Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [83]
“Is everyone all right?” I yelled. Two men were busy with shovels, digging the house out from under the debris.
“Everyone okay,” one of them called back.
I seized a shovel and scrambled down the hillside, following the edge of the colossal pit the landslide had created. Looking up, our house seemed to be teetering on the edge of the abyss. The mud slide had sheared off the hill to within a few feet of the house’s foundations.
“You must build a retaining wall,” said Vijay, a laborer who lived in the mud-encrusted house. A few weeks earlier, five people had died in a mud slide on Rabi, the small Fijian island that the British had given to the I-Kiribati expelled from Banaba Island, which had long ago been rendered uninhabitable by phosphate mining. As we had learned in Vanuatu, mud slides were an ever-present threat on the hilly islands of the South Pacific.
I began helping the family clear the debris, feeling awful about the situation. Here we were, guests in their country, and look at the mess we had made. Thank goodness, I reflected, that no one had been injured. Fortunately, our landlord agreed to build a retaining wall. Unfortunately, the retaining wall was built on island time, and during the subsequent weeks and months, as the workers followed a schedule known only to themselves, we’d find ourselves huddling in the back of the house whenever it rained, fearful that our weight alone would prove to be the tipping point that sent the house hurtling down the hill. Here, we thought, was one more very good reason to get out of Suva, and whenever we could, we hopped into our clunky secondhand car and set a course for the sun.
It was a bewilderingly odd juxtaposition of worlds. One moment we were at home, fearful of the house toppling off the hill, half-expecting to hear an exchange of gunfire as the trial of George Speight got under way, and the next moment we’d find ourselves on the west side of Viti Levu, that other world of beaches and deluxe resorts, contemplating which of the glimmering offshore islands we fancied going to for a swim. These were the Mamanucas, a group of small coral islands fringed with white-sand beaches. They look exactly as one expects islands in the South Pacific to look, possibly because the Mamanucas and, a little farther out, the Yasawas, are the preferred locations for films set on tropical islands—movies like Castaway and Blue Lagoon. Once the tourists began to return to Fiji, the Mamanucas were back in business.
The names of the individual islands alone suggested that this, very possibly, was not exactly the real Fiji. There’s Castaway Island, Beachcomber Island, Bounty Island, South Sea Island, and Treasure Island, among others. That’s all right, we thought. We lived in the real Fiji, and now and then, we wanted off. We decided one day to go to Beachcomber Island, which we soon discovered was an excellent place to go to if you’re in your thirties and, just for the fun of it, you want to spend a few hours feeling really old. From our hotel on the main island, we hopped onto a sputtering bus and proceeded to spend the next hour and a half stopping at a dozen hotels to pick up every shirtless backpacker in the greater Nadi area. Beachcomber Island, apparently, was a mecca for backpackers living out a fantasy of young adulthood, a fantasy I had deeply envied when I was fifteen.
As we approached the island by high-speed catamaran, the smell of diesel gave way to the odor of sunscreen radiating off a hundred bodies draped in the sun. From a distance, the island looked like a wildlife sanctuary for pink seals. What else would be flopping about under the midday sun? Like most Pacific Islanders, we had come to regard sunbathing as one of those peculiar things that foreigners do. As we stepped ashore it became clear that many of the figures lying prone on the beach were sleeping off the excesses of the previous night. Beachcomber Island