The Uyghurs in Xinjiang

Completely different from all I had experienced in China before was my far too short stay in Xinjiang.

I thought that Ürümqi (the capital of Xinjiang) was just another Chinese no-name-city and would be boring, and I therefore tried to get out as fast as possible, hence applying for an express-visa (3 working days) to Kyrgyzstan, instead of a normal application (5 working days).

In China there's a saying (somehow like this at least): “If you want to know how big China is, go all the way to Ürümqi in Xinjiang. And if you want to know how big Xinjiang is, go all the way to Kashgar”. And it’s true: Kashgar, the cultural and touristic hot spot of the region would have been another 26h further train on the train – too far for just a short side-trip I decided. Furthermore, as I really wanted to start travelling to Central Asia I had decided not to visit other places in Xinjiang and spare that for a future trip (you can’t imagine how many future trips pile up during such a trip…). It’s a shame though that I now only saw Ürümqi, which is not really an appealing city and can hardly represent what this region stays for. However, thanks to my CS-host Ebi my stay in Ürümqi got a whole different aspect. He was really helpful when I wanted to change my trainticket, buy bustickets for my further travels and even more when my wallet and camera got stolen. But there was so much more than that! Thanks to him I got a really deep insight into the Uyghur culture and traditions (well, as deep as it can be after 3 days).

Xinjiang is officially called “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region”, because the biggest minority group here are the Uyghur people, who used to be the majority in the region. Official Chinese policy – moving as many Han Chinese into the region as possible (giving them jobs, homes and good opportunities straight away while the Uyghur still have a difficult life) made the ratio between Han Chinese and Uyghur people change dramatically in the last century.

Uyghur people are a different ethnic group with ancestors from the Turk people. They speak Uyghur, which is written with Arabic based letters. Furthermore they are Muslim and really practice their religion, while Chinese are rather unreligious people. So the people look different – the Turkic influence is visible for sure – and they wear different clothes: most women wear a headscarf, some even burkas, and men often wear a doppa (like the man in the middle on this picture). And they are definitely proud to be Uyghur and keep their traditions high.

Ürümqi is a big mix of everything: You see a lot of Chinese influence, because of the official policy. Similar to other cities, the government simply destroys old quarters and historical buildings and builds new, tall, ugly boxes instead. Like this, more and more cities lose their appeal, their flair and become what I described in my last story: huge Chinese no-name-cities.

With Russia being quite close and an important trade partner – and Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan not too far away neither – Russian is also an important language in the region. Many shops would have signs in two of even three languages: Uyghur, Chinese and Russian.

Apart from Chinese and Russian influence, the much more interesting, colourful and atmospheric influence on the cities flair comes of course from their original settlers: the Uyghur people. You feel the Muslim touch, giving whole cityparts a kind of bazaar-feeling. Heaps of delicious Uyghur food is sold everywhere, fresh Naan-bread, noodles and at every street corner you can find the most delicious watermelons I’ve ever eaten.

Ebi is English teacher preparing college students for the IELS-exam. I was more than happy to help him out in his classes doing the English speaking class two times. I had given some English speaking classes last year in Yangshua, China, anyways so it was kind of easy. Like this I got to know all his students, Uyghur people as well, and can now tell you out of personal experience how friendly, generous and hospitable they are. And I learned soooo much about their everyday life and the political situation in their region, which I will talk about a bit further down. Because first I want to tell you what I great time I had in Ürümqi: Ebi treated me like a real guest, not just a CSer, and invited me to an Uyghur and a Turkish restaurant, to a Kawas (which is like a Kvass in Russia – or similar to Most in Austria) on the bustling night market and coffee in a nice coffee-house. The whole town awakes during the night, especially now as it is Ramadan. Ebi and his students as well are all fasting the whole day, which I really admire: from 2:30 to 19:40 they do not eat or drink anything! And believe me, it is quite hot in Ürümqi now. So the first glass of water and the meals in the evenings were a feast. Once I even got up with Ebi in the night to accompany him for his breakfast at 2.30 – but I am not strong enough to fast the whole day… no way…

As it was my birthday, Ebi prepared a great surprise for me: he invited his students to join us for a picnic in a park which became a great success! I just loved it: when it was officially time to eat, they shortly prayed and then distributed the water bottles among each other. We would start eating these really delicious melons. And then came the big surprise: most of them went away – to go praying in the Mosque (well, I really believed that!) – and came back with so much more food aaaaaand a big birthday-cake with “Happy 28^th Birthday Silke” written on it! God, I was so touched! That’s the first time in my life I got a cake with my name written on it, and this from people who hours before had been complete strangers! I had a great time with them: we were sitting in the park, eating all those delicious food and the cake and talking for hours.

