The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  Recession, devaluation, the low sugar and copra prices, Indian fears and tourist anxieties had all combined to make Fiji rather empty and pleasant. That was obvious as in the next few days I explored the island east of Singatoka, working my way towards Suva. Business was terrible. In the competitive atmosphere of Fiji it made traveling rather inexpensive. And Fiji was well set up for travelers. The efficient airport was at Nandi, the busy harbor – said to be the best in the Pacific – was in Suva. There was extensive development in between. What I had seen so far of Viti Levu was uninspiring – muddy beaches, messy crops, too many hotels, too many duty-free shops, ugly villages of huts that looked like prefab chicken houses – but I could not complain: the people were friendly and the place was cheap, as well as safe.

  I rattled around the bad roads, looking for a camp site on a pretty beach. The beaches were undramatic – the lagoons too shallow, the reefs too surfy for launching a kayak. And there were settlements everywhere.

  All the land was spoken for. This was fine in theory but it made camping on this Nandi to Suva stretch impossible. And anyway I did not want to camp within hailing distance of the Golden Sands Motel or the Coral Coast Christian Camp. There was either a house or a village or a hotel on every mile of the southern coast, which was both densely populated with locals and also tourist-ridden – Aussies and New Zealanders, mostly, with sunburned noses, seeming somewhat disappointed by the tameness of this part of Fiji and wearing T-shirts that said My Job is So Secret Even I Don’t Know What I’m Doing and It’s Not Beer, Mate, This Is just a Fat Shirt.

  I found a launching place near the town of Nasavu and set up my kayak intending to paddle across the five-mile channel that separated Viti Levu from a largish oyster-shaped island called Beqa (pronounced Benga), where there were said to be firewalkers.

  No sooner had I cleared the reef than I was battered by a strong wind from the east. I found I was expending most of my energy trying to keep myself upright – the wind was hitting me broadside – and so after less than two miles I abandoned the effort, and with great difficulty (because I had been pushed some distance to the west) I paddled back to my beach.

  I was sorry I had missed the firewalkers – and my kayak trip had been an experience of wind and slop. But that night I met a man who said that he had mastered the art of firewalking and that I could do it too. He would teach me how to walk on hot coals.

  We were drinking South Pacific Beer in the grim lounge of one of the tacky hotels on the way to Suva. The man, Norman, was American, originally from California, but he had left home to wander in the Pacific. Like me, he had been in the Peace Corps in the 1960s. We talked about that and then I had mentioned how I had been frustrated in my attempt to reach Beqa to see the firewalkers.. Forget it, he had said – firewalking is simple.

  “What is it, then, mind over matter?”

  “No, no, no” – and in his impatience Norman started to get cross. “It’s simple physics. You just walk across the hot coals. They’re very bad conductors of heat. You don’t need thick foot soles or anything like that. You just walk.”

  “And get charbroiled.”

  “Bull,” Norman said. “You can stand the heat for up to five seconds. Say you’re in a twelve-foot firepit. You just walk down it – you don’t even have to go fast. You could do it – I guarantee you wouldn’t get burned.”

  “Have you ever done it?”

  “Yes. Lots of times.”

  “Hot coals?”

  “Hot coals!” Norman said. “Of course hot coals.”

  “Done it lately?”

  “I did it in” – and he mentioned the name of a village that I could not quite catch. “The guys there almost shat when they saw me.”

  “And you didn’t get burned?”

  Norman stared at me, as though this was the dumbest question imaginable.

  “But charcoal fires are hot,” I said. “You stand next to one and you get burned.”

  “See, that’s the strange thing,” Norman said. “Charcoal fires are much hotter when you’re standing next to them than when you’re walking across them in your bare feet.”

  “How did you get interested in this?”

  “Read an article. ‘The Physics of Firewalking’ – something like that.” He put his face close to mine. “Anyone can do it,” he said, and hissed, “You can do it.”

  “Walk on glowing coals in my bare feet?”

  “Oh, God, what did I just tell you.”

  I did not do it, but his certainty made me want to try.

