Fiji Time...

Fiji Time...

Well we are 9days into the Fiji experience... Sorry for the slow updates, internet  is not the best here 1 out of 5 times we tried to log into our blog it has failed to work. So to catch everyone up.
After landing and spending the first few days jet laged, we decided to go on a 1/2 day hike/mudbath.  The hike was beautiful, although it is in the dry season here and everything is quite brown. We sweated our asses off hiking though the non shaded paths they had cleared for the tourists. We finally got to a sad excuse for a waterfall, it was quite nice setting but hardly any water was running. We decided to head back to the village instead of continuing farther up the cleared paths to the "bigger" waterfall. At the village we walked into a smoke filled inferno, the field of sugar cane next to the village had caught fire and was burning out of control, the smoke was so thick we could hardly breath and could barely see, our eyes and lungs burned, muscles ached from the hike and all we wanted to do was head off t the mud bathes and get back to the hotel for a cool refreshing dip in the pool. The villages invited us into there traditional Bure, this is a sacred building, which they use for church, weddings and apparently showing off to tourists. 4 young men invited/forced us into taking part in a Kava  ceremony, which consisted of one of the young men washing his hands in some dirty water in the traditional Kava bowl thing, then they added the Kava  which is a pounded white powder made from the Kava plant root. After stirring the milky dirty water with his "clean hands" after all he did wash them in the bowl he was now mixing our drinks in... We were offered "high tide? or low tide?" . Having no Idea what they were talking about I picked high tide and they offered me up a full half of a coconut cup full or dirty root water. I politely took a sip, looked at A with sad eyes suggesting it tasted awesome >.> I offered the cup back but apparently I was to dink all of it... I regretfully slammed the whole cup of dirty root water and passed the cup back. Now it was A's turn, she had learned from my mistake and took the low tide, her cup was only half full and when she took the first sip I saw in her eyes what I was thinking when I first took a sip of dirty root water.
After our Kava ceremony we were forced to wait around for a few hours with eyes and lungs burning from the smoke waiting for our driver to return to pick us up. After what felt like an eternity we were of to the mudbaths.
We arrived a few miles down the road to a field full of children playing below a village, and a kind lady took us around the area and explained to us the culture and beliefs of the mud bathes and how some of the Fijian use it for sun protection as well as war paint, and homeopathic remedy. She took us over to a muddy pool of water and said jump in. A looked at me warily as I made her jump in first as to get a photo of he being covered in mud. A few of the kids jumped in to help Her apply the mud, and I jumped in soon after. After being covered form head to knee in a thick yellow/brown mud we climbed out so the children could plaster the rest of us with mud, and were asked to hang out and let the mud dry. By this time the sun was already starting to set and the mud was taking forever to dry, after what seemed like and eternity we were finally dry enough to jump back into the mud puddle and rinse the mud off, we were then herded over to the hot spring which felt like a million bucks after crawling out of a dirty mud pool. We soaked for only a few minutes and headed of to get pickup up by our driver who waited for us this time, back off to the hotel for a hot shower.. we had mud in more places we wish to mention.