Castaway in Fiji

Originally published in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, November 2013.

On a walk along the winding path between the lush, fragrant gardens and the blue ocean we come across William, one of the island’s gardeners. “Bula!” he says. My wife and I return the greeting; our three and half year old daughter, Sylvie, does not.

“Would you like some coconut water?” William asks, lopping the top off a coconut with a machete.

“Vinaka,” I say to William by way of thanks. “Say thank-you to the nice man,” I add by way of condescension toward both my daughter and William.

Sylvie says nothing.

It is our second or fifth day on Castaway Island, a small near-perfect resort in the Mamanuca Islands of Fiji. Despite the many profound differences between them, it’s difficult not to associate Castaway with the deserted South Pacific island Tom Hanks washes ashore on in the movie Cast Away, which was filmed on an equally deserted island called Monuriki, very near Castaway. (Indeed, they’re so close that the resort offers day trips to Monuriki.) Probably the biggest difference between my island experience and Tom’s is that for fun I have available to me a swimming pool, several cocktail bars, three buffet and a la carte menus every day, windsurfers, kayaks, paddle boats, snorkeling gear and classes in Fijian cooking or weaving (all free), along with scuba diving, fishing and jet skiing trips, all of it accompanied by the ceaseless squeals and screams of happy children – so very many, very happy children – while all he had for entertainment and company was Wilson, a half-inflated volleyball. How I envied him.

I jest of course, but the truth is my experience was turning out less like a holiday in paradise than an extended class in tropical babysitting. Gone was the mental picture I’d painted of myself relaxing in a hammock strung between two palms (available in abundance on Castaway), replaced by the brutal reality of long days in the shallow end of the pool with Sylvie. And lots of other children.

This is Sally’s and my first-ever child-centric holiday. We’ve chosen a destination with her capricious – yet always very specific – needs carefully considered and placed almost equal to our own. In deciding upon that destination, we took into account such matters as extremes of weather and crowds, reliability of food, general health and safety conditions, and an unquantifiable quality we thought of ‘child-friendliness’.

Bula, Fiji! We didn’t plan on dropping her into the kids’ club all day every day, and we wouldn’t leave her in the care of a babysitter every night, but a few hours to ourselves every other day and/or night would, as every parent can appreciate, add an actual element of holiday to the vacation.

So here we are on the palm-shaded, white sand beaches of Castaway Island, surrounded by warm turquoise water and spectacular coral reefs teeming with tropical marine life, a local man offering us coconut water straight from the coconut.

I feel very anxious.

“Please say ‘vinaka’ to William, Sylvie,” I implore our usually impeccably-mannered daughter as she hides behind a protective wall of parental legs.

“No.”

And so it’s been for our entire time in Fiji; insisting on hiding behind our legs whenever a stranger came in sight; complete refusal to acknowledge the enthusiastic greetings and smiles of the staff from the moment we arrived on the island; loud and tearful resistance to joining the Kids’ Club even for three seconds, let alone a few hours. Not that we resent any of this but we can’t help being surprised. My wife and I try to compensate for her standoffishness by being first and loudest with most of the day’s three- or four-hundred Bula! exchanges. And spending a lot of time in our bure.

Nestled among a verdant garden of banana trees, frangipani, coconut palms, red ivy and papaws is our air-conditioned cottage or bure, modeled after the traditional Fijian village hut of reeds and thatch. It is spacious and welcoming, with plenty of room for families to spread out. The vaulted ceilings are decorated with hand-painted tapa cloth and the use of lustrous native hardwoods and woven rattan helps to create a true island feel, although not quite as ‘true’ as Tom’s experience of living in a cave. For five years.

The snorkeling immediately offshore is superb. I can’t offer a piscatologically authoritative account of the marine life but I did see: great schools of fish that look like they’ve been painted by Keith Haring; fish with long, droopy noses that are probably called Elephant Fish because of it; that main orange stripey one from Finding Nemo; great darting clouds of electric blue tropical cliché fish; coral clusters that look like vibrating cauliflower; and no litter whatsoever, this last being perhaps the most astonishing sight of all.

I quickly become an enthusiastic explorer of the undersea world and one morning take a guided snorkeling tour out to the reef surrounding a tiny, uninhabited island. As I sit in the glass-bottomed boat on the way to the ‘dive site’, I see that everyone else on the expedition is wearing one of those tight, torso-hugging blue diving jackets I had thought were the exclusive gear of professional scuba divers. All I have for protection and flotation is pudginess and a t-shirt. Oh well, I think, I’m an okay swimmer. I can handle it. And right then we enter very deep, very dark blue water and I quickly begin to lose confidence. The jackets are obviously a good idea – that’s why they were invented and why everyone else onboard is wearing one and looking pretty pleased with themselves about it. Somehow I had missed the everybody-grab-and-wear-a-lifejacket announcement back at the diveshop. We are, however, on a sailing vessel and there are plenty of lurid yellow emergency lifejackets on board, the kind designed to keep you extremely vertical in the water so you don’t drown trying to stay awake for five days waiting to be rescued and avoiding sharks… Can I stand the humiliation?

It turns out I can and I end up bobbing around in the water for one of the most pleasant, if extremely yellow, hours of my entire life.

After a week or so Sylvie has still not returned a single Bula! and she has had literally hundreds of opportunities every day as there is nothing that the Fijians seem to enjoy more than greeting people enthusiastically and often. We explain to our smart and sociable daughter that it is polite to return a greeting; more than that, it’s actually fun to blurt out a loud, emphatic Buulah! that will awaken people who like to sleep past dawn. But she declines. She will not say bula or vinaka and she will not return any of the dazzling smiles that are offered to her by the very friendly staff who dote on children and whose facility for remembering names is extraordinary; a week after the briefest encounter, in a resort teeming with kids of all ages they will remember the name of yours and enquire after them with genuine interest: “Is dear little Sylvie still refusing to speak?”