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The most romantic resort in the world

Friday, February 21, 2014 in Fiji, Likuliku | 2 comments

Likliku, the most romantic resort in the world...unless you're alone. Photo by David Lansing.

Likliku, the most romantic resort in the world…unless you’re alone. Photo by David Lansing.

This is what the Likuliku brochure says: “Once upon a time across the bluest of oceans, an island was born of lava and sand—an untouched paradise whose heart was a turquoise lagoon of unimaginable beauty and tranquility. The first visitors came and explored. To honour the magic of the place, they named it Likuliku, meaning “calm waters.”’

That’s where I’m staying. Nice, huh. But just so we’re clear, there is no island named Likuliku in Fiji. There’s a lagoon called Likuliku but the island itself is called Malolo. I’m not sure what Malolo means but there’s another resort, on the southern end of the island, called The Funky Fish Resort, so maybe that’s what the first visitors really called the place: The Funky Fish (after all, these “first visitors” were warriors and fishermen).

But if you are the Ahura Resorts company, which owns Likuliku, and you’re going to spend a gazillion dollars to build 46 bures along a turquoise lagoon “of unimaginable beauty and tranquility,” including ten villas suspended over a coral reef in the middle of the lagoon, then you are not going to call your place The Funky Fish. You are going to call it Likuliku and tell people the word is from the ancient, and largely forgotten, Malolo dialect and that it means “calm waters.” Frankly, I think it really means “fuck like bunny” if my first day here is any indication of what goes on.

The place is swarming with couples, all doe-eyed and moony, who just tied the knot three days or a week or an hour ago. They come down for breakfast late, still sporting bed-heads, and hold hands while nibbling fresh pawpaw and watching the sandpipers and shorebirds scavenge for their own breakfast along what has to be the most placid lagoon in all of Fiji (hence the “calm waters”).

I’ve been here a couple of days now and have yet to meet anyone who wasn’t either on their honeymoon or at least pretending to be (which reminds me of a certain resort area outside of Acapulco frequented by wealthy Mexican businessmen who take their mistresses here for quiet, unobserved trysts, but that’s a story for later). If you think this makes me jealous and bitter, you are right. Still, watching all these honeymooners around me is kind of interesting. A bit like observing bonobo monkeys or mating whooping cranes. Sometimes I feel like I should be wearing a white lab coat instead of swim trunks and videotaping the encounters.

One observation: People who have just tied the knot jabber at each other constantly. I mean, they’re so new at this whole “mister” and “misses” thing that they actually still have things they want to tell each other, even if it’s just an observation—such as I heard at lunch yesterday—that the other person’s hair “smells really, really nice.”

That is just so adorable. And I am envious, of course I am. Because my hair smells of chlorine on a good day and even if I used the Pure Fiji coconut milk conditioner that is provided by the resort, which I don’t, I just can’t imagine anyone leaning over a table by the pool and telling me how fantastic my head smelled.That would just seem creepy.

The other really cute thing is that newlyweds tend to order drinks that they’ve never had before and will never have again, like a mojito made with coconut crème, the house specialty at the Dua Tale (which means “one more”) bar, and then toast each other. “Here’s to you!” “No, here’s to you!”

When I see something like this I instinctively want to grab my camera and snap a photo of the joyous event and put them in little cardboard holders with the Likuliku logo on the sides and sell them as souvenirs at the front desk. Sort of like what they do with the horrified thrill seekers on Splash Mountain at Disneyland.

And wouldn’t that be something to have? A photo of you toasting your loved one, your sunburnt skin making you look like a pink glazed ham just out of the oven, your complimentary floral sulus wrapped around your waists (“Honey, what ever did you do with the sulu you wore on our honeymoon?” “I’ve been using it to wax the car for about nine years now.”), pleased as punch just to be sitting across from each other holding a rum and coconut crème drink with a little green umbrella listing on the rim? Back when you still had something to say to each other?

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Songbirds of Tokoriki

Thursday, February 20, 2014 in Fiji, Tokoriki | 1 comment

A myna bird waiting for breakfast and a song at Tokoriki. Photo by David Lansing.

A myna bird waiting for breakfast and a song at Tokoriki. Photo by David Lansing.

I think Penioni has decided to adopt me. Perhaps because I seem to be the only one at the resort by myself. This morning I pulled myself out of the ocean (I love going for a swim just as the sun comes up), wrapped a towel around my waist, and plopped down in one of the wicker chairs around the pool for breakfast. Before I could ask Niumaia for a pot of coffee and some fresh fruit, Penioni had pulled up a chair across from me. As if we’d arranged to meet for breakfast this morning. Which I’m pretty sure we didn’t.

