First Night in Fiji's Capital

When we pulled into Suva I was amazed at the amount of people clustered around the bus station. It was a smoggy, noisy, mess of people like I had never seen before. I quickly got myself away from this area and the population seemed to disperse quite a bit and I became much more comfortable. Once I got quite a bit further up the street a man approached me and wanted to know my story. I gave him a vague idea of what I had up to and didn’t tell him too much about my plans for the future then he pulled a Fijian hustler classic. He said had a gift for me. He whipped out a wooden tribal mask asked me my name. I knew better then to answer this question. Luckily a man on the plane ride over had warned me about this kind of thing. People on the street will come up to you and pretend to be your friend, then they will ask you your name and when you tell them they immediately begin to carve your name into one of these masks. They then try to force you to buy the mask that now has your name engraved into it. These guys are harmless though, and they seem to bugger off fairly quickly once you shut them down. After checking out a few hostels in the area I realized that all the ones in my price range were pretty much garbage so I just accepted it and checked into the South Sea Hostel near the Museum. I through my stuff into the steamy room and got right back out of here as soon as possible. I walked around downtown Suva for a bit then I noticed one bar called the Big Dirty Dog or something like that had a Happy Hour on at the moment. I was parched and thought I might as well swing in for a beer. Inside it was a nice enough place with friendly customers and staff too. I sat up at the bar and began talking to this Fijian-Indian guy named Kam. He told me he knew the owner of this place and would be able to get us Happy Hour prices for the rest for the night. I had nothing else to do at this point and I was in no rush to get back to my crappy dorm room so I said, “Lets do it.” He was a jeweler and souvenir salesman all around Viti Levu. We eventually went over to the very popular bar O’Reiley’s and met a few randoms in there. After a great night in there Kam gave me his number and said I was welcome to come stay with him and his family if I wanted. Many Fijians had offered to let me stay with their families up to this point but I was always a little skeptical. I just got a good vibe off of this guy and so the next morning when I woke up I gave him a call and the first words out of his mouth were, “So, are you ready to come home.”