Nadi

The Nadi area was long settled by iTaukei communities living on the river flats and the coast, within the chiefly districts of the western side of Viti Levu, a region whose West Fijian dialects and traditions differ from the east. European influence came late and indirectly: after Fiji was ceded to Britain in 1874, the Colonial Sugar Refining Company laid mills, cane lines and leased farms across the western plains, and from 1879 indentured labourers from India were brought to work them. Their descendants became the majority in Nadi and the other cane towns, opening the shops, garages and eating houses that still line the main street.

The Second World War made the town. New Zealand built the first airstrips on the flats north of the settlement from 1939, paid for by the British colonial authorities, and extended them into three long runways by 1942, with coastal gun emplacements at Momi Bay to defend the approaches. Afterwards the airfield became Nadi International Airport, a refuelling point on the air routes across the Pacific and the reason Fiji's tourist industry grew in the west rather than around Suva. The township itself was established in 1947.

Independence in 1970 and cheap air travel turned the airport's hinterland into a resort coast. Denarau, a stretch of mangrove and mudflat north-west of the town, was reclaimed and built up as a private resort development of hotels, an 18-hole golf course and a marina, and the catamaran services to the Mamanuca and Yasawa islands followed. Nadi has since absorbed the shocks of the country's coups, the long decline of sugar, cyclones and the closure of borders during the pandemic, each of which hit a town that depends almost entirely on aircraft arriving.

Nadi is the most thoroughly mixed town in Fiji, and the mixture is visible in a single walk down the main street: a Hindu temple in South Indian style at one end, Methodist and Catholic churches nearby, a mosque in the surrounding suburbs, Chinese-run shops, and iTaukei villages a few minutes away on the river and the coast. Diwali lights the town in October or November, Holi throws colour in the wet season, Eid is marked in the Muslim community, and Sunday empties the streets for church.

Village protocol still governs behaviour outside the tourist strips. Visitors are received with a sevusevu, the presentation of yaqona root, drunk in the ceremony of shared kava that opens any serious occasion; hats come off, shoulders and knees are covered, and the chief's spokesman speaks for the village. Resorts and lodges on nearby land lease it from local mataqali, and the meke dances, lovo feasts and kava sessions performed for guests are a real point of contact rather than pure display.

The town's own culture is commercial and gregarious: a market culture of bargaining and greeting, handicraft shops selling carvings and tapa, and a strong rugby following, with Nadi's team and the wider Nadroga and Ba provincial rivalries taken seriously. Music is heard everywhere, from church choirs and string bands to Bollywood playback in the shops, and the town's annual carnival brings parades and stalls to the centre of town.

Nadi had a population of 59,707 at the 2017 census, counting the town and the urban area around it from Namaka and the airport through Martintar to the coast, which makes it one of Fiji's largest population centres. Indo-Fijian families predominate in the town, with iTaukei villages around it and a growing mixed suburban population in between.

Work is tourism and what serves it: hotels and resorts on Denarau, the airport and airlines, taxis and buses, tour and boat operators, shops, security and construction. Sugar cane still grows on the plains inland, and market gardening, fishing and government offices provide the rest. Employment is seasonal and exposed — a cyclone, a border closure or an airline pulling a route is felt immediately — and many families have relatives working in Australia, New Zealand or on cruise ships and send money home.

The day starts early, with buses and minibuses full by seven and the market trading soon after; the middle of the day is hot and slow, and the evening belongs to the beach, the grog bowl and rugby training. Housing sprawls along the roads into the cane land, and the town's persistent problems are flooding of the Nadi River in heavy rain, drainage and water supply, traffic through a single main street, and the cost of living relative to local wages.

Western Fiji eats more Indian food than anywhere else in the country, and Nadi is its capital. Roti with chicken, goat, fish or vegetable curry, dhal, rice and pickles is the standard meal, sold from small kitchens all over town and wrapped as a roti parcel to take away; sweets such as gulab jamun and burfi fill the cabinets of the Indo-Fijian bakeries, and chilli, tamarind and coriander flavour almost everything.

iTaukei cooking is the other tradition. Lovo, an earth oven of hot stones, steams pork, chicken, fish, cassava and taro under leaves for feasts, and with it comes palusami, taro leaves wrapped around coconut cream and onion. Kokoda, raw fish cured in lime juice and dressed with coconut cream, chilli and onion, appears on every menu from beach bar to resort. Root crops — cassava, dalo and yams — take the place of bread, and duruka, the young flower head of a wild cane sometimes called Fiji asparagus, is a seasonal market treat.

The market sets the tone for shopping: pyramids of chillies and tomatoes, pineapples, papaya and mangoes in season, bundles of yaqona, and dried fish. Drinks are cold coconuts, fresh juices, Fiji-brewed lager and rum, tea made strong and sweet in the Indo-Fijian manner, and above all kava, the earthy, peppery infusion of pounded yaqona root drunk from a shared bowl at almost any gathering.