The English speaking classes were also a really interesting experience, because we covered a lot of topics mainly about cultural and traditional differences. A lot of what they said and how they thought about various issues were eye-openers to me and taught me more about the general world view of this still very family- and community-oriented people. Having family and kids are the most important goals in their lives. I on the other hand could teach them a lot about the Western society, which is focusing more and more on individualism and I tried to make them understand what kind of impact this has on family life and the structure of society in general.

Ebi is a really provoking teacher: his classes are far more than a simple preparation to the IELS exams. He confronts his students with for them completely different world views and forces them to answer questions and discuss topics they would usually never think and even less talk about. Most of these topics would be completely normal in the West. With this way of teaching Ebi gives them much more on the way they could dream of: they get already confronted with the completely different world they would be confronted with when going abroad.

The most controversial topic we covered, and where our general views were completely different, was the subject of same-sex marriage and homosexuality in general, which Ebi had brought up (I would never have dared to start with such a controversial topic when being a visitor in their culture). Some of them hadn’t even heard of something like homosexuality, making it nearly impossible for them to understand and tolerate same-sex marriage. These topics, being discussed so broadly in Western countries at the moment, are simply not a topic at all in the Uyghur society. I told them that of course in their society homosexuality exists as well and that they might even have gay friends without knowing it. I really admired the openness and high level of tolerance of many of them: you could see that they struggled with this topic, being such a fundamental “threat” to their views of normal human behavior, but most (not all) of them were willing to think about it, accept it and you could literally see the little cogwheels in their heads turning…

The answers to one of Ebis provoking questions really reflected how repressed the Uyghur people must feel: he asked his students what they would do, if they were president of China for one day. The answers were all more or less the same:

“Give freedom to Xinjiang”

“Make all the Han Chinese leave Xinjiang”

“Give religious freedom to all people in China and build mosques”

“Let students in school learn all subjects in their own language”

(PS: my answer was: “change the constitution so that real democracy can have a chance.”)

Life for Uyghur people is definitely really difficult because of the policy of the Chinese government. There are so many small things that make everyday life just a big struggle:

Ebi told me about a situation, where a Chinese shopkeeper had told him to leave the shop, because he was Uyghur. He then had started to talk English to her telling her he was not Uyghur but Turkish. She had been really ashamed and started to apologize. He still had left after that…

Another thing are the checkpoints: he was in Kashgar in the beginning of July and when walking around the city police checkpoints would check him everywhere. He might walk in the city for half an hour and be checked around 6 times! And the police ONLY checks Uyghur people, not Han Chinese or tourist.

Now around the 6^th of July are far more checks, because of the big riots in Xinjiang on July 6^th 2009. But also during other times there would be many checkpoints.

For Uyghur people it is nearly impossible to get a passport. Can you imagine this?! They simply don’t get a passport hence making it IMPOSSIBLE for them to travel to foreign countries. Only with a lot of effort, money and a loooot of luck they manage to get a passport. But then again: it is nearly impossible for them to get visas to different countries. I felt so weird: having an EU-passport opens the world to you. Still I admired Ebis students so much: they were completely curious and all said that they wanted to study abroad, even though they know how difficult it would be for them. They talked about these dreams and their plans as if there wouldn’t be any problems to achieve them!

What Ebi and others told me about the Chinese policy seemed to me like a big ethical cleaning project: they try to get more and more Han Chinese into the region, they destroy the cultural heritage and force the Uyghurs to learn Chinese. In schools subjects are taught in Chinese only. As their hopes of getting Uyghur and Hans to mix more (through marriage) didn’t work out, the government forced many mainly young Uyghur women to go to other regions (if not the family would have had to pay a lot or even lose their houses).

I find it just unbelievable to hear about these things and it makes me angry. I so much admire the courage of these people to go on with their lives like they do. I really have the impression to understand now, what living under occupation means, I really do!