It was odd. He didn’t say anything. Just sat down and folded his hands in his lap, staring down a myna bird, an island interloper from India, sitting atop a chair and waiting for someone to ignore their piece of toast long enough for him to make off with it. The bird, not Penioni. Penioni made a small hissing sound and the myna cocked his head in interest but refused to budge.

A couple of the boys in the water sports shack down below us on the beach, hosing down snorkel gear and pulling kayaks on to the beach, started singing. Penioni, locked in a blinking contest with the myna, joined right in. He sang carefully and with emotion. As if the two of us were in some sort of Fijian version of South Pacific and Rodgers & Hammerstein were directing him from the wings.

It was fantastic and upsetting for some reason, having a stranger sitting at my table, warbling like Rossano Brazzi, while I drank my coffee.

When the song was over and the boys went back to hanging up the wet suits to dry, I didn’t know what to do or say. I felt sort of embarrassed but I didn’t know if it was for Penioni or myself. Because the sudden silence was making me uncomfortable, I said, “Penioni, do you sing often?” What a stupid question.

But Penioni didn’t seem insulted. He shrugged. “All Fijians sing,” he said. “It’s what we do.” And then he got up and without saying so much as See you later, went and sat at one of the other tables around the pool, this one occupied by a young couple showing all the signs of being honeymooners (holding hands, glowing, guffawing when a myna bird stole their brioche). I felt certain that if Penioni broke out in song midway through their breakfast, they’d find it enchanting. And something they’d tell their children fifty years from now on the occasion of their Golden Anniversary. “We were on a little island in the South Pacific called Tokoriki where this little man who managed the resort—What was his name, Dolly?—would sit down with you at breakfast and just start singing like a song bird. Damnest thing we’d ever seen.”

And it was.

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Dinner with Penioni

Wednesday, February 19, 2014 in Fiji, Tokoriki | 3 comments

Is reading in a hammock suspended between coconut trees a wise thing? Photo by David Lansing.

Is reading in a hammock suspended between coconut trees a wise thing? Photo by David Lansing.

Penioni, a heavy-set, balding manager at Tokoriki Island Resort, claps his hands and a young woman in a fuchsia pink sulu brings me a tall glass of island punch made from a blend of pineapple, papaya, and mango juice with a dash of grenadine. I pull out an airline-sized plastic bottle of lemon vodka from my camera bag and add it to the fruit juice. After several hours of transport aboard first a catamaran and then a speedboat, I have arrived at this, the only resort on Tokoriki, just in time for dinner.

Penioni directs me to a table near the edge of the infinity pool beneath—I swear to god—swaying coconut trees. So here I am, looking out at the fantastically blue water, wondering how often a coconut actually drops down on one of the dining tables by the pool. Just to make small talk, which I’m not very good at, I ask Penioni, who seems a little bit bored, what I should do tomorrow. He brings his hands up under his chin like a professor waiting for an unruly class to settle down, and says, wistfully, “There’s nothing to do here.” And then he shrugs the way Italians do when there’s simply nothing to be done about the situation. I don’t believe him, of course, but even if it turns out he is right, that would be just fine with me. A little bit of nothing sounds fairly enchanting at the moment.

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Fiji: Drop me in the water

Tuesday, February 18, 2014 in Fiji | 6 comments

Drop me in the water. Photo by David Lansing.

Drop me in the water. Photo by David Lansing.

It is 5,536 miles, more or less, from Los Angeles to Nadi on the western side of Fiji’s main island, Viti Levu. I leave L.A. on a cool, brisk January evening and arrive in Fiji before dawn two days later in February—talk about leaving the old year behind—where the first thing I notice getting off the plane after my ten-and-a-half hour flight is the smell of moist, slightly floral, earth.

From the airport it’s a 20-minute taxi ride in the darkness to the Westin Denarau Island Resort (which my driver insists on calling the Sheraton, its old name). By 6:15am I’m in my air-conditioned room. Ready to go to bed just as the sun begins to make a pink-and-orange appearance over the water. Having pulled an all-nighter, unable to sleep, I’m as buzzy as a Vegas gambler after an evening at the craps table, but what the hell. I might as well go for a swim in Denarau Bay. What better way to start the New Year than gliding on my back in warm tropical water as the sun slowly rises behind me?

