Reece's Place 3

               “It is easy enough to define what the Commonwealth is not. Indeed this  
                 is quite a popular pastime.”
                                                                                               Elizabeth II


Each bay, its own wind. Robyn and I were back out at Nausori airport in the early afternoon next day. We had eaten lunch at Poon’s ‘Fully licensed wine and dine,’ and had acquired the same taxi driver that had brought us the nine kilometers, a day earlier. We checked in at the Sunflower Airlines Airline with a Heart desk, and were directed out onto the tarmac in the blazing sun, to wait for our pilot, beside the eight-seater matchbox toy Britten-Norman Islander. I asked the frizzy Fijian lady behind the counter if the flight was full.
“Only you two and the pilot.” She had said. As the sun began a descent past our 2:30 Flight 2S44 departure time, I wondered if there was only going to be the two of us when, loping out of the hanger, came a skinny white guy, tucking in his white shirt, and swearing a blue streak.
“G’day.” He said, unapologetically. “Bloody baboons. They could have bloody told me. Where are youse two from?”
“I’m from Canada.” I said. “And my wife is from New Zealand.”
“Yeah, well I’m from Australia.” He said. Not that there was much doubt.
“I guess we’re just one big happy Commonwealth family.” I said, trying to soften the edges.
“Don’t give me that shit, mate.” He said. “I’ve got no time for that bitch.” The Airline with a Heart. He went on to tell us that he was a ‘solid republican.’ I was hoping he was as solid a pilot.
“Hop in.” He said, like we were going for a spin. He pointed to Robyn. “You can sit up front with me.” He took off like a republican. I leaned over and asked him how he ended up flying for a small airline in Fiji.
“A man’s gotta eat.” He said, veering off to the right. A few minutes later, Robyn let out a giggle.
“Hey, hon.” She said. “I’m flying the plane.” I looked over the seat again, to find her clutching her wheel, and the Aussie looking out the window.
“Give it back.” I said. “Please.” It wasn’t but a few minutes later that the forested wasp-shaped form of Kandavu hove into view, and the pilot made his descent. I guess that’s what you could have called it, except for the fact that it was more like an abrupt nosedive, ten thousand feet straight down. He pulled out at the very last minute, hitting the muddy ground like he was landing an Aussie Rules football.
Out of the Britten-Norman, I put on my straw hat, and lit up my pipe. I looked up to find a tall striking older Fijian man, with a straw hat and a pipe.
“Humphrey.” He said. “Humphrey Bogart Reece. But you can call me Reece.” His handshake finished with the sweep of a large index finger.
“My boat is down that hill.” He said, pointing beyond the far end of the landing strip. “It will take us to Galoa Island later, but first we need to go to the village. Did you bring the yaqona?” I pulled the paper bag full of roots out of our daypack. He opened it and took a deep breath.
“Powerful.” He said. We got it right.
Past the volleyball net and the top-hinged shuttered open windows of the whitewashed school building, Reece and Robyn and I walked for several minutes out of Vunisea, to a small building, and a warm welcoming sevusevu ceremony from some mataqali village elders in sulus. We joined the large circle, already seated on woven rectangular pandanus mats, layered on the floor. They inquired after our health, and where we were from. We told them.
“Commonweath.” Murmered around the circle. God save the Queen.
With a nod from Reece, Robyn pulled the bag of roots out of the daypack, to expressions and mutterings of obvious admiration. Reece place the bundle in front of oldest one with the thickest glasses. He clapped his hands three times.
“Chief.” Reece whispered.
“Vinaka.” Said the deputy seated next to him. Thank you. And the Chief made a speech in Fijian, there was chanting, and then the herald clapped three more times when the monologue was finished.
“Tell them the purpose of your visit.” I had this one covered. Under no circumstances were we to consider this a material exchange. We had come to pay our respect to the village and its traditions. We were bringing, not taking. There was a slight vertical nodding of heads, definitely not side to side. The conversation shifted for good into Fijian and, except for the odd recognition of our names, Robyn and I were lost in the honorifics.
“You are now members of the village.” Said Reece. We sat a little taller on our mats.
A large old dark wooden tanoa appeared, without the salad greens. Its attached magimagi coconut fiber cord, adorned with cowrie shells, was extended out towards us.
“Grog bowl.” Said Reece. Three men closed in behind him, one to mix the yaqona, and two to serve. An ancient polished sperm whale tooth tabua was placed on the mat in front of him.
“Qai vakarau lose Saka Na Yaqona vaka Turaga.” Said the mixer. I will mix the Yaqona for the Chief with respect.
Upright and cross-legged, he pounded the kava quickly in a large stone with a small log, blended it with cold rainwater, and strained it through hibiscus fibers. In the old days, the yanqona roots would have been chewed by young girls and spat into the tanoa, for better extraction of its active ingredients, but the missionaries, who had brought the Fijians Mother Hubbards and the word of God, took away their saliva and their joy, in exchange.
