What time is it there?!

With 170,000 residents, the capital is home to a fifth of the entire population of Fiji. It has many of the same facilities (and problems) of other major cites, and for the first time since we left North America we encounter people (who may or may not be homeless) asking for money in the street. This feels particularly out of place here where the traditional village life seems to involve everyone helping each other out.

There are also, of course, McDonalds and KFC but why would you want to visit them when better (and cheaper) food is available almost everywhere you look?

We are now on the wetter east side of Viti Levu and we are welcomed by very heavy afternoon rain for an hour or so, although this does at least seem to reduce the humidity for a short while afterwards.

The guidebooks and hotels all warn you that, despite the legendary Fijian friendliness, there is a strong chance that anyone who greets you in the street in Suva itself will probably be trying to sell you something. This will generally turn out to be a wooden carved sword or mask. It doesn’t take us too long to get singled out as tourists!

As it happens, the man who ‘targets’ us (and claims to be just waiting for a bus back to his village, yeah right) gives us quite an informative little tour around the area of the parliament and government building. So we have visited the site of at least one of the coups in the messy saga that is recent Fijian history. Unfortunately (for him) our opportunist ‘guide’ has met his match in a tourist who has inherited a (possibly Fijian) determination to not get ripped off, so when we finally manage to shake him off and he suddenly offers us a ‘gift’ to take home he is swiftly dispatched!