the former has movement and sounds. And Mickey Rourke with an outrageous prosthetic chin, easily worth the price of admission alone. See it, whenever it makes an appearance. When I emerged from the cinema, it was raining again. I walked back to the hotel. Despite the soaking, it was rather pleasant. I think the rain might have suppressed the smell a bit. Spend another night having difficulty sleeping. At some ungodly hour of the morning, I arrive at the stupendous insight that midnight in Suva is only 10 pm according to my Canberra-synchronised body clock. Likewise, a 6 am wakeup call is physiologically a 4 am start. These and many other intellectual contemplations keep me awake most of the night. Interestingly, the stunningly crap TV lineup does not have a soporific effect of any kind. Not even the local advertising. Friday morning. At breakfast, I stumble across two people I know through work – one of them my director from my time in the Philippines section – who no longer work for the government. I find the smallness of Earth freakish and oddly reassuring. After a brief stop at the High Commission, I spend an awful lot of the day tramping around the grounds of a Suva university, hunting aimlessly for their IT department. None of the students I ask have any idea where it is. Turns out that it is Graduation Day. Fortunately I eventually meet the guy I'm looking for and spend a couple of hours chatting about databases like I know what I'm talking about. I'm able to get out of there before I see anyone wearing a mortarboard. The rain's stopped, it's an extremely hot day and I pity anyone that has to spend it in academic robes and a stupid flat hat. At the High Commission, I join a very awkward lunch where the head of the department tries to get her charges to open up and discuss the recent suicide of one of their colleagues. Everybody clams up. I get the distinct impression that none of the staff like her very much and are not particularly inclined to share their feelings with an intruder. That was a fun meal, you betcha. My flight doesn't leave until late that afternoon, so I have a lot of time to kill. Read and reread the guidelines and am just starting to get bored and wonder what else I can do with my time when the fire alarm goes off. Assembling in the designated area outside, after a comically non-hasty evacuation, I catch up with the guy I met on the plane. Just as the fire engines arrive and declare it a false alarm, the rain comes back. In about two minutes, it's impossible to see more than about ten metres. Luckily by that time we're allowed back in the building. In my whole time in Suva, I saw fewer dogs than mongoose. The locals see nothing exotic about this, and why would they? I realised sometime during Friday evening, as I took a cramped, vomit-inducingly diesel-smelling light plane from Suva to Nadi, that I missed both Jill and Alan's birthdays again. Well, at least this year I actually had a valid excuse. I am making this exceedingly unpleasant flight because Suva airport doesn't do international flights on the weekend, and if I want to go home before the following Monday – and I do, very much – then I need to go from the other side of the island. I assume the logic of this is that the tourists tend to travel on weekends, and Nadi is far more likely to be a destination for tourists than Suva is. I spend Friday night being kept awake to all hours by a screeching pack of graduate nurses on some sort of bender (pretty sure it was that and not some sort of epic mongoose war in the room next door). I found this less amusing than it probably sounds. Saturday afternoon. Home again. Smooth flight back to Sydney, though you would never know it from the passenger seated next to me, for whom every minor bump and jolt was a premonition of certain fiery death. As she was making a connection to Dubai and then London from Sydney, and therefore had the better part of another day aboard aircraft, I tried to be as confident and cheerful as I could manage in my semi-vegetative state. May not have worked, to judge from the deathgrip she had first on the armrest and then on my hand as we landed. I'm glad I like flying. The alternative appears to be completely horrible. And since then...? The rest of the week since then has been a complete blur. Evan was here, attending Conflux (a local spec fiction writer's con – I'd put in a link to it but the internet seems to have vanished as I write this). I hardly got a chance to see him though. Work was mayhem, so I didn't get any time off, and he disappeared for a couple of days to go sightseeing with his writer friends (or possibly just one writer friend, who is smart and attractive and who can blame him?). Listen to that, I'm too tired to even gossip properly. Damn. Ev went home this morning, so I assume things will start to get back to something resembling normality here. I probably won't notice, though. There's still too much work to do. Got to get to work on those CV's. Can't even post this up to Lexifab before I do, due to the aforementioned distressing lack of internet. In fact, no, bugger it, I'm going to bed. Sleep's more important. 3 smartarse remarks Post a Comment 3 Comments: You missed your true vocation. You should be a travel writer. Or maybe working for the Fiji Tourism Department. By winstoninabox, at 8:28 AM Hey Dave, Thanks for the rememberances - despite the fact I've probably (no definitely) missed the last dozen or so of your birthdays. On the up side, I guess that means you're still 23 to me. By Alan, at 9:02 PM a) I don't think the world needs another travel writer who does nothing but bitch about the weather. b) Hey Al. By Dave, at 6:24 PM