Living the Dream on Dravuni Island
You hear a lot about ‘living the dream’ these days, especially when it comes to travel. There tends to be a touch of ‘one size fits all’ in the assumption that everyone will recognise and share the same, single dream. But for each one of us ‘the dream’ may take a specific and personal shape, depending on our particular imaginative influences. When you are lucky enough to live one of those dreams, one of your dreams, you may have one of the most joyful and intense of all your travel experiences.
I was able to live one of my dreams earlier this year, and I can’t think of a better way to start this blog than by sharing the experience.
Dravuni Island, Fiji
My husband and I had booked our first cruise together, part of a Holland America repositioning voyage that would take us from Sydney to Honolulu. The itinerary included a day spent at a tiny Fijian Island we’d never heard of before, called Dravuni Island.
Lying towards the south of the Fiji group, Dravuni is all but surrounded by the Great Astrolabe Reef, one of the world’s largest coral formations. The island is only 2km long and half a kilometre wide, and fewer than 200 people live there. Its village has a primary school, but children have to go away to a neighbouring island for high school. There are about 25 cruise ship dockings each year, and no other obvious way for outsiders to visit.
The people of Dravuni live a fairly traditional life in an isolated location, and that of course is the appeal for us Westerners. The island’s remoteness and lack of tourist development provide the kind of pristine setting that travellers prize.
Paradise
With its graceful palm fronds and sparkling sea, Dravuni is the picture-perfect Pacific island. By the end of our day there, practically everybody I spoke to who had gone ashore said that they had now seen paradise. There are two types of tropical islands, ‘high’ (volcanic) and ‘low’ (coral atoll or ring). Dravuni is a fine example of the first kind. For visitors there are two main activities: climbing the steep hill, with its magnificent 360° view of the ocean and surrounding islands, and snorkelling the reef.
But my dream day on Dravuni involved much more than the island’s geographic beauty. For me, it was primarily a social experience, providing a version of an archetypal Pacific encounter that I had read about in dozens of books and pictured in my mind hundreds of times.
It began with our arrival by tender boat right to a small pier on the beach, as there are no docking facilities for large ships. Even just arriving in this way can make you feel like an old-time explorer ‘making landfall’ in a new world.
Crossing the beach
Next we did something very significant: we crossed the beach. If you’ve read Captain Cook’s log or the journal of Joseph Banks, if you know the story of the Bounty mutineers, or if you’ve read the Pacific tales of Herman Melville or Robert Louis Stevenson or Jack London, you’ll be aware that this small journey of just a few steps can mean as much as a whole ocean voyage. To cross the beach is to leave ‘our’ world and enter ‘their’ world as certainly a guest, almost certainly a trader, possibly a teacher (for good or ill) or a student. In the past it often meant also being an invader and conqueror. This shadow from our culture’s history of exploiting the Pacific islands and their people weighed on my mind when I arrived at Dravuni, tempering the elation I felt at being there.
You know that dream-like sense of feeling that you recognize where you are and you know what will happen next? Some people call it ‘like being in a movie’. When I heard the children of the island singing their welcome song and I saw how beautifully they were all dressed in honour of the ship’s arrival, I realized that I knew this scene from dozens of journals, letters and stories I’ve read over twenty years of researching Pacific literature and history. There was performance, and then there would be trade, or at least the exchange of gifts. This is how the scene almost always unfolds.
Gifts
Gift-giving is integral to the rituals of Pacific cultures. The children’s song was a gift to us. We reciprocated with gifts of school supplies – new exercise books and pencils, and every spare calculator that we could find lying around our house. (A tip on Tripadvisor had let us know such gifts would be welcome.) We handed them to the head teacher, wide-eyed children looking on, then visited the two spic-and-span classrooms that make up the small school. Exchange of goods, exchange of knowledge – for better or worse, every Pacific encounter will involve these. The great thing is to try to do no harm, and if possible to do something of use.
‘Pleasanter groves can not be imagined’
After visiting the school we did the steep, hot hike up the hill; it was satisfying to achieve the summit, where we admired the celebrated view. But for me, a more exciting encounter with the landscape took place on the path from the village to the hill.
I’ve seen many palm-fringed shores – the classic ‘tropical paradise’ shot – but never before have I walked through a natural grove of palms and other island trees. It was enchanting, a cool and shady green space with well-spaced trees creating a pattern of elegant shapes. ‘Pleasanter groves can not be imagined’, wrote the botanist Joseph Banks of such an island landscape in 1769; here we were in 2017 seeing the same thing.
The visitors’ dance
No food is sold on the island, so everyone had to go back to the cruise ship for lunch. Many people were happy to stay on board ship after that, but not me. I was so intoxicated by the experience of being on the island that I had to return in the afternoon. I took the tender again at about 3pm, and joined a small but determined group of ‘stayers’ who seemed, like me, unwilling to drag themselves away from the idyllic location.
There were still quite a few people in the water, while others browsed the racks of island shirts and dresses set up by local people along the beachfront. I heard the sound of Hawaiian music and followed it to a thatched, open-sided building, which I recognized from my Pacific reading as the village ‘Speak House’. (It may be called something different in Fiji). And there I witnessed something wonderful.
A troupe of Hawaiian dancers and musicians who had joined the ship at our previous port were putting on an impromptu show, not for us cruise passengers, but for the local men of the island. (The women were operating the market stalls further along the beach.) Children didn’t seem to be allowed into the Speak House, but crowded around the perimeter to watch the unfamiliar spectacle.
Of course, I didn’t go in either – it wasn’t my place to do so. I hovered outside with the children, while the Hawaiian dancers performed their graceful moves and the Fijian men stirred their kava pot, applauded and called for more. It suddenly occurred to me that people who live on idyllic islands must get tired of putting on dances for visitors when nobody ever puts on a dance for them. Here was an exception to the rule, and I was privileged to see it, a moment of cross-cultural connection that was the icing on the cake of my island dream.