Of course there is a gap between the Uyghur and the Han Chinese and they both rather stay with people from their own group, and of course there is racism, there are wrong generalizations and jeopardy. But still, most of them handle everyday life and the living together pretty well, as far as I could say: they do understand that it is not the fault of the individual and without each other, life in Ürümqi wouldn’t work anymore on an everyday basis. Most Han Chinese who had followed the incentives of the government and came to the region had hardly any idea of the situation. So even though the students said they wanted all the Han Chinese to leave, they don’t boycott Chinese shops or insult Chinese people on the street. People do work together and treat each other respectfully in general.

How must it be to live in a region with two big groups that can’t read or write, and only understand orally on a limited basis, the language of the other group?!

At the police there were Uyghur and Han Chinese working: after my wallet and camera had been stolen out of my bag, Ebi and I spent a few hours at the police station (Man, what would I have done without him?!) The first police officer took all my information and wrote down the whole incident in Uyghur language. The theft report I needed, however, was written by a Chinese police officer. (I imagine all external documents must be written in Chinese…) I don’t know, but I guess, that the first police officer simply couldn’t write Chinese.

But what I wonder about even more:

How must life have been shortly after the biggest riots the region had ever seen, nearly exactly 3 years ago: on July 6^th 2009 many people were killed, on both sides, during riots in Xinjiang (the only time I had ever heard about the Uyghur people on a broad basis in Western news – compared to the quite regular reports on the quite similar situations of Tibetians). It all had started by wrong information spread about 2 Uyghur men having raped Chinese women in a factory on the other side of China: in Guangdong. After that, Chinese workers had overrun the quarters of other Uyghur workers, killing many of them. This again had triggered a big outrage in Xinjiang leading to killings and revenge killings. It is not possible to say anymore, how many people really had died during this riot. Ebi told me that still many families are missing their sons and thought that there were up to 10000 Uyghurs killed during these riots – the official data speaks of less than 200. Like often, especially when it comes to such emotional topics, the truth lays somewhere in between…

After this, I want to finish this story with something positive, something sweet and delicious... hmmmmmmm

Due to limted time, most of the links in this story are from wikipedia. There are a loooooot of infos in the internet, so for those who are really interested, there is a lot more to find out! One surely really interesting report is this one about the Uyghur identity.

So I do apologize if this story is biased or information is not correct, I did my best with limited time :)

BTW: most of the photos in this story are from the internet too, only a few are by myself.

seen that, done that... nooo, far from that!

Back in China... "Again?!" you might say, "how boring!"
And, what? I was even in the same places?! Pffff... how boring is that?!!

Well, nope, it was not boring at all!

After Fiji I definitely turned my different travelplan into reality: turning westwards and heading bach to Europe through Central Asia, hence crossing China again .

Both my stays in Hong Kong and in Beijing were dominated by people I had already met on this trip - and anyways: it was people I met who have made this trip what it is !

Rindo, my dear never travelling Indian friend I met in Singapore, came all the way to visit me for 4 days in Hong Kong. We had just a great time over lots of talks, some beers and delicious food, together with other friends.
Apart from the inevitable Victoria Peak we were lazy tourists and didn't really visit anything. We were rather just walking around, breathing in the air and flair of the city, watching the ongoing dragon boat festival and enjoying beer at the local beer festival. Oh, and of course I showed him Chungking Mansions where we had great (and authentic - according to Rindo) Indian food. Hmmm, yummie!

And Beijing was just again marvellous Beijing!

I stayed longer than expected: firstly because it is simply IMPOSSIBLE to get a train-ticket from Beijing to Ürümqi, where I wanted to go. And secondly because I, in consequence, applied for my Kazakh visa in Beijing instead of in Ürümqi.
This visa-application procedure was btw the most enduring, un-understandable and annoying ever. I will soon start an own story comparing all the different consultancies I've been to before and during my trip and giving you some anecdotes of this annoying detail out of the everyday life of a world-traveller...

Beijing treated me well! I met all my friends again I had made last year. Beijing had in fact been the first and only place where I made a lot of friends I in the meantime kept in touch with. So I was more than happy to see them again. And of course to make new friends through them too...

Beijing as a city also welcomed me well: the sky was blue (wow!!) for a few days, great sunsine. What I love so much about Beijing is the great mix: the houses in the city are not high at all, giving it a flair of a small town. You can reach a lot within the center by food or by bike. The hutongs (small alleys) are really old and you see and feel the old traditional Chinese life. There is loaaads of delicious food on the street available for just a few yuan. And if you want to get away from everything Chinese you will still find enough really nice Western-style cafés and restaurants.

