It took me four years to write this story. That is, one month to look for a contact, and four years to track its location and look for background information, and some delays in between. After virtually hitting a roundabout every time I tried to get historic details, I decided to write a piece anyway, purely based on my brief experience of what I believe is the most exotic location for a graveyard.
When you stand at a place where you can feel the wind on your face, let the sun kiss you and embrace the abundance of nature around you, from sparkling dunes and aquamarine seas, then you have to be in paradise. Period! And paradise is not the kind of place you’d like to equate with a tract of land used as a burial ground. We often link the grave to death and decay, the vulnerability of mankind, and a place that is never satisfied; always greedy and ready to swallow more dead bodies.
But the graveyard for the descendants of the first European (and part European) families to settle in Sigatoka is more than meets the eye. It enjoys one of the best vantage points that the senses can behold. I first heard about the site in 2020, during an interview with iconic hotelier Bob Kennedy During a sit down with the hospitality guru he shared insightful stories about the many places he had been to and the many hats he worn in his lifetime.
Then he mentioned the graveyard, perhaps unexpectedly. “If you go up the Sigatoka River mouth, you’ll discover graves,” he revealed. Well versed with.