  “Suva reminds me of an aunt of mine who drank too much,” a Canadian woman, resident in Fiji, said to me. “She was delightful. But she was prone to stumble. Her clothes were a little askew, and there was always a strap of her slip showing.”

  Yet seedy, friendly Suva, with wet green mountains behind it, and sloping on twisting lanes of cheek-to-cheek shops down to the sea, was probably the most habitable and busiest harbor city I saw in the South Pacific (Honolulu is in the North Pacific). A settled place, with a look of comfortable monotony, Suva was a city to live in, not to visit. And it was not for tourists – tourists seldom visited anyway, because it rained so often there, and it was more than a three-hour drive across the island from Nandi, and it had no beaches or hotels to speak of. The nearest resort, Pacific Harbor, was thirty miles away. In any case, tourists tended to avoid Suva. The Fiji experience for tourists was a week or so in a resort in the drier part of the island near Nandi where they stayed behind the hedges, sipping drinks, playing tennis, and if they penetrated Melanesia at all it was in small-talk with dusky, smiling room attendants and waiters.

  “I like Fiji, because this is one of the few places in the world I’ve been where the blacks didn’t hate me,” a woman from Los Angeles told me in a Nandi resort hotel – and it seemed to me one of the silliest summaries of Fiji I had heard.

  Suva was an Indian city, not only in its population but in its layout as well – it had compounds, and tenements, and back-alleys, and the hectic atmosphere of a bazaar. There were many benefits of Suva, because it was a city of shopkeepers and rooted families where everyone was local and as urbane as it was possible to be in Oceania. Tourists become lonely and uncomfortable in such places, seeing residents so preoccupied with their own lives – work, school, bills, friends. It was the sort of place where you could buy a screwdriver or a teapot or a roll of duct tape, but you’d never find clothes or a pair of shoes you liked. Suva people themselves ate in the restaurants, which were inexpensive and served good plain food. This was a wonderful change from the mock-coconut-isle Fijian hotels that made inedible attempts at nouvelle cuisine such as Carpaccio of Slack-Jawed Sea Bass (thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents) and Goujons of Owlet’s Thighs Presented on a Bed of Warm Lettuce (forty-five dollars, subject to availability).

  The city had grown up around the harbour of its large bay, and it had prospered through its shipping when Nandi was just a village. Even now Nandi was no more than a scruffy small town – one main street and a market. Suva’s market was vast and noisy, teeming with activity, full of vegetables, fish and fruit – and shells. “I can give you a good deal on some shells,” an Indian said to me with a desperate wink. The shell and curio business was terrible, but it was interesting to see how Indians, who never drank kava, had more or less cornered the kava market. They did a brisk trade in yanggona, selling dusty roots or bags of high-quality powdered root to Fijian men who did little else but squat around a bowl and guzzle it. I bought four pounds of the stuff – roots and powder – because I was told that it would come in handy if I wished to ingratiate myself in a Fijian village. I give you yanggona, you let me camp here.

  As in Nandi, nearly all the shops in Suva were Indian, displaying panicky-looking hand-painted signs saying Close-Out Sale! and Prices Slashed! – and though the city had the look and feel of a provincial town in India, looking closer anyone could see that it was a polyglot place. It was a mishmash of Muslims and Hindus, representing most of the
larger provinces in the subcontinent. There was a Chinese community in Suva, too, and Australian franchises, and a residue of British commerce.

  The sidewalks were crowded with shoppers and strollers – Indians mostly, with a scattering of Fijians. The merchandise in the stores looked rather old and shop-worn, and even the duty-free goods for which Fiji was famous looked a bit old-hat, overrated, old-fashioned. Why order a shipload of new models if you were about to lose your lease and Doomsday was just around the corner? There was such a variety of prices that I didn’t buy anything except a map of Ovelau, an offshore island where I hoped to paddle. I went back and forth to Natovi Landing to launch my boat, but I was always facing the teeth of the wind that blew from the east. I decided to suspend paddling for now, and to pursue it when I got to the lee of this island, or to the larger island to the north, Vanua Levu.

