My Strange Wainibokasi Story!

This is such an odd story I often wonder that if I understood what happened I'd know a great deal more about how the world works.  It also makes me think of Freud and how he charged a thousand pounds per session for psychoanalysis because he said that such a high price would force his patients to take it all very seriously and so get better.

When I was a child growing up in Fiji, for a long while we Murphy kids loved our kayaks more than anything.

And our very best adventure in them was always racing each other down the Wainibokasi, a large, fast-moving river in the isolated and heavily jungled mountains in an area called Rewa, outside Suva. Fun like you wouldn't believe and we could never get enough, so every Sunday afternoon our mum would dive us up into the mountains of Wainibokasi, off-load us and our kayaks at the upper reaches of the river, then drive down to Wainibokasi Bridge to read a book and await our arrival.

However on our very first trip up the mountain, we came across the strangest sight. Just beside the winding narrow dusty road, and next to a waterfall and lake, was an enormous column of water that rose straight out of the ground. You have to imagine how strange it was: exactly like a Greek ionic column, about seven feet tall and silver-coloured yet glistening like an opal, sparking off these tiny little rainbows. No, seriously, it looked like it was made of pure silver yet it was entirely water.

Mum stopped the car and we all got out to walk around it, gazing in awestruck silence. Never in our lives had we even heard about such a thing.  And here was this miracle right before our eyes, a true wonder so close to home and yet no one had ever mentioned it to us.

"How is this even possible?" mum was asking, then we all got back into the car and went home to fetch dad - who always knew everything - before returning to again gaze in wonder at it.

"It's physics." said dad.  "This lake has been formed because that road has cut off this stream's outlet into the river. And notice that the cliff is granite, in fact this entire area is granite, so there must be a seam in the granite that comes out at this spot here, and the pressure of that waterfall over there is driving this column up and out and water viscosity is holding it into this column shape.  If you poked it with a stick, it would break the bond and so the water would spray out into a regular fountain."

That satisfied us all, and so we simply drove away, continuing up the mountain to find a spot suitable to launch our kayaks.

For the next few years, while our kayak obsession lasted, every trip we'd pass that miracle and eventually we even stopped noticing it.  And I'd like to point out that never once did we see another car on that mountain road ...

... until Fiji was hit by a massive cyclone that wiped out most of the Rewa area.

They were desperate times and no one had any money to repair. And up there in the Wainibokasi mountains, a village lost everything, including their church - the very worst blow - so they needed to fund-raise fast.

But how?

We know the answer because we saw them doing it: an entire village out there on the Wainibokasi road building an eight foot high bamboo fence around the column of water.

Naturally we stopped to ask what they were up to and were told that this village held many meetings to think long and hard on the knotty question "What do we have of value that we can sell to raise money to rebuild our church?" and that's when some bright spark came up with a rather brilliant idea:  we'll charge people to see our Marvel.

So that's what they did:  they wrapped a bamboo fence around their miraculous column of water and began charging a penny to see it. 

I thought they were idiots.  Like why would anyone PAY to see something that for so many years had been free to view and yet never ever visited ...

... but it worked.  No, seriously! Every single weekend we saw more and more cars on that road. And yes, they were all coming to pay-to-view. First there were dozens of people and then hundreds, and then, within months, it was literally thousands, with entire bus-loads coming from all over Viti Levu to see the Marvel.  Often they'd be many miles of cars parked there on the road so it was getting harder and harder to get up to our launch-spot higher in the mountains.

Yes, we'd always stop at The Marvel because it was always fun, with a rollicking party atmosphere and hundreds of ice-carts and food vendors and picnickers. And the line to pay-to-view was always very long and people would come out looking astonished and saying "How is that even possible?" but what was really astonishing was how often we'd ask mum for pennies so we too could go inside the fence to view The Marvel for ourselves.

So that's what happened for just over 18 months. Those many thousands all paying their penny to-view all added up until the village had more than enough money to rebuild their church, build themselves nice houses and put aside money to pay everyone's school fees for the next few decades, until the village decided "We don't need more than this!"  ... and so took down that fence and thus The Marvel was no longer pay-to-view ...

... AND NEVER AGAIN DID WE SEE ANOTHER CAR ON THAT MOUNTAIN ROAD!

The Marvel was still there, still as strange and astonishing and beautiful as it ever was, still glistening like opal and still sparking off those gorgeous little rainbows, but ... gosh, I don't know ... if you didn't have to pay to view it, it HAD to be too ordinary to bother with so no one ever bothered.  Is that the lesson learned here?

Is something only precious if you have to pay for it?   Freud certainly thought so.

Anyway, I don't know if The Wainibokasi Marvel is still there since, according to my father, stopping it was simply a matter of building a proper outlet into the river ... but - hint hint hint - wouldn't it be interesting to find out.