Getting Stoned with Savages

by J. Maarten Troost

  We were due to leave imminently, and I found a perch from which to watch the event. Two hours later, I was still there, watching the mechanics hammer away at a greasy machine part. The boat hadn’t moved. I should have known, of course. Even after nearly four years in the South Pacific, I still maintained an optimistic faith in schedules. But nothing leaves on time in the South Pacific, and when the Spirit of Fiji finally departed, three hours behind schedule, I realized that this would be a very long day, and suddenly I understood the appeal of flying.

  The ship glided through the break in the reef, near a Chinese fishing boat that had missed the entrance and lay hull up on the reef shelf. Beyond the reef, there was a swell running, and the flat-bottomed ship rolled with each wave. We were traveling at approximately two miles per hour. I could swim faster, I thought. We passed the headlands of Viti Levu and threaded our way through the Lomaiviti archipelago toward Koro Island. In the distance, I could see the hazy contours of Wakaya Island, the destination of choice for movie stars and millionaires. The morning newspaper had informed us that Tom Cruise was presently frolicking on its beaches. I felt a camaraderie with Tom. We both traveled first class.

  We moved over deep water, a wine-dark blue dappled by the sun. Behind us was the cragged eastern shore of Viti Levu. In the distance, the offshore islands reflected an alluring languor. A frigate bird swept low above the waves of the Koro Sea. If there was a more enchanting scene anywhere in the world, I could not imagine it. In gloomy Suva, with its fetid air and belching buses, paradise was a punch line. But here, on the glimmering water, I again understood the allure of Fiji. Paradise was a place that could be seen only from a distance, but it pleased me knowing that we lived so close to it.

  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 myself to simply holding out until dawn, when I came across a sign pointing me toward the Hot Springs Hotel. I followed the road up a hillside, pleased to see that, if all went well, I might soon be able to put an end to this day.

  Suddenly, two dogs bounded out of the trees. Well, fuck, I thought, my heart pounding. Ever since we’d lived in Kiribati, I had become utterly terrified of island dogs. They are either wild animals, left to their own devices to find sustenance, or they have been trained as guard dogs. Neither type amused me. I stopped moving and dropped my backpack, poised to throw my rock. The dogs were about thirty feet away. They too stopped. I stomped my feet. “Skat! Get out of here!” I hissed. Off they ran. Apparently, they had learned to fear people. Thank goodness for that, I thought.

  The hotel lobby was open to the elements. I was pleased to see a light on.

  “Bula,” said the sleepy guard, using the Fijian word for “hello.”

  “Bula,” I said. “Do you have any water bottles here?”

  They did not. A few moments later, I found myself in my hotel room, drinking from a flow of rusty tap water.

  SAVUSAVU. It pleases me just to say the word. Savusavu. For a while, I had considered going to Taveuni, the garden isle of Fiji. There was a boat going there too. I had been to Taveuni before, when we traveled through Fiji on our return home from Kiribati to the U.S., and I had liked it very much. The main town on Taveuni is Somosomo. It was a close call, but Somosomo wasn’t quite as evocative as Savusavu.

  There was another reason for going to Savusavu. Many of the Fijians on Vanua Levu had supported the coup, and I wanted to ask them, you know, what was up with that. It was difficult to get a sense of what had driven the coup in Suva. Fijians and Indians lived separate lives in the capital, but they lived these separate lives together, harmoniously ignoring each other, more or less. The Fijians played rugby, the Indians cricket. The Fijians worked in government. The Indians were the shopkeepers. The Fijians celebrated the queen’s birthday. The Indians lit candles for Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. Even though they had been sharing the islands for more than a hundred years in roughly equal numbers, intermarriage between Fijians and Indians was a striking rarity. In a way, Suva reminded me of Washington, where blacks and whites occupied the same geography, walked the same streets, shopped at the same stores, then went home to lives that had nothing to do with each other. In our Suva neighborhood, in the evenings, the Indians who lived below us gathered around a small set of drums and sang Hindu chants. The Fijians who lived above us settled around the kava bowl. And in the mornings, we all wished each other a good day.