The expat-scene in Beijing is just amazing, and the partying opportunities are huge, as well as the opportunities to get out of the city and do some stuff in the near countryside.
Yes, Beijing, I really like you :)

However, after a few days I got to see the bad side of Beijing too: smog. This photo was taken in the middle of the afternoon. It looks as if it was evening but it is not! So after one week, it was hard to say goodbye to all my old and new friends, but the smog made the leaving easier...





But I not only visited places I already knew, I also saw new things and new places.

Before coming to Beijing I made the inevitable stop in the bordertown Shenzhen. And there it just hit me and I saw and understood what China can be reduced to in one word: China is big. or rather BIG!!!

Hong Kong is a big city, Shenzhen lies just next to it and is huuuuuuuge too! Next to Hong Kong and Shenzhen lies Guangzhou, which is HUUUUUGE too. And during my stay in Shenzhen I went to the town Huizhou 30km from Shenzhen away, where the copy of an Austrian town is, and this town is huuuge too!

Public buildings in China (administrative buildings, trainstations,...) are all just amazingly big! A normal no-name-city (like Huizhou) has big amounts of skyscrapers. And of course there are just soooooo many people everywhere!
I checked on wikipedia and found out that China has: Shanghai with more than 10million people, another 5 cities with more than 5million people, and in total 24 cities with more than 2million people (by urban population). I'm from a country with a population of around 8million and live in its capital Vienna, which has a only around 1,75million people. So, yes, I do think that 24 cities with more than 2million people is kind of impressive!

No worries, you didn't overread what I was writing above: "copy of an Austrian town"... haha, remember, I mentionned I wanted to see the copy of Hallstatt! And I did (btw: only thanks to my CS-host who made this a day-trip: we drove around 2,5hours from Shenzhen to finally find the place of Hallstatt in Huizhou, walked around in the copy-town in the unsupportable heat for an hour or two and then again 2,5hours back! Thank you Peng!!)

I can only say: it is simply madness! They really copied the towncenter, it's just hillarious. The whole thing is part of a big project: they are building a new part of the city with many big villas and the center of this new villa-area is the already finished town-center of fake Hallstatt. Amazing!

The whole area, apart from the center, is under construction: villas are being built and the surrounding mountains set up. We went in two of the villas, they are really big! (Welcome to China!)

The town itself, well, it is not Hallstatt of course and I can only advise you to go to the original one if you want the real flair of a real Austrian town. But damn, it was fun to be in this copy-town!!

I made a few clips with comments by myself so you can just walk around the city by yourself through my videos: it is simply hillarious.

Approaching Hallstatt
Crossing the bridge to Hallstatt
Hallstatt Church inside
Hallstatt Main Square

Oh, and being in copy-cat-China I also went to the big entertainment park "Window of the World" where they copied major tourist sights from places all over the world, mainly in smaller or in real-life sizes... I wonder why I was travelling so long when I could have just gone to this park and seen everything and even more in one day??
(second time I meet this Strauß-statue on my trip... remember? The Wiener Café in Irkutsk, Russia...)

Thanks to my CS-host I was happy to experience not only really delicious traditional food but also something original (and not copied): a traditional Chinese dancing show. I was really lucky because I really like ballett. The chinese dancing was like ballett with much more acting and more acrobatic components... Whoever is interested might check out the two clips I put on youtube.

Isn't it just sooo beautiful? Want to see more? This second clip somehow reminded me of the 4 swans from Swanlake... well, kind of...

Anyhow, that's all already a while ago and now I am in Ürümqi, the capital of the Autonomous Uighuir province Xinjiang...after 46 hours sitting in the train (yes, SITTING!!!)

I thought I might give you an idea of how a Chinese hard-seat-carriage looks like: here we go! And yes, all those people who are standing in the corridor did not have any seats and were really standing around the whole time or sitting on the floor, on some small chairs, between the carriages on the floor, on the sink,...

Everything in China is simply too big, and China itself is too big, and too crowded...

In order to make this story kind of short (for a change), I will talk about the even more interesting and new part of China I got to know right now - Xinjiang - in my next story, which will be coming very shortly too! So get ready to read more in the upcoming days!

