From Here to Where? Why You Should Move to Fiji Instead

By Christopher Darby

If you're planning to move abroad and thinking Europe, Latin America or Southeast Asia, there's a good chance that Fiji is not even on your radar. This book explores all the reasons why moving to the Fiji Islands is easier, safer, and quite possibly a whole lot cheaper than the countries currently on your list. You'll find out exactly how to do it and what to expect when you get there. The final chapter is the author's own tale of moving to Fiji. Reverse everything he did and you'll have the formula for a successful move abroad. He learned the hard way. You don't have to.

• Language: English
• Publisher: From Here to Where?
• Release date: Aug 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386255680

Christopher Darby

Christopher Darby has travelled extensively with his wife and two kids in search of a place to call home—preferably one without traffic lights. After thousands of hours of research and several moves within North America, Europe, the Caribbean and the South Pacific, they found what they were looking for in the Fiji Islands. He currently spends his days writing a comic novel that he put on pause to write this book. He lives with his wife and two boys on the southern coast of Viti Levu.

Book preview

PREFACE

Whatever your situation and whatever your reasons, moving abroad isn’t easy. You’d like to make the right decisions. You’d like to find a place that feels like home. Somewhere you’ll be fulfilled. You want to have your cake and eat it too. Why not? What you don’t want is to go through the trouble of moving to a new country, only to deeply regret it. You don’t want to come back home with your tail between your legs after wasting a bunch of money doing something you shouldn’t have. If you’re thinking Latin America, Europe or Southeast Asia, you’ll find out why Fiji is a great option you probably hadn’t considered. We’ll explore all the reasons why moving to Fiji is easier, safer, and quite possibly a lot cheaper than the countries currently on your list. Along the way, you’ll find out exactly how to do it and what to expect when you get there. You’ll also find out exactly how not to do it. I learned the hard way. You don’t have to.

What this book won’t do is help you decide whether or not to move abroad. It won’t tell you how to get rid of your stuff. It won’t tell you how to mentally prepare for it, how to manage your taxes, or what to tell your family, your kids, or your friends. My wife and I? We said to our kids: We’re moving! Again? they answered. Yep! A week after arriving in Fiji, I emailed my parents to let them know that we had moved to an island on the other side of the world. In other words, I’m not the person to go to for advice about these things. I don’t know how to manage my money or yours, and if you’re serious about moving abroad, you’ll figure out what to do with your stuff. There’s eBay, Craigslist, dumpsters, storage units, and shipping agents for that.

You don’t really need this book to plan a move to Fiji, but you might need it to help talk yourself out of moving to Mexico, only to find out too late that there was a better alternative. Maybe you’re already in Latin America, wishing you weren’t. Either way, you can find a lot of information on the internet. From expat and international travel blogs to government websites and everything in between, you should be able to find most of the information that is of immediate concern when planning a move abroad. A small problem is that some of what you’ll find is biased, misleading, outdated, or simply wrong. What may have been true three years ago might be completely false today. In Fiji, the majority of expats are from Australia and New Zealand. If you’re from the US or Canada, you play under different rules. Australian expats blogging about Fiji might have useful information about where to get the best meat in Suva, but they’re no help regarding official matters. Many government websites aren’t much better. Over the years, I’ve found them to be almost deliberately ambiguous and sometimes hard to navigate. In the end, they look at each case individually. It’s up to that particular government to approve or deny a particular residency application.

When we moved to Fiji, the Immigration Department’s website stated that the minimum age requirement for residency was 45. At the time, we were 38. I looked at my wife, and laughed. That’s bullshit, I said. That’s just some arbitrary number they made up to keep 20-something surfer dudes from thinking they can go camp out on the beach for five years. It’s targeted to older people who presumably have a stable income—pension, property, more money. If I was a 23-year-old multi-billionaire who wanted to move to Fiji, buy an island, and sprinkle millions of dollars all over the place, you can bet that the Department of Immigration wouldn’t tell me that I was welcome to come back in 22 years. And I was right. The only thing I had to do that I wouldn’t have had to do if I was 45 or older was get cleared through Interpol to prove that I wasn’t an international drug-smuggling child molester. What being 38 as opposed to 45 had to do with that was entirely beyond me, but it’s not up to us to question the mysterious ways of small island nations. Less than a week after being cleared, we got a 3-year residency permit easily renewed for another three years.