  In the steamy, humid interludes between the bouts of cold drizzle, Suva looked miserable and friendly. I liked the vegetarian restaurants – where else in carnivorous Oceania would I find others? It could be pleasantly informative to eat in the Hare Krishna vegetarian restaurant on Pratt Street and, over a healthy meal, listen to Indians complaining about the Fijians. I said nothing; I felt they needed each other.

  If Fiji had been an Indian island it would have been charmless and frenzied, a hotbed of litigious warring sects, at each other’s throats. As a homogenous Fijian island it would have been something like the sleepy Solomons, hospitable but hardly functional. As a multiracial place (Indians in towns, Fijians in villages) it seemed to work. What surprised me was that the Indians wanted to live there at all, since they had no political future, were frankly hated, were forced to pay lip service to a military government, and had to make do with minimal profits.

  “Situation is stagnant,” an Indian named Kishore told me in a gloomy voice, and then attempted to bamboozle me into buying an over-priced wristwatch.

  Perhaps the hustle-bustle of the packed streets in muddy claustrophobic Suva explained it. This was obviously an easy place for an Indian to live because it was predominantly Indian, a bunched-together place that had a life of its own. It was unlike any other town in Fiji, or the Pacific for that matter. You could imagine someone arriving and seeing all the people and the built-to-last buildings and the busy quays at the harbor and thinking: There’s money to be made here.

  Fijians were in the minority in Suva, and the few that loitered in town shopping or eating kept to themselves. They tended to prefer porky Chinese food over Indian curries. Apart from the market stalls, there were no Fijian restaurants. In my days in Suva – waiting in vain for the weather to break: but it did nothing but drizzle and blow – I noticed that when Fijians dined out they gorged themselves on fatty meat and gravy, with taro or rice. As with other former cannibal islanders – “reformed cannibals” was the missionary phrase – they loved Spam and corned beef.

  Their carnivorous appetite alone could have been the reason they were so much out of key with the Indians. It was hard to see what Fijians and Indians had in common, culturally, and though there were moderates in Fiji from every racial group (a moderate coalition had won the election), the loudest people in Fiji were those who exploited the conflict and eagerly exaggerated their differences – the Indians boasting of their ancient culture and complex family structure and their skill at arithmetic, the Fijians smilingly reminding them that they were here first, on this tight little archipelago of cannibals and Christians.

  Having just come from wild but coherent islands which had resisted the pressure of colonials and aliens, and where race was not an issue, this Fiji strife was a tiresome novelty. It also tested the patience of all right-thinking New Zealanders who smugly condemned apartheid and championed human rights in South Africa, but hadn’t the slightest idea of how to react to this racial conundrum. After a hundred years, the Indians in Fiji – fully half the population – had found themselves a politically oppressed and soon-to-be-disenfranchised people. Yet they were prosperous!

  Go home, the Fijians said to Indians who knew no other home but Suva.

  Other foreigners in Fiji avoided the pickle that Indians had found themselves in by buying islands outright. After they became wealthy, the Banaban people of Ocean Island (little more than a three-mile-wide lump of coral and phosphate in the Gilbert and Ellice group) came to Fiji and bought the island of Rambi, off eastern Vanua Levu, because mining had made their own island uninhabitable. A number of other islands in Fiji are also privately owned. On a whim, Malcolm Forbes bought Lauthala island off Taveuni, and at least six whole islands in the northern Lau group were bought by aliens – one by a Japanese hotel company, another by an Australian export firm, one by an American messiah named Jones, who after colonizing the island with his acolytes began calling himself Baba Da Free John. A number of other islands are owned by obscure millionaires – there are 300 islands and atolls in the Fiji group. Paddling off the north shore of Viti Levu I often landed on a small pretty island only to see a sign saying Private Island – No Trespassing. Private islands in Fiji change hands for a million and a half and up.

