Ocr. 8, 8:30pm
I want this photo to stand as proof to all who worry that I’m not taking sun protection seriously: See? I have surrendered ALL dignity, and am even willing to show this photo publicly. You can’t say I’m adding to the beauty of Fiji, but they don’t need my help anyway.

Oooh, Harry reminded me! I forgot to write about an element on the Fiji entry form. Of course everywhere you go wants to have some sort of documentation about where you’re going, how long you’re staying, whether you’re bringing in disturbing quantities of local currency—like that. And island nations, of course, are at tremendous risk of invasive species, so you need to promise you’re not importing cats of molluscs or anything that would destroy the local ecology.
But Fiji had the strangest thing on their form! Can you read this image? See question 11?

It wants to know if I have any cremated remains with me, which—sure. If every past visitor insisted that their ashes be secretly spread across Fiji, the island would be awash in gray powder. I get it. Keep your “cremains” to yourselves, people.
But HOLY WATER?? Does anyone want to offer an opinion on the presence of holy water as a Substance We Must Regulate Most Severely?? Is Fiji ruled by a tribe of exceedingly friendly vampires?
Being friendly is a Fijian standard. The greeting of “Bula!” is universal. Fijians look upon you with a beaming smile and cry out “Bula” with evident joy. It takes about five minutes until the visitor is ALSO screaming “Bula!” at everyone they pass. Now, here at the exceptionally lovely Sofitel resort, it’s clear that ONLY Bula-screaming employees have been hired—but everywhere we’ve gone, total strangers have smiled and waved and called out “Bula!” I get the feeling that after the tourist has passed out of sight, only SOME of those people actually roll their eyes and think “spit out the tourist dollars and move on.” There really does seem to be a tremendous friendliness here.
My blissful travel agent (Anita Carson and she’s not taking any new clients and you’re VERY sad about that I assure you!) got me into a room that has smoochy-lovely privileges. For example, I am ushered with tremendous cries of BULA! into the adults-only “beach club,” where paradise is NOT accompanied by loud pop music through garden speakers.
To be clear, I really enjoy loud pop music. The main, all-kids-are-welcome pool (which is about fifty acres long) plays pop music all day and I’m always singing along as we walk through there—but the beach club is mostly quiet. This is the adults-only beach club pool:

At the beach club, I can hear the waves washing up on the shore and that is GLORIOUS. It's even better, I would dare to say, than singing along with Pitbull and Taylor Swift, as much as I love them.
That’s where we met for breakfast this morning. Bula, bula! How are you today? Would you like to sit here with a view of the ocean? Here—what can I bring you?

And what they could bring me was a bowl of deliciousness that was SO close to the yogurt breakfast my nutritionist Chip has got me eating; the only possibly questionable element was a passionfruit gellee which was, let’s face it, just a honking big blop of jam with a better name… Tomorrow I’ll bravely ask them to omit it. Make good decisions, make good decisions, make good decisions… passionfruit jam today, no jam tomorrow. All is good.
We lingered over our meal, eating every scrap of deliciousness. (They add pine nuts to the nutritionist-applauded yogurt breakfast; hey Chip! Can I add pine nuts too?? So tasty!). Then we took a little tour in a loop around Demarau Island to look at all the fancy resorts in this very posh little gated community. (How did we take this tour? We bought a ticket on the—can you guess?—BULA BUS.) Apparently it’s the thing to do. You put on your bathing suit, hop on the Bula Bus, and get off at a resort that looks good to you. Walk boldly through their lobby to their pool and jump in; check out the offerings. This causes great beaming smiles and calls of (shout it with me) BULA! when the Bula Bus pulls up. The Hilton even has two bare-chested men in grass skirts to shout bula along with the bell hops. It’s very entertaining.
My room ALSO came with TWO free spa services (I suspect Anita the glorious travel agent was working her very generous magic again; SMOOCHES, Anita!), so I had a massage while Twig and Harry went to lunch. It was one of the most entertaining (if mildly unsatisfying) massages I’ve ever had. Oh—this is where I sat to await my massage.

