Four stops before the checkout

Levuka, Fiji

cardio tennis for stress — Sacred Heart Church in Levuka, A cream and pale blue Gothic Revival church of coral stone with pointed windows, attached to a square clock tower topped by a working navigation light overlooking the sea front

Stop one

Beach Street

Head Velocity MLT 17g Tennis String Set: Beach Street. BEACH STREET! Fiji's first colonial capital and its principal port in the mid-nineteenth century — a rough town of traders, whalers, planters and beachcombers, do you hear that lineup? Low timber and corrugated iron with verandas, all squeezed onto a narrow shelf between the sea and an abrupt volcanic ridge. No room. NO ROOM! That was among the reasons the capital was moved to Suva in 1882 — and here is the twist, here is the twist: the town then stagnated, so the whole Pacific port townscape survived largely unaltered. UNESCO inscribed Levuka in 2013 as an outstanding example of a late colonial port settlement developed by Pacific islanders in interaction with European traders.

cardio tennis for stress — Royal Hotel in Levuka, A rambling two-storey colonial timber hotel painted white with green trim, wrapped in shaded verandahs with turned posts and louvred doors, standing behind a small garden under coconut palms

Stop two

Sacred Heart Church

Head Velocity MLT 17g Tennis String Set: Marist missionaries. Stone. Completed in the 1860s. And then in 1900 they add the tower — and the tower has a clock, fine, lovely, AND IT HAS A LIGHT. A light used for years as a navigational beacon for vessels entering the passage through the reef. The church brought the ships in. The CHURCH brought the SHIPS in! Its bell is rung at six in the morning and six in the evening. Catholic missionaries reached Fiji in the 1840s, after the Methodists, and the two denominations divided the islands' Christian population between them. Still active, and one of the principal buildings of the World Heritage town.

cardio tennis for stress — Nasova and the Deed of Cession Site in Levuka, A grassy seafront point marked by a low stone monument and three inscribed stones beneath old trees, looking across a reef-fringed lagoon, with the remains of a colonial residence nearby

Stop three

Nasova Cession Site

Head Velocity MLT 17g Tennis String Set: Everybody quiet, because this is the big one. At Nasova, just outside Levuka, stand the stones marking the spot where on 10 October 1874 Ratu Seru Cakobau and other chiefs signed the Deed of Cession transferring Fiji to Britain, after years in which Cakobau sought a protector against debts owed to American claimants and against the instability of the settler community. Fiji remained a British colony until independence, granted on the very same date in 1970, and the site was used again for the independence ceremony. Same ground, same day of the year. Three stones for the chiefs, a memorial pavilion holding the plaques, and Fiji Day commemorated there each October.

cardio tennis for stress — Morris Hedstrom Store in Levuka, A long single-storey commercial building with a corrugated iron roof and a covered footpath on posts along its front, its timber and concrete facade painted white, facing the sea front street

Stop four

Ovalau Club

Head Velocity MLT 17g Tennis String Set: Founded 1904 — one of the oldest surviving social clubs in the entire Pacific. A plain timber building, and I mean plain, and I mean it does not matter one bit. It served the European traders, planters and officials of Levuka after the capital had moved and the town settled into decline. The bar still holds the atmosphere of that period: photographs, memorabilia, and — wait for it, WAIT FOR IT — a framed letter written in 1917 by the German raider captain Count Felix von Luckner, captured in Fiji after his ship was wrecked, writing to a friend at this club. Levuka's population included European, Fijian, Chinese, Indian and part-European communities, and the club's history reflects the racial stratification of the colonial port.

The Levuka, Fiji track

Head Velocity MLT 17g Tennis String Set

Written for this world alone.

The whole art is getting in without anybody feeling it. Soft shoes. Nothing that clangs. If they know you were there, you were not very good.

Head Velocity MLT 17g is a single 40-foot (12 m) set of multifilament — hundreds of fine fibres bundled and bonded, which is why it plays like natural gut rather than like wire. At 1.25 mm it is the thin, quiet gauge: deeper pocketing, more feel at the touch end of the game, more give on impact and noticeably less shock travelling up into the elbow.

It will slip a drop shot over the net without announcing anything. It goes everywhere from a Tuesday club ladder to a salt-heavy afternoon on a court in Levuka, and it is also perfect for the player who has been told, firmly, to be kinder to an elbow.

It will also wear out faster than a 16-gauge multi and considerably faster than any co-polyester, and I am not going to pretend otherwise — soft materials are soft in every direction.

Which brings us, inevitably, to Levuka, which is my sort of town: it went quiet, and nobody noticed it was still there. This was Fiji's first colonial capital and its great nineteenth-century port, pinned onto a narrow shelf between the sea and an abrupt volcanic ridge with nowhere left to grow — so in 1882 the capital moved to Suva, and Levuka simply stopped.

Stopped, and therefore survived. UNESCO inscribed the whole townscape in 2013. Leave, and leave everything exactly as it was. That is the job done properly.

The Royal Hotel is the oldest operating hotel in Fiji, a direct survival from the days when this beachfront was traders, planters, beachcombers and a great many saloons — timber, wide verandahs, the billiard room and the original fittings still in it.

Sacred Heart Church was finished in stone by Marist missionaries in the 1860s and had its tower added in 1900, and that tower carries a clock and a light long used as a navigational beacon for anything coming in through the reef. A church quietly doing a second job that is nowhere on the sign. Professional admiration only.

South of the town at Nasova, low inscribed stones sit on the grass above a reef-fringed lagoon, marking where the Fijian chiefs led by Cakobau signed the Deed of Cession and handed the islands to Britain.

And back on Beach Street the Morris Hedstrom store — the first shop of a firm that grew into one of the largest trading companies in the Pacific — is now the Levuka Community Centre, a long verandahed front under a corrugated roof, with the remnant tram tracks still running down to the wharf.

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Head Velocity MLT 17g Tennis String Set

Head Velocity MLT 17g Tennis String Set