And I will definitely try my best to give you an as accurate as possible overview over the situation of the Uyghur people - suppressed like the Tibetians are - in their very province! 

one week in paradise

What a weird last evening in Fiji!!

Arriving in Nadi, checking my mails in a really funky backpackers (all the tourists slurping their fancy drinks decorated with pineapples, living in their bubbles...),then  going back to my backpackers - the bunkhouse. What a contrast. Oh yes, the bunkhouse really deserved its name: a shabby house, the lights worked only in half of the rooms, the ceiling in my room was full with mildew. I was the only foreigner, and I guess the only guest - the other people in the house were in fact the family, which is running the place. 

Right when entering the frontgates of the bunkhouse a Fijian guy, who was there to help out the owners, talked to me and I ended up drinking beer with him for a while - Fiji style: one small glass is enough for everybody, regardless of the amount of people drinking together: it is filled up for one person at a time, who finishes it and filled up for the next... like this everybody gets the same amount. I really liked talking to him: after working 6 years in New Zealand Bosco (yes, many Fijians are really religious) came back 2 years ago and is since then working in tourism. But only in backpackers, because - I really loved this statement - "I hate working for the rich". Likewise.

I don't know what was going on, but this family must have had a party, or at least people coming over to have a few drinks. Anyhow, a lot of noice while I was sleeping (too tired to join them)... When I got up the early morning there was nobody awake, a few guys were sleeping on the floor in the entrance hall, and a girl was sitting on the toilet asleep with doors wide open (and pants down)... well, I went to have my early business in the bush...

I started backwards, why not continue backwards??

Before even arriving in Nadi I had taken a bus from a small bridge over a river on the complete other side of the main island. Bus rides in Fiji are funny. In Asia you'll always be lavished with cheap fight-movies, but in Fiji they'd show videos more adapted to their situation: when arriving to Fiji the first video on the bus had been "Flippers new adventures" :)


(PS:  on this photo you can see Fijian schoolboys waiting for the bus... They are wearing sulus, which is a traditional piece of cloth wrapped around the hip creating a skirt. Men wear it as well as women. Whereas I considered Burmese men wearing longyis really sexy, I don't find Fijian men wearing sulus sexy. Sulus are only 3/4 long, and this looks in my Western eyes simply - sorry my dear Fijians - not masculin at all)

Even though the busride took quite a while I really enjoyed it. Somehow I like these moments, when one step, one part, of my trip comes to an end and the next one announces itself...
I can sit for ages in a bus, enjoy the landscape and daydream into the future and everything that is coming up!!

And especially this step is quite a big one: with the flight from Fiji to Hong Kong I changed the direction - from east- to westward. After Fiji I am now actually starting my way back home... More about that the next time though!

There are different kinds of busses: the bigger busses running around the island and the small busses connecting the small villages with the towns. I was lucky to get to know both of them: the long-distance busses are really ok, even though there are 5 persons per line, which gives you a sardine-feeling. The short-distance busses are quite special though: there are no bus-stops so whenever somebody wants to get off, he would ring the bell (the bell indeed: a string is tied from the back of the bus to a bicycle-bell in the front! Hillarious!) and the busdriver would stop wherever you want. Even if the bus had stopped just 5m earlier! No joke, they really ring and make the bus stop every few meters!!

The same is the case when you want to get on a bus - just stop the bus wherever you are. So that's what I did: I was standing just at this bridge, flagging down the first bus going in the direction I needed to go.


I had reached that bridge with a boat from the island Leleuvia, where I had been for 5 days. We had been going quite a while through the long river delta, where I saw many mangrove trees with their "trunks" hanging from the top of the trees down to the water. I have never seen that!! Amazing!

We passed fisherwomen on small bamboo-rafts. The driver of my boat explained me that they went out fishing with the currents: when the tides change from high to low the currents bring them out to the sea and when the tide gets high again they go back the river with the current... 

The change of tides is really fascinating! I was on a really small island for five nights, where - especially with the full moon - the tides would change approximately 2m in sealevel: when it was low tide you would have to walk out for nearly 150m before being able to swim properly whereas you could go swimming straight from the beach during high tide.

I really enjoyed these five days on Leleuvia island. It is exactly like the image of Fiji everybody has:

beautiful white sandbeach, palmtrees, sun, cristallclear turquois water... and only a few other people! Yes, I was really really lucky to have found this insider tipp: when I was there construction works were going on (to avoid the noise I was just walking on the other side of the island - no noise, no people) so there were hardly any other tourists :) oh yes, my little paradise!!

