The real Fiji isn’t performed for you. Instead, it’s poured and passed, then shared after dark.
Words, images and video Ben McNamara
The real Fiji isn’t performed for you. Instead, it’s poured, passed and shared after dark.
Words, images and video Ben McNamara
It's midnight and I'm eating lamb chops on the side of a road I don't know the name of, somewhere on the edge of Vanua Levu, with a man I met forty minutes ago.
It turns out his name is Sanfred. He's missing his front tooth. He's wearing a singlet like he was born wearing it. And he's just handed me a plate of meat from a 44-gallon drum that's been sliced in half and forced into a new career as a barbecue.
I eat chops.
It's midnight and I'm eating lamb chops on the side of a road I don't know the name of, somewhere on the edge of Vanua Levu, with a man I met forty minutes ago.
His name is Sanfred. He's missing his front tooth. He's wearing a singlet like he was born wearing it. And he's just handed me a plate of meat from a 44-gallon drum that's been sliced in half and forced into a new career as a barbecue.
I eat chops.
Home life on Vanua Levu away from the swim up bars and resorts.
HIT PLAY TO WATCH ▶
Cicadas are going absolutely feral in the dark as the hiss of fat dripping onto the coals fills the night. Smoke drifts into the thick tropical air. Abandoned tyres lurk in the bushes like sleeping animals, making this a very different kind of Michelin restaurant. I have no idea where my luggage is. These chops are perfection.
Sanfred Smith.
Sanfred is a kava man. He grows it, harvests it, sells it, and drinks it the way you'd drink tea with a neighbour, because there's always a reason to sit and listen. For the next week, I'm living in his world. Somewhere between the airport and this roadside grill, I understood that the itinerary I'd written in my notes app was already irrelevant.
Harvesting the Kava root.
For as long as the Pacific has been occupied, kava has been the language of serious moments. Before a battle, two chiefs would sit together and share a bowl. It lowered the temperature. Increased the chance that words would do the work instead of weapons. It was diplomacy in a coconut shell, and it still is.
A kava plant ready for harvesting.
The cleaning of the roots.
The bilo. A half coconut shell.
Most travellers encounter it at a resort. There's a setup: a muscle-bound warrior in grass skirt, the protocol explained in careful English, the coconut shell extended toward you like a sacrament. You clap once, you drink, you try not to visibly recoil, you clap three times. It's genuine, and Fijians are the most naturally welcoming people I've met anywhere on this planet, but it can feel like kava is being presented to you. A little curated. A cultural postcard, handed over with a smile, that you tick before heading back to the swim-up bar.
But step beyond the resort and the tradition runs deep. In villages across Fiji, kava is how a chief welcomes a guest, how a community marks a birth, a death, a dispute resolved. It's been the ritual at the centre of every significant moment in Pacific life for thousands of years, and now - it’s at the centre of welcoming guests, travellers and new friends.
Elsewhere it's been deconstructed entirely. In Los Angeles, kava bars serve it cold, in cocktails, in capsules. Repackaged for the wellness economy. Given a logo and a macronutrient profile.
Sanfred has never heard of any of that, and I suspect he would find it very funny.
His home sits at the point where a river and a wall of jungle have quietly agreed to share the land. To get there from the road, you park and yell. Six minutes later, a tinny hums across the water to collect you.
The house runs on a logic I don't fully understand but immediately respect. Kids appear and vanish. There's always fish on the coal fire. Someone is always laughing on the front porch, about something, and they don't explain what. I'm introduced to a rotating cast of uncles and cousins and people who might be cousins but are really just people who eat here a lot. Within twenty minutes of arriving, a plate appears in front of me. Within thirty, I'm sitting on the porch in the dark.
Joti - A kava farmer.
Clap. The bilo, a coconut shell worn smooth from years of hands, comes around. You receive it with both hands.
Drink. Clap. Clap. Clap. As the bilo comes away from my face, every set of eyes in the room is on me. That look isn't suspicious. It's pride.
The first thing you notice about kava is the taste: earthy, peppery, something older without a name. Your tongue goes slightly numb. Your lips tingle. And then, slowly, something that has been coiled in you all day begins to unwind.