The mixer filled a coconut shell bilo with the murky liquid, lifted it high, and poured it back into the tanoa, so the Chief’s herald could see its opacity.
“Wai.” He said. Too strong. More rainwater was added. Another stream careened through the air. I could sense the saliva, coming into mouths around me.
“Wai donu.” Said the herald. Just right. And the mixer circled the tanoa with his arms.
“Qai darama saka tu na Yaqona Vakaturaga.” He said. The chiefs yaqona is ready to drink with respect. He clapped his hands three times, and carefully took the Chief’s own full bilo to him. Cupping his hands, and clapping deep and dignified, the Chief took his first drink, as everyone clapped in slow cadence.
“Maca.” Said the herald, after the Chief had finished with a single flourish. Empty. Everyone clapped three times. Then it was the herald’s turn.
“Maca.” He said, again. Everyone in the circle clapped twice. The herald touched either side of the tanoa.
“Taki vakavo Na Yaqona vaka Turaga.” Now all may drink of the chiefs Yaqona. And he clapped twice.
Everyone else would drink from the same coconut cup as the herald had used. The bilo came around the circle clockwise, with much clapping and ceremony. It got to Robyn, and left with a grimace. By the time it got to me, it had left a trail of stories being told in Fijian. I looked down into the bowl. It looked and smelled like muddy water but, draining it in one long swallow, it tasted like muddy water, with a little pungent peppery wintergreen sawdust thrown in. I clapped three times, and then the novocaine hit. My lips and tongue were frozen for the next ten minutes. It was passed to the single toothed smile to my left.
“Fiji Bitter. “ He said. As a physician, I had read about this stuff. Sun-dried kava root is about fifteen per cent active kavalactones, water-insoluble compounds destroyed by heat, and producing a mild cheerful sedation, relaxed muscles, analgesia, talkativeness, and vivid dreams, through GABA neurotransmitters which increase dopamine and noradrenalin in the brain. The mechanistic theories always sound more scientific than they really are. What kava is definitely associated with, is liver damage, puffy faces, scaly yellow skin rashes, addiction, and lazy days. But in a culture where the principle preoccupation used to be cannibalism, kava was an excellent way to relieve short-term anxiety, and a peace pipe between quarrelling groups. Given a choice of conflict resolution methodologies between the collective effervescence of firewalking, or kava, kava wins, hands down.
The hands were down to indicate that the tanoa was empty, and another bowl of grog was mixed, and made the rounds. After it passed me the second time, I realized that my legs didn’t work. This was a potential life-threatening situation, as I was aware of the fact that kava ceremonies could continue on late into the next day. Earlier, I had received another warning from Reece.
“You may be asked to say a few words.” He had said. “We call it talanoa, shooting the breeze.” The breeze was about to become a gunshot fatality. I noticed the Chief waving his arm towards me.
“He wants to know about your travels.” Reece said. And I couldn’t move my legs, and my mouth wouldn’t work either. “But I told him we must go to our boat, before it gets too dark.” I managed to exhale, and told Humphrey Bogart Reece what his namesake had said. The problem with the world is that everybody is a few drinks behind.
Robyn and I thanked our hosts, swayed on our legs in gratitude, and followed Reece back through the village, and down to the long handmade hardwood skiff on the mud beach at the bottom of the hill. It was painted white and yellow, with red gunnels, and took but a single heave from our Fijian host, to launch us into Namalata Bay. The last of the daylight was almost gone, but we could see the northern tip of Galoa Island from our departure point, and it took but a few minutes to make the high-tide crossing. A hurricane lamp, suspended in the darkness on the other shore, nodded up and down, like the heads on our village hosts. Hovering just above it was Mona, Reece’s wife, a delightful charming Bacall for our Bogart. She welcomed us with happy Fijian enthusiasm, and brought us directly into the low ceiling of her kitchen, where we had the first of many home-cooked dinners of fried fish and casseroles, yams and potatoes, and pasta, rice and taro.
Reece’s Place was basic. There was no hot water, no telephone, no cold beer, no obvious maintenance, and electricity from a generator too expensive to run, except for the hour Mona needed it to prepare dinner each evening. Flat-wicked kerosene lamps provided light, and ambience. Our thatch bure, in a coconut grove under a large laden breadfruit tree, was decorated around its base with a continuous line of giant porcelain clam shells. The absence of mongooses on Galoa had ensured a ready supply of skinks inside our room, and a continually changing panoply of large moving head-height spider webs outside the square apertures that passed for windows. It was wonderful.

