Tuesday we were heading into town to pick up some cooking supplies for a lesson from our resident chef and housekeeper Sunita and also for Ryan to watch the Eagles Monday Night NFL game (during lunch on Tuesday). We heard from a women in town who has lived here for four years with her husband, (previously from California), that The Planters Club is the place to watch the games.
There are buses that run in and out of Savusavu and Siga Siga is about a 15 minute drive into town. However, when Ryan and I tried for a second time to catch a bus into town, one that runs once every two hours, it drove past us full. The guide book in the Bure says you can catch a ride from taxis heading that way anyway, so we decided to wait 10 minutes and see what happened. After about five minutes a green truck pulled over and stopped for us.
This is how we were introduced to Bill with the Big Hair. (Bill has a long gray ponytail and said he’s known by the Fijians as Bill with the Big Hair.)
Bill lives down the road a ways in the two-story white house with a blue roof. He’s an organic farmer and was heading into town to run some errands before leaving on a trip to Vanuatu for a few days. Those of you who know Ryan are aware of his special talent of “ingratiating himself to strangers”, so it should be no surprise then, when we finished our errands and walked into the Planters Club, Bill with the Big Hair followed a minute later.
One of the great things about meeting Bill was that he’s a member of The Planters Club and knows the bartender Peter. He stayed and had drinks with us for about two hours.
View of the Eagles game from the bar
Bill used to grow marijuana in California back in the 1980s but decided after being shot at from a helicopter, it was time to make some changes. He had some friends who were trying to get him to visit Fiji for some time and he decided to check it out.
Bill has lived in Fiji since 1989 and so he’s been through several coups here. The latest one he said, allowed for Chinese fishing boats to come in and fish with their two-mile wide nets, (in exchange for investments in infrastructure like roads and electricity). So now, people have said, the tuna are gone. Bill’s also a Master Diver and used to catch 60 lb. tuna, but he said that was years ago.
Fijians own 80-90% of all the land in Fiji, which is probably why it’s so fucking beautiful here. You can’t really trash a place when 90% of it is owned by the people who have lived off it and cared for it, for a long time. He said it’s hard to get your money out of Fiji, but I think that makes sense. The government doesn’t want you to have only a short-term interest in this place.
Bill’s wife is Fijian and he plans to teach organic farming, drip irrigation and other techniques to the villages by the Nadi airport. His wife has land in the village nearby. He said he’s a teacher you know, because he had six kids and that makes him a teacher. Seems like some people just have a lot of children and I don’t think that makes them teachers, but I get what he was saying.
Anyway, Bill with the Big Hair sounds like a happy guy with dual citizenship- Fiji and U.S.
“Real James Bond stuff, you know?”.
As we all know by now the Eagles lost so, better luck next time?
Go birds!