In Fiji,“Bula” means hello, and always gets a smile! Located on Viti Levu, Fiji’s largest island, Lautoka is also known as Sugar City. Like my home town Durban, its important Indian population descends from indentured labourers brought in during the second half of the nineteenth century to work in the sugarcane fields.

 

Best of Nadi Tour

It’s about a 45-minute drive from Lautoka  to Nadi, Viti Levu’s second-biggest town after Suva in the south. Our guide Zack was jolly good, but his sidekick was an irrepressible older gentleman who was amazingly uninformative and tended to shout.

First stop was the Boat Shed restaurant, located next to a pretty marina, where they gave us drinks, cut fruit and green coconuts – plus demonstrating (again) how to husk and crack open a ripe coconut, scrape out its meat and squeeze coconut milk from it.

Once again, there were ladies overseeing tables of bits and bobs to buy. I overheard a passenger asking the price of a trinket: it was five Aussie dollars, or ten US dollars, so you really, really don’t want to be using greenbacks!

In central Nadi, most of the retail businesses are owned by Indians and most of the restaurants are run by Chinese. For me, the tour’s saving grace was a 20-minute stop at Tappoo, a department store where I found a mask and snorkel. Sportworld, around the corner, came up trumps with just one size in fins, large, that fortunately fit me. For once in my life, having enormous feet has worked in my favour.

Why snorkelling gear? Our last two stops – Dravuni Island and Mare – were going to be all about snorkelling and the beach.

Lautoka Town

After lunch on board, I kissed my beloved Roy goodbye and made a solo foray into Lautoka by taxi – first to wander around the market, and then for a stroll around the modest little Botanical Gardens.

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Another day, another local market – differentiated, however, by the Indian spices and the piles of freshwater mussels

I don’t enjoy sightseeing alone, however. It doesn’t help that I’m pathetic at bargaining. Taxi-driver Josh easily talked me into paying way over the odds for just over an hour of waiting for me outside two venues – in between which he picked up his plump, gorgeous wife and her nearly identical plump, gorgeous sister from the school where they work to drop them off at a supermarket. (The two of them barely fitted into the back of the SUV.)

In the end, what does it matter? I like to think that Josh, his wife and her sister might that evening have raised a glass to one foolish, skinny blonde tourist before blowing her largesse on a lavish dinner.