  Sylvia and I often went for early-morning w
alks along the seawall in Suva. It was the only place in town where one could have some confidence of walking without being assaulted by dogs. Some mornings we ran into Sitiveni Rabuka on his morning constitution, bedecked in a shimmering track suit. He had led Fiji for a decade following the first coup, after he overthrew the first predominantly Indian elected government. A little farther on, we often encountered Mahendra Chaudhry, the Indian prime minister of Fiji until George Speight and his followers attacked the parliament. That they could share the same seawall for their morning ambulation, I thought, was rather extraordinary and spoke well of Suva. Indeed, most Fijians in Suva voted for the Labor Party, Chaudhry’s Indian-led party. On the western coast of Viti Levu, the sunny side, and up into the Mamanuca and Yasawa islands, there was little support for the coup among indigenous Fijians. So how could it happen? How could a democratically elected government be overthrown on an island where support for the coup was negligible?

  It was a chiefly dispute, people said in Suva. In Fiji, a chief, or ratu, as we had learned, had considerable power. The vast majority of land in Fiji is Fijian owned, and rents, whether from an international resort or an Indian sugarcane farmer, are collected each month by the Native Lands Trust Commission and sent on to the local chiefs. These are inherited positions, and if there is a more lamentable form of governance than inherited power, I cannot imagine it. In Europe, of course, tax money is still dished out to a few royals. But today, this is really the equivalent of fattening up a duck for the hunt. In return for accepting the largesse of the people, the royals are subjected to hunters—known as paparazzi—who stalk them with zoom lenses, seeking out scintillating photos for the public. A good shot will result in abject humiliation and personal ruination for the royal, which strikes me as a fair bargain. Alas, Fijians still maintain a quaint reverence for all things chiefly, and when a paramount chief has dastardly deeds on his mind, there is little to stop him. It was the nefarious northern chiefs, people alleged, who were responsible for the coup and the subsequent army mutiny.

  In Savusavu, however, I couldn’t quite understand why anyone would bother to trouble himself with something as nettlesome as overthrowing a government. With the morning sun, Savusavu revealed itself to be located in one of the most extraordinarily beautiful settings I had ever encountered in the islands. The town overlooked Savusavu Bay, an alluring expanse of blue water hemmed in by verdant peaks. Directly across was a small islet, and in the safety between it and the main island, a number of yachts were riding out the hurricane season.

  I ambled down toward the dozen or so clapboard buildings that constituted downtown Savusavu, and four minutes later, after I had wandered from one end of the muddy town to the other, I caught a taxi in front of the covered market. For such an extraordinary locale, Savusavu was a modest town.

  “Where will you be going today, sir?”

  Sir? I wasn’t often called sir in Fiji. But then I noticed that I still had my FIRST CLASS stamp on my arm. I considered getting a tattoo to make it permanent.

  I didn’t really have a destination in mind, just a vague desire to see a bit of the island and perhaps have a swim somewhere. I told the driver as much.

  “No problem, sir. I will show you the area around Savusavu, and then I will take you to the beach. You go for a swim, and I will come back for you after one hour. What do you think?”

  This struck me as an excellent plan. The taxi driver’s name was Saresh. He was an Indo-Fijian of a venerable age.

  “I have one son who is a dentist in Canada,” he said as we followed a paved road into the hills behind Savusavu. “Another son who is a welder in Christchurch, and a daughter who takes care of her children in Melbourne. She is married to an accountant. Then I have three more left here. A son who is an accountant in Suva, another who owns a garage here, and a daughter who is still a student. You see? Everybody working. Not like Fijian people.”

  It often struck me how Indians and Fijians viewed each other. Indians saw Fijians as a slothful and indulgent people who never thought of the future. Fijians saw Indians as busy worker bees who needed constant watching, lest they sneak off with Fijian land. In Suva, a multiracial city, such notions were softened through interaction. Elsewhere in Fiji, however, where Fijians and Indians did not live side by side, the prejudice festered.

  “Look,” Saresh said, waving at the thick bush that lined the road. “This is Fijian land. They don’t do anything with it. No farms. Nothing. They lazy, you see. Now this,” he said, gesturing toward a sculpted garden and a sumptuous house with views over Savusavu Bay, “is European land. Very tidy, you see.”

  There were a surprising number of Westerners in Savusavu, I learned, chasing paradise. They had built their bungalows on the ridges above the bay. Some of the homes were on freehold land, that small portion of island land that could be bought and sold. Other homes were on what was called native land, which could only be leased from the Fijian landowners.

  “And see,” Saresh continued, “this is an Indian village. It is freehold land. You see? It is very clean. Everyone takes care of their house. Not like Fijian villages.”

