There are a handful of life experiences where I throw caution in the wind and think:
Fugg it, I will do (or eat it) ━ at least it will be a story to tell later.
From crawling the Chu Chi tunnel in Vietnam (not recommending, never again) to stripping naked in a room full of Japanese women; from eating live octopus in a Korean fish market and to the latest one taking a mud bath in the middle of nowhere in Fiji because, yes as I told Jik:
This is a day I will want to write about.
Our day started pretty standard, with a buffet breakfast in the hotel, praying in the temple, and visiting a local market.
Then the driver offered to take us to see the Garden of the Sleeping Giant with a hot spring nearby. We both were pretty reluctant about the garden (we ended up having a good time there), but I was very keen on the hot spring from the minute he offered it.
I had never been to a hot spring outside of Asia (the Fiji trip happened before I went to Mornington Peninsula hot spring a few weeks ago) and am curious about it.
Will we have to get naked? What kind of facility do they have? Is it seperate between men and women?
My questions came to a halt almost immediately when the taxi stopped in the middle of an open-air area with a few huts and three brown-coloured ponds, two of which were natural hot spring pools.
This was a beautiful traditional-style hot spring, and we decided to give it a go.
Slathering Mud All Over Our Bodies
After changing to our bathers in a changing hut, A Fijian guy whose face was completely covered with mud, told us to put the mud, from a bucket, on our skin.
Feeling a bit awkward, I tried to make a conversation and asked why his face was caked with mud. His answer:
“Too much kava last night.”
I have heard this typical Fijian joke more than enough times during my short stay here.
Alas, we did as instructed; putting mud on ourselves and standing there in the sun while waiting for it to dry, which is when the abundance benefits of it are supposed to kick in.
Once caked, we descended into the mud pool. If you don’t know, a mud pool is a water body on a thick mud and seaweed bed.
It took a deep faith and a few screams for me to step into the black pool, which at first felt bottomless as I kept sinking deeper and deeper into the thick, warm, gooey and unknown mud and plants. However, once we found our footing inside, the childishness took over, and we had a great time taking slow-mo videos and washing the mud off each other.
Soaking in the Traditional-style Hot Spring
The hot spring was a much clearer pool, which we could only get into after we cleaned as much mud as we could in the mud pool. The hot spring pool is so good! It was warm, with a few spots hotter than others. I could spend hours in it but didn’t because there was an extremely loud group of tourists who joined in the pool soon after, and we didn’t want to spoil our already zen state of mind.
A Massage Under The Dakua Tree
The last thing we did was to get a Fijian massage, in an open-air hut, under a huge tree. I requested the Fijian lady who was massaging me to do it stronger, which somehow triggered waves of laughter among themselves. We didn’t know why they found it amusing, but it made us laugh out loud too.
Mudbath followed by a hot spring soak and ended with Fijian massage; it turned out to be such a relaxing afternoon. We returned to the hotel in a daze, crawled to the bed and took a two hours nap before waking up to Mediterranean dinner in the hotel compound.
“Life is good when you get to spend the day covered in the mud”, was the conclusion I muttered to Jik right before dozing off that night.
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