The blessings of digital silence

Other than being he home to the Banded Iguana, one of the facts about Fiji is relative digital isolation. If you work on the USP Laucala campus, you've got a pretty fast connection but at the cost of serious usage limits - proxied web connections, blocked ports, content filtering, etc. If you are a wealthy individual or organization, you can procure enough bandwidth in Fiji to make your cousins in neighboring island nations blush. But it is not possible (or at least practical) to get the kind of affordable residential broadband here that has made YouTube a household word and daily pass-time in households in North America, Europe, and South and East Asia.

Internet access in Fiji is also severely constrained by geography. Once you leave the urban centres, your options for access rapidly diminish until you are eventually left with the PC in the lobby of the nearest FJ$500 a night resort as your last uh... resort.

Still, it is refreshing to take a break from the piles of emails, rss feeds, online games, and carpal tunnel syndrome and spend some time in non-virtual reality and interact with other entities without mediation by the TCP/IP protocol suite. It's actually pretty nice.

Back in a few days...



Photos by amkhoslaand YXO