It doesn't announce itself. That's the thing nobody warns you about. There's no moment where it kicks in. There's just a before and a sometime later.
You notice your shoulders have dropped two inches and the silence between sentences has become comfortable. A volume dial being turned down on everything that doesn't matter.
There's a reason it worked for those chiefs. Kava acts on your GABA receptors, the same ones that govern anxiety and tension. It doesn't sedate you. It just quietly removes the static. What's left is the room, the people in it, and whatever actually needs to be said.
Nasolo Village - Vanua Levu.
Joti sampling his own product.
I sit there trying to analyse it, the way you do when you've come somewhere with a notebook and an angle.
What does it feel like? What's the effect? How would you describe it?
Sanfred's cousin is talking about his friends. "I've met my best friends over kava," he says, the river audible behind him. "Never over alcohol."
I write it down. I stop trying to analyse it.
The ideal conditions for kava.
Three days in, we go to the farm.
Kava doesn't grow anywhere convenient. It wants highland terrain, steep and humid, the kind of thick canopy where the light comes through dappled and the mud has opinions about your footwear.
We drive until the road becomes theoretical, then we walk. Then we keep walking. The kind of walking where conversation stops because your lungs have other priorities.
I sit with two farmers at the edge of the crop while their grandchildren orbit my camera like small, delighted satellites. The logistics of their lives are staggering and stated plainly, without complaint. The farm is 60 kilometres from home. To reach it they take a bus, then hike 15 kilometres into the bush. When it's harvest time, they pull the stubborn, heavy, resistant roots from the earth and carry up to 40 kilograms of them on their backs all the way out. Then they pay $100 for a taxi to the market, where they stay until it sells.
Joti in the field.
Here's the part that doesn't make it onto a bar menu: kava is one of Fiji's most significant export crops, and yet for years the economics punished the people growing it. The value accumulated at every point in the chain except the farm. Middlemen, margins, no guaranteed prices. And underneath all of it, a structural problem with no easy fix. In Fiji, farms are owned by communities and tribes, not individuals. Banks don't loan to villages. So there were no tractors, no trucks, no cars. No equipment to make the mountain smaller. Just backs, and the 15-kilometre walk, and the $100 taxi home.
A kava farmer on horse back.
Something is shifting. Farmers are organising. Buyers are factoring ethics into their spreadsheets. Slowly, access is arriving: consistent rates, micro-loans, the rare luxury of planning more than one season ahead.
One of the farmers tells me his son is learning to drive, thanks to a micro-loan.
It sounds like a small thing until you understand what it means. A car means the walk becomes a drive; the path becomes a road. It means time, and time means everything when you're farming a crop this demanding in terrain this remote.
The mountain, he says, just got a little smaller.
We pull the roots, carry them down, and pound them into dust.
Then we go back to the porch.
Clap. Clap. Clap. Drink. Clap.
Same bowl. Same rhythm. Same slow settling of the world.
Sanfred's home.
Somewhere between the second and fifth night, I lose count. The days go soft at the edges out here. I stop waiting for something to happen and start just being in it.
That's the trick kava plays. Or maybe it's not a trick. Maybe it's the whole point.
It doesn't take you anywhere. It just makes where you are feel like enough. The river. The porch. The dark. The cousins and the uncles and the people who might be cousins. Sanfred with his singlet and his missing tooth, refilling the bowl without being asked.
You don't understand kava by drinking it. You understand it by sitting still long enough for it to show you what's already there.
Seleima and Raveuni - 5th generation farmers.
The next afternoon the heat is high and Sanfred is squinting at the sky with the expression of a man who has made a decision.
"Ben." He doesn't look at me. "I think we have enough photos today, yeah?"
He turns, and there it is, that gap-toothed grin.
"Maybe we go fishing."
In Fiji, plans are suggestions. Time is elastic. And the best days are the ones that dissolve into something else entirely before you even notice.
I put the notebook away.
get in the know Kava has always been used as a peace offering and being a natural relaxant to reduce anxiety, stress, and insomnia, it can provide inner peace as well as outer.
SHARE THIS ARTICLE
