Legend says that a Fijian god once repaid a favour to a warrior on Beqa island, (Beqa pronounced Beng-ga and not Beck-a) by giving him the ability to walk unharmed on fire. His descendants, all members of the Sawau tribe on Beqa, still walk on hot stones to this very day. Traditionally the participants, all male, had to abstain from women and coconuts for 2 weeks prior to the ceremony! If not they would suffer badly.
This said we happily took ourselves off to our hotel's reenactment comfortably knowing that if they asked for crowd participation I would be ruled out without a doubt as (a) I had eaten coconut for lunch and (b) Fe, my travel bud, is female and the main person I've spent the last 7 months or so with. So with this fixed in my mind I was feeling pretty safe as we took our seats in the very front row, most others shyly hugging the back two rows. Did they know something we didn't? The fire was lit ready and raring to go. BULA we all cried nearly knocking over our cocktails, as the chaps in grass skirts from Beqa strolled in. Mad-men the lot of em.
Once it got going it all seemed a little touristy really, the romance of the history surrounding the event kind of over shadowed the event itself. Either way come the end it was quite funny watching the Aussies queue for kava tasting. I wonder if they knew it didn't contain any alcohol what so ever being just yaqona roots mixed with water strained through a couple of old coconuts husks. I am sure most would have headed straight back to the dining room for the next round of 'eat yourself eggshaped' as the call for the next dinner sitting had just kicked off.Us on the other hand we'd already dinned at a small cafe we'd found up the road that bizarrely enough was owned by a British lass who was, like us, a very long way from home. A touch of Shirley Fijian Valentine me thinks
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