Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [92]
The hours passed. Most of the other passengers had brought their own food and drink. I set off to see what I could find. Not quite thinking ahead, I had brought only a small bottle of water and a banana, which I had long ago finished. I checked the first-class lounge, prepared and even looking forward to waving my forearm about. I hadn’t really expected an afternoon tea service. Indeed, what I had expected to find was the ship’s crew snoring on the benches, which was precisely what I did find. Disappointed that no one had asked to see my stamp, I moved on to the general café. It was shuttered.
Now I was thirsty. I had had enough experience with waterborne intestinal parasites to make me wary of drinking the ship’s water. The last thing I wanted to experience was belly-belly in Savusavu. This wasn’t a Carnival cruise. This was a third-world interisland ferry. There wasn’t a tourist aboard other than myself, and it seemed unlikely that the ship’s water supply was any cleaner than that found flowing through the pipes in Suva. Still, I noticed that every half hour or so, a crewman carried a bucket of water up to the ship’s bridge.
“They are drinking kava,” a fellow passenger noted.
Oceans of it, apparently. As the sun set over the Koro Sea the kava was replenished bucket by bucket. If the crew was using the ship’s water for kava, I figured, it might be drinkable. The captain, I noticed, hadn’t withered away. Indeed, he was the most corpulent man I had ever seen in Fiji. He wore a red T-shirt, splotched with grease and oil, that strained to cover his enormous gut. A little belly-belly would probably do him some good. Nevertheless, though I was feeling parched, I resisted the temptation to drink the ship’s water. I had just emerged from a bout of dengue fever—what fun that was—and was looking forward to a few weeks of health.
Shortly before midnight, we neared Koro Island. This should be interesting, I thought. There was no electricity on Koro. The only light available was offered by the stars. It was an extremely compact harbor, and the ship was very large. The captain and crew had spent the previous seven hours drinking buckets of kava. If it were me at the helm, I have no doubt we would have soon become one with the reef. In any event, the captain gave a few curt orders, and the ship turned around and brought its rump toward the pier in an admirable display of seamanship. They might not look like seamen, I thought. And they might all be stoned on kava. But they knew what they were doing. A few more trucks rumbled aboard, and soon we were cruising again through the darkness.
Two A.M. passed. Most of the passengers were asleep on the benches. Though I was exhausted, I couldn’t sleep. I had tried to retire to my first-class bunk, but with every roll of the boat there followed a discordant creaking of metal grinding on metal. It was the kind of noise that I tend to fixate on, and after a half hour, I was reduced to a state of frothing insensibility. Resigned, I sat on the deck and watched the slow drift of stars moving over the sea. Seventeen hours on a ferry was beginning to feel very much like seventeen hours on a ferry. Indeed, I was beginning to check my watch an awful lot, wishing the time forward: 3:02…3:06…3:09. Finally, at 4 A.M.—there’s that time again—we arrived at Savusavu, and the silence of the night was disturbed by the sound of a dozen trucks turning over their engines, sending forth a foul cloud of exhaust that hovered above us in the still air.
I grabbed my backpack and walked the short distance toward the town. It is often described as sleepy, and it was good and asleep now. I hadn’t made any advance arrangement for a hotel, which now struck me as a regrettable oversight. Savusavu at 4 A.M. was a dim and quiet place where nothing stirred except for a few dogs. I picked up a rock and trudged on. I had almost resigned