  Here are some Fiji island offerings – “Entire Islands Freehold/Fee Simple” – from a current (1991) real estate brochure called South Pacific Opportunities:

  Tivi Island – NE of Labasa, Vanua Levu: 204 acres, white sand beaches. US $1,500,000

  Adavaci Island: 104 acres, superb beach and anchorage, perfect for small exclusive resort or private estate. US $1,500,000

  Savasi Island: 52-acre plantation, 2 nice residences and related, lovely residential estate or major resort. US $2,000,000

  Kanacea Island – Near Vanua Balavu: Operating copra plantation, over 3000 acres, suitable for major resort. US $4,500,000

  I heard there was a private island, called Mana, in the Mamanuca group – owned by Japanese, so I was told – where if I played my cards right I could visit. “Playing my cards right” simply meant paying a large sum of money to an excitable Fijian who owned a small speed-boat. I would not have dreamed of paddling across those eighteen treacherous miles in a high wind and six-foot waves, though Mike the Fijian was not fazed in his boat, even when we were on the point of being swamped.

  Smacking his boat into the steep faces of waves, he denied that the sea was rough. “What’s rough then?”

  “Waves more than two meters!” he shouted. “This is a bit less!”

  We wallowed in the troughs of waves and then banged forward with such force that fixtures fell off the boat – the binnacle compass hit the deck, and then its bracket, and then the lugbolts from a bench. For an hour and a half, Mike fought the breaking waves, skirted the reefs and shoals, and plowed into the headwind. We arrived at Mana Island soaked to the skin.

  I had expected to find a Nipponese outpost, full of little Japanese vacationers in floppy hats snapping pictures of each other. All I saw were sunburned Australians sleeping off their lunch on the beach and playing with their scorched-looking children.

  “You should have come this morning,” Geoffrey, the general manager, said. “We were full of Japanese. We’ll get another batch tomorrow.”

  There was a weekly plane, he said, Tokyo to Nandi, and then the people were shipped out to the island, where they were dispersed among a hundred little tidy bungalows. There were three or four beaches, some restaurants – one was Japanese – and various sports facilities. Many of the Japanese were honeymoon couples. New Japanese brides, horrified by what marriage entailed, regularly flung them-selves out of the windows of Honolulu hotels, but Geoffrey said his honeymooners were no problem and anyway could not harm themselves by jumping out of the windows of his bungalows.

  “Is there a language barrier?”

  “Not really. I encourage my Fijian staff to learn Japanese,” he said. He sent a dozen or so of his workers every few months on a Japanese language course. And in the staffrooms at Mana, as in the equipment sheds and dive – shops of resorts elsewhere in Fiji, there were blackboards, chalked with Japanese phrases an
d their English (but not Fijian) equivalent: Konnichiwa – hello. Arrigato – thank you. And so forth.

  The Mana Resort was owned by a Japanese company, Nichiman, which had negotiated a ninety-nine-year lease from the island’s owners, the Fijians who lived in Aro village at the eastern end of the island. The Fijian village was ramshackle but no worse than any other slap-happy Fijian village of flat-roofed prefab huts. One proviso in the lease was that first preference for jobs had to be given to the villagers living in Aro.

  There were no gardens on Mana Island, there was no fresh water, no fishing. The Fijians in the village lived off the money they got from the Japanese tenants. They did a little fishing, but only for their own amusement.

  “Do you collect rainwater from roofs?”

  “No. We barge it in,” Geoffrey said.

  Twice a week a water barge made the forty-mile round-trip from Lautoka, the western harbor of Viti Levu, and the water was stored in big ugly tanks.

  Solar power was not used. They had, instead, a generator that ran on diesel fuel. That too was barged in from Lautoka. In fact, everything was barged in – food, water, fuel, guests, equipment and the majority of the workers, because most of the people in Aro were unwilling to work at the resort.

  It was a strange artificial way of inhabiting the island – totally dependent on barges, boats and the occasional sea-plane. Nothing at all was generated locally, and even the coconut trees were seen as something of a liability.

  “One of our guests was hit by a falling coconut,” Geoffrey said. “He was hurt really bad. We flew him to Nandi for X-rays. Thank goodness, he was all right in the end. Those coconuts can be lethal.”

  One day in Fiji a man I knew vaguely said, “Want to meet the Governor-General?”

  He meant of New Zealand, but I said yes anyway. The nights could be long and very quiet in Fiji.