Several people who'd heard I was Fiji-bound had tried to scare me - not just about strangers, but strangers with machetes. "Fiji can be dangerous!" they warned. And there I was, in Fiji, being confronted by a man with a machete.
I'd gone for a walk round the headland from my hotel, Mango Bay Resort, to see some of the other bays. This was Fiji's Coral Coast, famous for leaning coconut trees that fringe the beach and a reef that causes the waves to break several hundred metres from the shore.
A local guy was animatedly waving his machete while talking with another tourist. Should I have been worried? Of course not! It soon became clear the machete was for vegetation and that this was a friendly conversation about fishing and the previous day's dodgy weather.
I had a good sense about Esa, a fisherman/coconut gatherer/all-round nice guy in his late 30s. A chat about me wanting to snorkel quickly turned into him promising a more unique experience for the following day: snorkelling with a dash of spear-fishing. Perhaps as the years fade I'll remember the story as me being the one doing the spear-fishing and catching our lunch. It will be a great yarn and I'm already looking forward to telling it, but in the meantime I'll settle for the almost-as-cool reality, which was me snorkelling while following Esa through the coral gardens. Esa would silently spot and then spear the fish with his underwater bow-and-arrow-like device while I watched on, trying to stay as still as possible in the water.