So now I’m standing up to my knees in water warmer than baby’s formula watching the sun as it sneaks through the palm trees lining the beach. I am the only one in the water. In fact, the only other person out and about this early is a tall, handsome Fijian man in green khakis singing softly to himself as he rakes up small piles of sea grass along the beach. His singing is beautiful. A falsetto voice singing what sounds like church music. Not gospel, mind you, but church-y somehow. Music, sung in Fijian, that makes me think of sinners and absolution. Like a Fijian version of the old Talking Heads classic, Take Me To the River.

And as I walk out deeper into the water, I start humming the song to myself. Not the Fijian song. The Talking Heads song.

I don’t know why I love her like I do. All the trouble that you put me through. Take my money, my cigarettes. I haven’t seen the worst of it yet.

How to explain this without sounding dramatic….It is my first morning in Fiji. My first hour really. And I’m belly-high in warm water, the rising sun illuminating my face, listening to a voice—on the shore? in my head?—that seems to be beckoning me to do something. But I have no idea what.

I cross my arms over my pasty chest and slowly, like in a movie, fall backwards into the warm water, my head slipping below the surface.

Take me to the river (Take me to the river). Drop me in the water (Drop me in the water).

When I come up to the surface, perhaps a minute later, the tall man in green khakis is standing silently on the shore, his rake in hand like a staff, looking at me in a satisfied way. He smiles and nods without saying anything. Then he turns around and walks up the beach, disappearing into the grove of palm trees.

It is perfectly silent. Not a rustle in the palm fronds, not a chirp from a feeding shorebird, not the lap of a wave. Perfect silence. Except for the noise in my head.

I don’t know why you treat me so bad. Think of all the things that we could have had. Love is an ocean, I can’t forget. Take me to the river. Drop me in the water.

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Honey, don’t forget the Steely Dan

Friday, March 30, 2012 in Davui, Fiji

Getting on the plane to fly to the Nadi airport. Photos by David Lansing.

I packed and took a last minute look around my villa to make sure I wasn’t leaving anything behind. Christopher had told us that the Royal Davui always asks their guests to leave their luggage outside their doors and come down for a final cocktail while the staff sings the traditional Fijian farewell song, Isa Lei, partially so housekeeping can meticulously go through the cleared-out villa while the guests are still on the island.

“We almost always find that people have left something behind,” he told us.

“Like what?” I asked him.

Well, he said, yesterday a young couple who had been honeymooning here for a week were drinking a final glass of champagne while the staff sang them the farewell song when a member of housekeeping had quietly come up to Christopher and showed him a dildo. The couple had left it under the mattress.

“Should I give it to them?” asked the maid.

“God, no,” said Christopher. “Take it down to the dock where their luggage is waiting and slip it into one of the suitcases.”

So that’s what happened. But it got me to thinking—what if it wasn’t theirs? What if some earlier guests had left it? Or what if it was the wife’s but her new husband didn’t know she’d brought it, which is why it was under the mattress, and housekeeping slipped it into his luggage instead of hers?

“Holy shit,” the guys says when he gets home. “What the fuck is this doing in my suitcase?”

“Why are you asking me?” says the indignant wife. “Why did you bring a dildo on our honeymoon anyway?”

A lot of variables here.

Anyway, I very carefully went through each room in my villa making sure I’d packed everything.

Saying goodbye to Siteri.

I was the first one down to the Banyan Bar. As Siteri was pouring me a glass of champagne, I asked her if she was sure she wouldn’t like to go back to Los Angeles with me. She laughed and said, “No, Mr. David. But thank you.”

When Marguarite came down, I asked her to take a photo of me and Siteri together. I’m going to miss her. Who will make my banana pancakes for me every morning?

The staff gathered and sang Isa Lei. Then they came by and shook each of our hands. Lots of hugs all around.

Around three, we went down to the dock. All of our luggage was already on board. Christopher came down and said, “Uhm, ladies, I think one of you left something in your room.”

“Oh, god,” said Marguarite. “What?”

It was a nautilus shell, a parting gift from the resort. Not a dildo at all.

It took us half an hour to cross the bay to Pacific Harbour. No one talked on the crossing. Katie sat on the bow of the boat, her eyes closed, the wind in her face. At Pacific Harbour, a van was waiting for us. We drove about fifteen minutes down the highway to a tiny little dirt runway where our little two-engine plane was waiting for us. The pilot weighed first our luggage and then us, and then directed us as to where he wanted us to sit. He had me in the front, next to him. After we were all in and buckled up, he changed his mind. He told everybody to get out of the plane. He put one of the girls in front and put me in the back.

And then the engines were started, the plane accelerated, and we were in the air. Flying low over the water, Davui, off to our left, slowly vanishing, and the Fiji mainland, dead ahead, rushing up to meet us. The trip was over.

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