Pretty, huh? And I could hear Sabrina Carpenter and Ed Sheeran over the wall from the all-kids pool, which I enjoyed even if it did seem incongruous to the spa experience.
The lovely and kind woman who gave me my massage was friendly and cheerful. She was unaware (and I’m glad of it) that I’ve been under the hyper-skilled hands of the therapeutic masseurs at Body Dynamics (in Falls Church Virginia, and if you’re local, book yourself an astonishing education at the hands of Sula or Gwynne or Brian the Lion and learn a little something about your body). Nobody who’s been through a therapeutic massage would ever expect a resort massage to equal the experience, so I don’t mean to imply that I was holding this woman to too high a standard; she gave a very decent spa massage.
The challenge was that I think she saw it as her duty to make sure every inch of me gleamed in the light from the oiling she did. Not only did she coat me in a slick oil, but every time she went after muscles in my scalp (like the knots that form at the base of my skull above the neck), she made sure to oil up first.
Initially I thought—okay. So the underside of my hair will be greasy. Once my ponytail is back down, the oil she’s coated me with won’t be visible. I can get away with it at least for the afternoon.
Then she gently pulled the hair elastic from my head so she could get at ALL the muscles of my scalp. Now, a scalp massage is a wonder and a glory; it’s a dreamy thing. But she made a point of oiling up before heading in, ensuring that my entire skull was slick with grease.
And then—I swear she was doing it deliberately and must have thought it would be desireable—she oiled up her fingers again and made sure she coated my hair from root to tip, pulling her fingers luxuriously through my hair. Repeatedly. When I finally looked at myself in the mirror, I’d been transformed into Doc Brown, or maybe Einstein in a heavy wind. It was like I was wearing a fright wig. I was trying so hard not to giggle, or ask her what she thought she was doing to help, but the view in the mirror forced me into a hopeless guffaw that I’m SURE she heard from her post awaiting my emergence outside the door.
So I thanked her and smiled and immediately used the shower in the locker room to wash my hair for the second time that day. Typically, even a bad massage is a blessing since I’ve got quite a lot of acreage and don’t do a very thorough job of moisturizing my back; a massage at bare minimum leads to a pleasing lack of itchiness down my spine. But not today. I spent the next fifteen minutes sending several gallons of massage oil down the Fijian drains while sniggering helplessly.
Then I had to duck back to my hotel room to comb my hair and re-apply the serious sunscreen. But I made it to the front lobby in time to meet Harry and Twig. We hired a driver (named Moxie, and is that not a great name? He was delightful, too—excellent bula-er) to take us to a botanical garden about half an hour from the hotel. Just the ride was wonderful. We got out of the city and drove through the countryside, past the fields and scrublands that stretched from the sea to the startling, handsome mountain range. Occasionally little shopping centers would crop up, featuring the kind of creative independent businesses that have a hard time surviving in the US. For example, “E.R.A.S.E,” which turned out to be “Electronic, Refrigeration, Appliance Service Experts.” And why shouldn’t someone who was good at three not-too-similar things set up a storefront and hawk his wares? Go on with you. I’ll give you a good marketing campaign: “We can E.R.A.S.E. all your worries!”
Moxie turned from the road onto a gravel path that went on for miles. We bounced and jostled along, marveling at random skinny cows standing in brush (“What do you suppose those cows are thinking about?” Harry wondered; an excellent question) and at how odd it is to be in a former British colony where they drive SO HAPPILY on what seems to me to be the wrong side of the road. I watched carefully, though; Twig and I will be driving when we hit New Zealand and there’s no sense in ignoring the skill it takes to negotiate a round-about GOING THE WRONG WAY.
The botanical garden was fascinating and very beautiful. Twig, Garden Clubs of America member, was delighted when Harry suggested we hire one of the staff as a guide. We got a young fellow named Luke who answered every plant question with tremendous authority and scientific names.

When he wasn’t talking plants (which he’d clearly studied in depth), he would make up total lies about anything else. Twig asked him what kind of birds we were seeing. “Mynas,” he said. I questioned him. “All of them? Even the little ones?”
Harry, fast as lightning, said “Those are minor mynas,” which made me snort in a most unladylike fashion. Luke said the little ones were legless birds that never came to ground. They slept on the wing. (Having seen the large birds in Drake’s Passage, I respect the amazing ability of a petrel to sleep with half it’s brain while the other half keeps soaring around, but these were not deep ocean birds Luke was talking about.) “How do they hatch their chicks?” I asked with skepticism. “Yeah!” Twig chimed in. “How?”
“In the air,” Luke said with perfect confidence. “It’s a miracle.” Luke was a pip; we liked him immensely.
We came across three trees with strange statuettes seemingly embracing them. We asked Luke, prone to blissful flights of fancy. “Those women are hugging the most expensive tree in the world—the mahogany—to share in its energy.” I always need more energy, so I did some tree-hugging of my own and Twig captured the moment.

And he and Twig got into very highbrow conversations about orchids and ginger and all kinds of plants whose names I could not possibly reconstruct now. (Harry and I were quite contented to stroll along behind them, admiring a pretty flower or a big tree. Ooh, nice.) I remember two plants only because Luke’s monologue got trapped in my brain twice. This is the octopus orchid from Papua New Guinea.

It is extremely likely that if it hadn’t had such a good name, and hadn’t been from Papua New Guinea, this too would have fallen out of my brain as quickly as all the other names. And this is either the triangle palm or the triangular palm (so I guess the name HAS fallen away, but it was something like that), which I adore because it looks like the finest pleated fabric at Paris Fashion Week.

And here are some of the other photos I took. You might ask me what they are, but you may rest very much assured that I HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA. Pretty though, right?




This orchid was growing in mid-air. How cool is that?



We found Moxie and headed back to the hotel Moxie had to come to a halt at one point when a construction worker’s truck blocked the road and a school bus came the other way. Half a dozen boys in their school uniforms piled off the bus. Their uniforms were spotless white and featured long skirts instead of pants; a nod to the island tradition. Here’s an ugly, out of focus photo because they looked so great.

I took a nap when I got back (god, it felt SO GOOD!), and then I met Twig and Harry at the beach club, where they’d scored loungers and wine in view of the sea. As afternoon faded to dusk and nighttime, I was so enraptured by the palm trees in front of us, tossing and waving in a breeze that was ALMOST too chilly but not, that I took six billion photographs of the same thing. Here is a small selection. I hope you can see the tranquility and relaxation in the poor photography.


A vertical panorama to over my head and behind me:



We had dinner at the beach club and have now crawled gratefully to our beds. Tomorrow we need to transfer to the Sheraton (on the Bula Bus route, but how to get our enormous bags onto the Bula Bus? I think we’re going to have to take a taxi about fifteen feet down the road; this will call for an immense tip) because the Lindblad people are meeting the group there. We’ll spend one night at the Sheraton before taking the charter flight to the Solomon Islands to get to the ship. Twig’s brilliant idea is to check out of the hotel, leave our bags with the bell captain, and go to the beach club and sit for hours in one of the latticed cabanas by the sea, doing exactly nothing until it’s time to head to the Sheraton.
Does that sound good? Ohhh. Yeah. That sounds like an awesome plan. Might mean tomorrow’s post is just fifteen shots of the same oceanscape and a melting of all tensions. For me, anyway, if not for you!
Bedtime. Blissful, delicious bedtime. I like it here.
So lovely! I adore your hat! Why does that last flower pic look like some weird cross between a duck and a poodle?!