My wife and I have extensively researched moving to Iceland, Thailand, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Romania, Malta, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Samoa, Tonga, Vanuatu, and almost every island in the Caribbean. I’m sure there’s a few more that my limited memory doesn’t presently recall. For the record, we don’t have a vacation home we’re trying to rent out in Fiji (that would be, like, illegal) and we’re not involved in the tourism industry. But we did a lot of research while trying to find a country that was beautiful, safe, cheap, and had reliable internet and some good restaurants. We found all of that and more in the Fiji Islands.

1.

FROM HERE TO WHERE?

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The idea of ‘picking up and getting the hell out of here’ is an enticing one. Once you get it into your head, it’s hard to get it out. My wife and I had dreamed of moving abroad since we were teenagers. Europe? The Caribbean? Thailand? Iceland? Somewhere else. Somewhere not here. You can drive two thousand miles, we’d say, and find the same strip malls, the same stores, the same restaurants, the same thing. Maybe a different backdrop but more or less the same, the same, the same. It didn’t help that as time passed, we seemed to lose more friends than we made. Eventually, we didn’t have any; but on trips abroad, we seemed to meet people everywhere we went. People we still stay in contact with. Somehow, we felt more at home when we were away from home. It’s true that the grass is not always greener on the other side, but that’s something we have to find out for ourselves. A different place doesn’t make you a different person. If it’s the right place, it just might make you a happier one.

Everyone who wants to move abroad has a different reason. We all have unique circumstances. For us, we wanted to raise our kids where there was a zero percent chance of dining at Applebee’s or having to endure another birthday party at Chuck E Cheese. Whether it was bouncing around the world on a permanent detour or settling in some far-flung land, we didn’t know. Some people dream of taking their school-aged kids around the world and settling in a new country for the typically-allotted 3-month period before moving on to the next. It’s called worldschooling. Some people are retired and want a warm place where their money will go further. Some people can work from home, so why not live in a house overlooking islands scattered like loose change in a deep blue sea? Some people have kids, some people don’t. Some people don’t have a budget, most of us do. We can’t all afford to move to Europe. Until recently, it would have meant watching your money get cut in half when converted to Euros. Unless you’re a young, highly-qualified tech guru, you pretty much have to be Tina Turner or a bazillionaire to move to Switzerland. I’d love to move to Malta, but alas! It’s not the easiest. The far-away islands you think of, like the Marshall Islands or places in Jimmy Buffett songs? They’re far-far. Ain’t nothing there, my friend. If you have teenagers, sooner than later they’ll want to disown you for dragging them to an island in the middle of nothing, where the internet’s glitchy and the food sucks. Tin-meat or tin-fish, dear? Before long, you’d be dreaming of Applebee’s. Then, there’s Southeast Asia. The food’s great, the culture is interesting, but it’s not anywhere on my list of places I’d want to live. Too many unknowns, and far too many stories about foreigners dying while on holiday in places like Indonesia and Thailand. The police scare me, the attitude of the locals toward foreigners scares me, and the laws definitely scare me. Being a white person from the US, the present international political climate scares me. Then, there’s all the beautiful places where the adage, ‘If you have to ask, you can’t afford it’ applies. If you don’t have to ask, you’re not reading this book.

My wife and I have two boys who were both young when we started seriously looking into leaving the US. Like most people, we looked south. We found that a lot of islands in the Caribbean aren’t the easiest places to move to. Well, they’re easy if you have lots of money. After a lot of research, we ended up moving to Saint Croix in the US Virgin Islands. It’s a US territory. Easy! We knew there was a good school on the island, but with a baby and a toddler, we were more worried about dengue fever and hurricane season. If you’re a US citizen, moving to the USVI is like becoming an expat without really becoming an expat. It’s Expat Junior.

The USVI turned out to be a great example of a country taking something beautiful, and doing nothing with it. The year we moved there, the government allocated $900,000 for renovations to the governor’s mansion, almost double the amount for education. That same year, cruise lines took St Croix off their itineraries because passengers were getting mugged in Frederiksted when they came off the ship—in broad daylight! Sadly, the USVI is grossly neglected. I know there are people from the US who live there and love it. To me, it’s like a step-child mommy dearest wants nothing to do with. I can’t tell you how many times we drove down a bumpy road to a lovely beach, only to be confronted by a group of guys who were decidedly not dressed for a day at the beach. Were we waltzing into some kind of drug deal? With two little kids in the back seat, we weren’t rolling the dice and hoping for the best. There aren’t enough cops, almost all of the food is imported, and at least when we lived there, the food basically sucked. A cheeseburger, even in paradise, gets old after a while. Hopefully the dining options have improved in the ten years since I lived there, but it still wouldn’t get me to move back.

