The gay pirate from the Black Forest

I can’t sleep. After a fairly uneventful day and a collapsed internet connection, I’m walking along the beach at one o’clock. Suddenly I hear music. A good guitar player, nice songs and good singers. Where there’s singing, settle down. I end up in the middle of a very bizarre bunch of tourists and locals and receive a very warm welcome.

Fiji is at the end of the world. Mana is out in the sea before the end of the world. At the end of Mana is the Mana Lagoon Hostel. You can’t get any further away. You would expect to find the most secluded outsiders in the world here. But they are not. They are as close to the centre as possible.

The black captain introduces himself to me as Giovanni Bosco from the Black Forest. He’s wearing a skirt, banderole and sunglasses in the middle of the night. He has a firm grip on the helm. A good captain, a gay pirate to be precise. His friend gets on my nerves but realises after a while that I’ve sat at this end of the table purely by chance.

They invite me in for beer, cigarettes and uncooked chicken-flavoured dry pasta. My antibiotics should have done their duty. The wild group sings beautifully, and after every song there’s a round of taki: everyone drinks beer, one after the other, all from the same glass. Quite different from Oktoberfest. I stay until the early morning.

After two hours of sleep, I wake up without a head. The gay pirate still has two free seats in his boat. On the way to the reef, he steals some fuel from the neighbouring resort’s dive boat in proper style. Far out at sea, I go snorkelling. Suddenly the boat is gone. The other divers tell me that we’ll be spearfishing here for two hours.

We’re going hunting. The weapons: adventurous homemade harpoons. Mild steel, 5mm thick and 80cm long. A point at the front, a notch at the back. I put one loop over my left thumb. Attached to it: a rubber tube, at the back another loop for the harpoon. The whole thing works in a similar way to a slingshot for one-handed use.

You can’t shoot very far with it, a maximum of one metre. I watch for a long time to see where the best hunter is looking, how he lurks, how he aims and shoots. After an hour, I finally shoot a fish. The smallest of the day. After all, the big ones are far too easy to hit.

The Fijians shoot really big and colourful chunks. I don’t know the name of the fish in German. In any case, it’s a deadly – if prepared incorrectly – and always a very expensive speciality in Japan. It looks like something from prehistoric times with all its spines and zombie eyes. After 2 hours we head back, not without another proper sunburn.

The internet is offline for the second day. I’m about to cross over to another island or back to the “mainland”. I have urgent work to do online. Then the diving instructor Andrew offers me his mobile wireless access. All problems dissolve in the fine white sand. Apart from the ants in my laptop.