The people working on the small resort were our friends and everybody mixed up. I was lucky to see and taste a lot of Fiji culture there: nearly every evening the employees of the resort and the workers for the constructions were sitting together, singing while drinking kava (video is really dark, but you get the singing...):

I was lucky to taste some of the kava as well: A drink made of the rood of a certain wood mixed with water. They usually sit together with a huge bowl of kava and drink it out of a coconutshell, which is passed around (Fiji-style...). After many cups of kava you're getting quite numb and really tired the next day. I only had a one or two cups each time, so I can't tell...

I was quite lucky too to see how they prepared lovo. It is their traditional way of cooking: inside the earth. First they dig a hole and put a fire there. On the fire they put stones which after one or two hours get really hot and turn white...

...When the stones are ready they put food (entire pigs, or birds, any kind of meet, potatoes, ....) in alufoil on the stones, cover everything with leaves...

...then with bags and afterwards cover the whole thing entirely with earth again. In this hot oven the food is cooked for one or two hours and gets this yummy smokey taste through the lovo!! It is simply delicious...

Yes, I really enjoyed my time on Leleuvia. I was lying around the beach - my own little private beach, walked in the jungle in the middle of the small island, was going snorkling in the cristall water, had a nice chat with the other people in the evenings. Simply relaxed, like you'd do on vacation, right?

Before this great time on Leleuvia I had been on the main island Viti Levu for three nights - in Pacific Harbour to be specific... Why the hell did I go there? Because, to be honest, it is not particularly beautiful there. But I had a great reason to go there:

Since Tim had told me and shown me his videos of the shark dive he had done, I knew one thing: when I come to Fiji I definitely want to do that too. I was like the bungy jump: I knew I wanted to do that in New Zealand so I did it! Same with the shark dive: I wanted to do that on Fiji, so I organised everything around that!

So that's how I ended up going straight to Pacific Harbour after landing on Fiji - the place to be for shark dives. The place itself is rather unspectacular: the club oceanus resort (in Fiji you find mainly resorts, and some hostels in some places...) I stayed in was nearly empty. So the dormitory-bed I had turned out to be a bed in a 4-bed room I had all to myself. The weather was so-so and the beach was not inviting at all due to huuuuuuge jellyfish. Well, so far so good. That's not really the picture everybody has of Fiji, right?

But I came to this rather forlorn place for the shark-dive anyway. So the next morning was already the big day! The weather was still rather shit, the sea rough making me feel not really well on the boat. So I couldn't wait to get into the water. I don't know how I would have felt if some sharks had been swimming close to the surface though. A guy who was there too showed me a video where this was the case. Really freaky indeed! But here all was pretty easy going: getting into the water, going down to 24m (oops...) and then all divers just lined up and sat there, while the dive masters were feeding the sharks (PS: on the photo is not a dive-master feeding but another diver making photos...).

The visibility was so-so, and in fact there were sooooo many fish that you couldn't really figure out how many sharks were there at the same time (this photo really represents best how the view was in general!). But still, there were many and quite often they would swim just in front or over you. They are really big indeed. Unfortunately the weren't any of the in that area quite rare tiger sharks. These would have been really big. So I only saw the "smaller" silvertips, black tips, bull sharks and lemon sharks. They are "only" around 3m long... Haha, yes, still long enough!

The remaining day in Pacific Harbour I was just relaxing at the (rather small) pool. In the evening the dive masters would invite me to join them to a beach party with another dive group. Got it all: beach, beer, fire! Fiji, this is!!

I really loved my stay in Fiji and I wished I stayed there longer!! The people are really nice and welcoming. Tourism is of course the main income of the island. But unlike the countries in South-East-Asia they really take it seriously in Fiji: you can feel that they aim for sustainable tourism and a long-time relationship: They definitely want the people to come back! In SEA I always had to bargain wherever I went and whatever I bought. And still I would often have the impression that locals would get the stuff for a cheaper price. In Fiji I never had the feeling of paying too much, the rates for busses are fixed, the taxis run with taxometers, and even in small markets the prices for bananas and other fruits are marked... Nowhere I had the feeling of being considered like a walking wallet.

I know, I didn't put many typical Fiji-photos in this story, but you can check them out here!