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Before I came to Fiji I didn’t know that it was the hitch-hiking capital of the world. Missed the bus? No problem – just jump in a stranger’s truck and throw them a couple of dollars.
Negating every social norm I’ve ever been brought up to respect, Fiji takes laid back to the extreme. As soon as we landed at Nadi International Airport and the pilot announced that we were now on “Fiji Time” I realised that we would have to start being a lot more relaxed about most things here that we take for granted back home. This included lack of any decent internet, public transport timetables and mosquito activity. Which is fine. When you travel you expect that kind of thing. The hitch-hiking, however, I did not expect.
Particularly when we found ourselves stranded on a road in the middle of nowhere in the darkness with no clue where we were or how to get to where we wanted to go. We had been told what time the evening bus was going to come so like good little children we headed to the bottom of the lane to wait for it. Right on cue it came rumbling down the dirt track road. Wow, this is easy. We got on, cash in hand, only for the driver to inform us that he was only going as far as his house and so we would have to get off when he got there. He also told us that that was the last bus of the evening. Realising that his house was actually only about a quarter of the distance we needed to travel we panicked and jumped on the bus, worried about the lack of any further transport. Not even two minutes later, the driver was pulling up outside what I can only assume was his family home and telling us to jump off. Great. It was then that I realised just how damn useful my headtorch would have been, had I had it in my bag.
Stumbling down a road in the utter darkness, unable to even see each other, it dawned on us that getting on the bus, even if the driver hadn’t charged us, was a bad idea. The road was ridiculously quiet at that time of night and it didn’t even seem to possible to flag down a passing local and ask if we could pay them for a ride to the main road. We considered knocking on the door of the only nearby house and asking them to call us a taxi, but after walking for a few minutes a minivan came zooming towards us in the dark. Standing in the middle of the road flailing our arms and trying to attract their attention by waving the light on my iPhone towards the car, the minivan slowed and the driver offered to take us to exactly where we needed to be for a small amount of money. That is the beauty and the curse of Fiji. Everyone is a taxi driver. Forget everything your parents told you about not getting in cars with strangers – in Fiji it is sometimes the only way to get around.
Simply relieved to no longer be stumbling along a dark and deserted road, we gladly accepted and climbed aboard with every other member of his family squashed inside the van.
Sitting upfront the driver asked me how we had got there. I informed him that we had taken a bus but it had made us get off and there were no other buses running.
“Oh dear. Well, you are visitors. Walking down the road in the dark you would have got looted. Fiji isn’t as safe as it used to be.”
Erm, say what now?
Just like that, we had either been saved from a terrible fate or had fallen into the hands of overly-cautious locals, similar to those we have encountered in other countries. Either way, that was how our Valentines Day evening began. Squished into a minivan with a family who were most likely returning from doing their supermarket shopping. Because that’s how we roll, kids. Narrowly avoiding being looted and making small talk with somebody’s grandma. Rock ‘n’ roll.
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