Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [73]
No, I didn’t want a date. Frankly, I was beginning to feel a little weirded out by Fiji. It’s not every day that I’m accosted or solicited by cross-dressers and prostitutes. I had no idea what this portended, but I was looking forward to moving on to Suva. How much more sordid could the capital be?
SUVA IS A CITY that has a way of confounding one’s expectations of what a city in the South Pacific ought to be like. Even though I had now lived in Oceania for more than three years and knew how astonishingly varied the islands could be, I could never quite get accustomed to the fact that in Suva, the beating heart of the South Pacific, the sun rarely shone. It’s true. Of all the places in the South Pacific available to the English for a regional colonial capital, they chose to place theirs in a rain shadow. I’m not sure why they did this. I had always thought that the weather in Britain, its ceaseless rain and endless gray, was what drove the pursuit of the empire to sunnier climes. And yet, once they reached the South Pacific, what did they do? They placed their administrative capital on the wettest, grayest sliver of island they could find. I don’t think the French would have made the same mistake. Looking at the weather map of Fiji, one inevitably saw happy sunshine cascading over all the islands except for that one small corner of Viti Levu occupied by Suva, where invariably rain showers were to be expected into perpetuity.
The other thing that I, at least, had come to expect of towns in the South Pacific was that they were possessed of a calm languorousness, a sleepy essence suggesting that whatever it is that needed to be done now could always be done tomorrow. Suva, however, bustled. It was the Midtown of the South Pacific. There were Fijians and Indo-Fijians, of course, but also Polynesians, Micronesians, and other Melanesians from the Solomons, Papua New Guinea, and Vanuatu. There were so many Westerners from Australia, New Zealand, North America, and Europe living there that it remained possible, hypothetically, for them to have affairs without the entire expatriate population knowing about it the following morning. There were Chinese farmers ferrying in produce to the covered market, and a large swath of Victoria Parade, the main road in Suva, had been transformed into a strip of Chinese restaurants and nightclubs catering to the hundreds of Asian fishermen who found themselves in town each day as their catch was weighed in port. The United Nations was represented by approximately 130 separate agencies, doing whatever it is that U.N. agencies do. The Indo-Fijian businessmen had their headquarters in Suva, and many firms from Australia and New Zealand maintained offices in town. The government, of course, had its offices in Suva, and its officials could be seen conducting business wearing sulus, the gabardine skirts that only Fijian men can wear with aplomb. The main campus of the University of the South Pacific too was located in Suva—a disappointment, no doubt, to the three or four American students who enrolled there each year, thinking they’d signed on for four years of surfing bliss, and discovered too late that the nearest beach was nearly an hour’s drive away.
Standing at the bus station, surrounded by dozens of windowless buses belching thick black clouds of smoke, I found myself feeling bewildered and confused. The bus trip had been exciting as the driver careened around blind corners at one hundred miles per hour, tipping us onto two wheels, only to suddenly swerve to miss a cow idling on the road or screech to a halt in front of one of the half-dozen police checkpoints that had been set up on the Queen’s