Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [78]
There was, as far as we could tell, not much of the Pacific Grand left to guard. Built in 1914, the two-story hotel had once been the finest in Oceania, with stately colonnades and verandahs set to capture the breeze off Suva Harbor. Alas for the Pacific Grand, it was bought by Nauru, a grim flyspeck of a country that was once among the world’s richest. After squandering the wealth it had derived from its phosphate deposits, Nauru was reduced to penury and today makes its living as a prison island housing Australia’s illegal immigrants. The Pacific Grand Hotel, like most of the properties owned by Nauru throughout the Pacific, had been left to crumble.
“Would you like a tour?” Ahanda asked, prying apart the plywood shutters that had been nailed to the entranceway, presumably to keep people out. Ahanda, clearly, had a rather unique interpretation of his role as a security guard. Sylvia squeezed through, carefully maneuvering the volleyball she had evidently swallowed.
Inside, it was like stepping through a time warp and arriving the day after the Gilded Age had ended. The champagne flutes had been picked up, the chandeliers removed, but otherwise the lobby remained as it must have appeared to the fops and dandies of a bygone era. Well, provided, of course, that one ignored the pools of bird shit, the mounds of dust, the acres of cobwebs, and the uncomfortable feeling that, any moment now, you might fall through the floorboards.
“Come upstairs,” Ahanda said. “I will show you something.” We followed him up. Creak, creak, the stairs said ominously as we passed a sign informing us that the morning post left at 10 A.M. Pausing for a moment to pluck the cobwebs off our faces, we emerged onto the second-floor balcony. A dozen birds scattered into the air.
“You see?” Ahanda said. “This is where Queen Elizabeth stood. The first one. She stood like this.” Ahanda struck a regal pose, surveying his domain with outstretched hands. “It’s very beautiful.”
It was.
Suva looked remarkably good when you directed your gaze away from it. The city was on a peninsula, unraveling in helter-skelter fashion over urban hills, tumbling toward the ocean that encased it on three sides. It became the capital of Fiji in 1882. A few Australian farmers had settled on the peninsula, and when their cotton crops failed, they were able to persuade the English government to move the capital from Levuka, on the island of Ovalau, to Suva, which offered more room for growth. “We have rain,” the Australians told the English. “You’ll love it.” Today, some 350,000 people lived in the city, and from what I could tell, only four of them had garbage cans of their own. The remainder just dropped their trash on the sidewalks and waited for the wind to blow it to the town dump beside the WELCOME TO SUVA sign.
The hotel overlooked Suva Harbor, one of the most appealing deepwater anchorages in the Pacific. A thin white crescent of breakers marked where the reef lay. In the near distance were the remains of several boats that had misjudged the harbor entrance, their hulks slowly whittled away by the unrelenting waves. We could see the dim outlines of Beqa, a mountainous isle whose inhabitants have a peculiar fondness for walking on fire. Directly across was a wall of green mountains and the steep, jagged eminence called Joske’s Thumb, named, naturally, after Mr. Joske’s digit. On the lawn below us, we noticed a mongoose skirting the seawall. Mongooses were everywhere in Suva. They had been imported by the English, who had unleashed the rodentlike creatures to clear the sugarcane fields of rats. They also killed most of the snakes on Viti Levu, which I understand, in principle, was a really bad thing