Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [69]
Before moving, Sylvia had to make one last business trip to Sydney, where she’d also receive a checkup. Prenatal care in Vanuatu pretty much stopped at the confirmation of pregnancy. Yup. You’re pregnant. Good luck. Next! In the meantime, I would be the advance team in Fiji, charged with finding a home for the little fam. Sylvia would meet me a week later in Suva.
“You’re sure I can find Vanuatu kava in Fiji?” I asked a friend who had lived there. There was, I knew, plenty of kava in Fiji. The Fijians drank copious amounts of it—at home, at work, at ceremonies—there was hardly any situation in Fiji that did not call for kava. But it was weak kava. Once you’ve had Vanuatu kava, there’s no going back.
“In the covered market in Suva, across from the bus station, on the second floor, there’s an Indian named Vijay Patel who sells it in powdered form. Typically, it’s from Pentecost, now and then from Tanna. His stall is the third one on the left, two rows in. Tell him I say hey.”
“Powdered, not freshly ground?”
“Afraid so. I tried smuggling in some fresh roots, but they were confiscated.”
“Tragic. Better have a few shells before I go.”
I said good-bye to Sylvia as she boarded the flight to Sydney. We’d meet next in Suva. “Be good,” she said. And then I said farewell to Vanuatu. “You are my brothers,” I told the group at the nakamal.
Though I would miss the nakamals dearly, I was looking forward to moving to Fiji. When we’d departed the atolls of Kiribati some years earlier, Fiji had been our first stop on the journey home. It seemed huge to us then, profoundly civilized and welcoming, and we enjoyed our stay there immensely. Of course, at the time, we were easily impressed. “Look,” I had said to Sylvia in Suva. “An escalator. Do you see? It goes up. And look. That one goes down. Isn’t that amazing?” When we discovered that our hotel room on the Coral Coast had both a view of the ocean and air conditioning, we were smitten forever.
And, I thought as I boarded an evening flight to Nadi on Air Vanuatu, there won’t be any of this pseudo-colonial nonsense in Fiji. No one will call me master in Fiji, I thought confidently. Port Vila had always felt uncomfortably odd, provoking my inner Marxist. I didn’t know I had an inner Marxist until I arrived in Vila, and I hoped to leave him behind. Marxists can be so tedious.
It was thus with a happy optimism that I arrived in Fiji. The smell alone was redolent of the Fiji I remembered—the ocean, ripe vegetation, sweat, curry, diesel. There were dozens of taxis lined up outside the airport, and I half-expected a scrum of drivers charging at me, beckoning me with an insistent hail. The Fiji I knew was frothing with hyper-tourism, and noting the scarcity of tourists at the airport, I had prepared myself to be assailed by tour guides and cabdrivers hungry for a customer, any customer. It was with some surprise, then, that I actually had to raise my arm to catch a taxi.
“So how is the tourist business in Fiji?” I asked the young Indian taxi driver as I settled into the front seat, feeling as pleased as pie that I could speak in English and reliably expect to be understood. The radio blared Indian pop music. On the dashboard was a sticker of a dancing blue elephant with an unnatural number of limbs. Nearly half the population of Fiji is of Indian descent.
“Are you a tourist?” he asked.
“Not quite,” I said.
“Then we are still waiting for the tourists to come back.”
Looking around, I could see why. Nadi was where the international airport was located. The airport gate was heavily guarded by Fijian soldiers carrying M-16s. Not exactly what one wants to see on a honeymoon. We slowly weaved around a series of tire traps. There were eight soldiers, and they were all business, scanning incoming cars with flashlights.
“How is the political situation?” I asked the driver