  The village was in a deep gully below the road. It seemed like an awful location for a village, a place where breezes did not reach and mosquitoes festered. But it was freehold land, and that for the Indo-Fijians was what mattered most.

  Saresh dropped me off at a small beach near the Namale Spa & Sanctuary. “It is very dear,” he said as we passed the resort’s entrance. That was Victorian English for “expensive.” I had read that it was owned by Anthony Robbins, the toothy motivational speaker, and that it was frequently booked solid with conventioneers motivated to spend upwards of $2,000 a night. He’s good, that Tony Robbins. My taxi fare, so far, had come to about $4, and as I swam I wondered if I would have enjoyed my swim more if I’d paid an additional $1,996. I’d probably enjoy it less, I thought, particularly as it was by then overcast. Foolishly, I failed to put on sunscreen, and when Saresh picked me up exactly one hour later, it was with some exasperation that I realized I was burned. Thank goodness, I thought, that at least I hadn’t paid $2,000 for the privilege of getting a sunburn on an overcast day.

  I asked Saresh what it had been like on Vanua Levu during the coup.

  “During the coup, it was very bad. They attacked all the Indian houses here. They take the cattle and the goats and the chickens. They take the women. They even took the Air Fiji pilots hostage. It was not so bad in Savusavu, but here,” he said, gesturing toward the hills and the Indian farms, “it was very bad. And in Lambasa, it was also very bad.”

  Lambasa was a town in the north of Vanua Levu. It was largely an Indian town, and since the coup, many of its inhabitants had drifted to Suva looking for work. This had been a region for growing sugarcane, a precarious industry in the best of times. Since the coup, however, many Fijian landowners had declined to renew the leases of Indo-Fijian sugarcane farmers. Expelled from the land their families had farmed for generations, the farmers found themselves in an unenviable situation.

  “For me it is too late,” Saresh said. “I will die in Fiji. But for my children, I tell them to study. They must study, get degrees, and then they can emigrate.”

  Why couldn’t we all just get along? I thought. Perhaps we could just blame the British for Fiji’s predicament. After all, it was they who had brought the Indians—coolies is what they called them—to Fiji. The British had needed Fiji to pay for itself, and rather than disrupt traditional Fijian society, they had decided to import workers from abroad to till the soil. Fijian and Indian cultures are disparate, to say the least. And yet, Fiji had been an independent country for more than thirty years. That these two peoples could not reconcile themselves to each other was a failure of their leaders.

  A SHORT WHILE LATER, I found myself at the Captain’s Café in Savusavu, admiring a framed note hanging on the wall. It was from Brooke Shields, who had apparently enjoyed her meal there. Some of Fiji’s higher-end resorts were on Vanua Levu. Woul
d Brooke Shields stay in a resort? I wondered. No, I figured. She probably visited Savusavu on a yacht. Such were the depths of my thoughts when a Fijian man joined me at my table overlooking the harbor.

  “Bula,” he said. “I am Bill.”

  He wore a formal sulu, the sort typically worn by Fijian men on their way to the Methodist church on Sundays.

  “These are the end days,” he informed me.

  “Ah…,” I said. “Could be, could be.” I didn’t have any information suggesting otherwise, so I thought it best to remain neutral.

  “I was hit on the head,” he said, rubbing the back of his head.

  “I see.”

  “By a truck.”

  “Ah…”

  “I was in the army. But I didn’t receive anything. No money. Nothing.”

  Clearly, Bill was not one for small talk. I wasn’t quite sure what to say to him, and so I spent a moment nodding thoughtfully, a little nonverbal gesture that I hoped conveyed a sense that I too found this world lamentable.

  “So, Bill,” I said. “Savusavu is in the province of Cakaudrove?”

  “Yes, Cakaudrove. Then there is Bua and Taveuni. Taveuni is where the high chief is from.”

  All coup support areas.

  “So you have a chiefly system here,” I said. I found it helpful to feign ignorance, though often enough, it wasn’t much of a feint. The Fijian chiefly system was exasperatingly complex. Even the president of the Great Council of Chiefs, the chief chief, if you will, had recently had to plead his case to a special tribunal of chiefs when he attempted to claim a particular title. A chiefly cousin had also claimed the title. It took months of painstaking research into their respective lineages before the tribunal decided in the chief chief’s favor. This was no small matter, however. An air of latent violence had hung in the air in Fiji as the chiefs sorted through the dispute.