The French are different. They treat their overseas territories like an outlying Paris suburb. A little farther down the Lesser Antilles, in St Martin, you can sit at an outdoor café sipping a white Bordeaux while nodding to a passing gendarme whose on a two-year assignment from France. If you move to St Martin, you can’t get your paperwork done there. Last I checked, you have to go to the neighboring island of Guadeloupe to conduct anything related to immigration. Along with residency requirements, all this adds up to moving to a French territory being about like moving to France: it sounds really nice, but for most of us, it’s too expensive.

That’s why most aspiring expats from the US or Canada end up in one of the various Latin American countries that most readily come to the minds of people looking to move somewhere cheaper abroad. Mexico, Costa Rica and Panama top the list. Currently, there are almost a million US expats residing in Mexico. The dollar goes further, the sun is warm, the rent is cheap, and it ain’t all that far away. Hard to resist, right?

When my wife’s father got sick, we moved back to the states. After he died, we made a failed move to Germany before ending up in Atlanta. It was everything I’d ever wanted to avoid, rolled into one: below the Bible Belt, too many cars, too many traffic lights, too many people. After two years and a failed business venture, we cast our net again. But where?

Mexico? I said to my wife. Nearly a million expats precede us. That’s a lot of due diligence in favor of moving there. A lot of people who have already done the thinking for us.

My wife insisted that we do the thinking for ourselves, even though we’re not very good at it. Over the next few weeks we read and read about moving to Mexico. Expat websites, digital nomad blogs, government websites, travel sites, statistics, and anything else we could find. After extensive research we honed in on Isla Mujeres, a small island off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. It’s a quick ferry ride to Cancún, where there are tons of resorts, restaurants, and girls in bikinis (not that I care about that). To the south, the Mayan Riviera stretches down the Caribbean coast, with lots of interesting places to explore. Everything was looking good.

You know what I like about Isla Mujeres? I said to my wife. "Isla means ‘island’. Being on an island has to be safer than being on the mainland. It’s not even in Mexico. It’s in the water!"

It’s in Mexico, my wife assured me. Everything I’d read said the same thing, so I figured that she must actually be right; but when I re-checked the map, Isla Mujeres still didn’t look like it was attached to Mexico.

Nantucket isn’t attached to the US, my wife said, but it’s still part of Massachusetts, which is in, and part of, the US.

Yes, I said, but there are no traffic lights on Nantucket. In the US, there are traffic lights all over the place. How do you explain that? I was pretty sure I had a point. My wife once again assured me that I was wrong. Since she always does that, I still wasn’t sure what to believe.

Soon, we had enough information to start feeling comfortable and a little excited about dispelling the stigma of danger often associated with Mexico. We’d even honed in on a specific place that appealed to us. An island off of Mexico, I told myself. Digital nomads and long-time expats assured us that it was a great, safe, beautiful place.

At that point, I agreed to buy a few Mexico travel books. We’d made so many stupid decisions in the past that I’d only ever agree to buy books about a place if things were looking in favor of actually moving there. We have travel books about many countries that we have absolutely no use for. The Mexico travel books were filled with pretty pictures and lots of information about all the great things we could do and see in the Mayan Riviera. We spent days trading the books back and forth. Everything was looking like we’d found our place. With a full handle on residency requirements and having exhausted the blogs and expat sites, we expanded our search. Let’s revisit that safety issue, I said. After all, we’re talking about Mexico, and we’ve only been there once.

One website I found was mexicovacationawareness.com. The first thing to grab my attention was the number of tourists who had drowned or supposedly flung themselves to their deaths from the balconies of 5-star all-inclusive resorts. There were stories about families pissed off that investigations weren’t conducted, police reports not filed, hotel staff unwilling to help. The injuries didn’t match the stories the hotels stood by. The hotels refused to cooperate. Staff stood by as the person died, insisting that the person was just drunk. There was one instance where security pushed away a guest who was in the medical profession administering CPR. The hotel insisted that they had to wait for the EMT to arrive.