Reece's Place 2

Robyn and I continued along the street towards the main market. Many Indian shops looked old and shabby, with prominently displayed ‘close-out’ signs, for the purpose of emigration rather than expansion. We stopped in at the Sunflower Airlines office, to book our flight to Kandavu for the next morning. The Airline with a Heart. The market was in Technicolor, with yellow bananas and lemons and breadfruit and jackfruit, mauve eggplant and big pink yams, red chilies, green mangos and watermelon and cabbages, ash-grey manioc, tall tied pink and green taro, and bright orange pineapples. Large Fijian women with frizzled black hair, in their garish Mother Hubbard dresses, sat on plastic tarps around the outside of the stalls. There was the smell of flowers and fish and dust and frying oil. We walked under a sign, reassured. Poisonous fish prohibited for sale. The stringy earth color we were seeking, was sold only by Indians, for consumption only by Fijians. We needed it for our arrival in Kandavu. In one of the most interior stalls, we found trays of the long curled roots of Piper methysticum, the ‘intoxicating pepper’ of the Southern Sea.

“You are wanting Yaqona?” asked the stall proprietor, pointing to his collection of kava. “Very powerful.” We had been told to buy powerful, so this was the guy. He told us the price. I flinched.

“Gratitude is expensive.” He said, not appearing like he had much to be thankful for himself. The cost of four year-old roots had apparently doubled in the previous three years. I paid him.

Down the southern road was the blue and pink and lime pastel Sri Siva Subramaniya temple, aspiring to emulate the Dravidian skyscrapers of Southern India. But the concrete contract had obviously gone to the lowest bidder, and the tropical mildew was making inroads, like it had with Paul Theroux’s namba, in the same Fijian humidity. The situation is dormant.

Back at the market, we boarded a bus to Lautoka, for the evening firewalking. Just north of Nadi, we passed Raymond Burr’s Garden of the Sleeping Giant, four thousand acres that he and his paramour, Robert Benevides, bought in 1965, to house his orchid collection from Sea God Nurseries. I remembered his emergence from the closet, and the scandal created at the time for a Canadian actor, playing the role of a brilliant legal mind with impeccable integrity, to have so deceived his fan base. When you pick someone to lie to Mrs. Granger, never choose your doctor or lawyer. In both cases they can be fatal...In any country but this, they would have let him in.

We made the 24 kilometers to Sugar City in record Indian bus driver time. Lautoka had the largest crushing mill in the Southern hemisphere, but the sugar produced, like its girmitya producers, was brown, not white. Bligh had charted the coast while making his epic lifeboat voyage to Timor after the mutiny, in 1789. Not much had changed, except for the Japanese honeymooners that had also arrived for the firewalking ceremony. Robyn and I recognized the Australian salad bowl seekers from Jack’s. The social anthropologists who pretended to understand the purpose of these types of activities define a notion of collective effervescence, in which a common arousal results in a feeling of togetherness and assimilation. They quote data that purportedly demonstrates the synchronization of heart rates of the firewalkers and nonperforming spectators. This is presumed to be the physiological basis for an alignment of an aroused emotional state, which strengthens group dynamics and forges a common identity. I looked around at the social dynamics between the Indian owners, the Fijian dancers, and the tourists, and rather than finding any evidence of collective effervescence, I saw a bunch of tourists that seemed anxious to see some feet burnt. The dancers were Sawaus from the island of Beqa, and would be walking on stones that were white hot, from the bonfire that had been lit hours earlier. In the old days, the participants had to abstain from women and coconuts for two weeks before the ceremony, or the gods that had given them the gift to walk unharmed on these stones, would withdraw their protection. The guy with the girl on his arm, slurping his green coconut water through a straw, seemed blithely unaware of the injunction. Just after sunset, he defiantly pounded his way across the rocks, and emerged unscathed. I knew this was a phenomenon of simple thermodynamics. The ‘mind over matter’ was ‘matter over matter,’ quickly. The amount of time the foot is in contact with the ground was not enough to induce a burn, and the stones were not good conductors of heat. The square root of the product of thermal conductivity, density, and specific heat capacity is called thermal effusivity, and explains how much heat energy the body absorbs or releases in a certain amount of time per unit area, when its surface is at a certain temperature. It was the Leidenfrost effect from the insulating vapor barrier under the dancer’s wet feet that protected him, not his deal with the gods.

But you have to keep moving, or the thermal conductivity will catch up with you. The twenty managers of the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets in Australia, who confidently jumped into the firewalking team-building exercise three years after they were buying salad bowls in Fiji, were treated somewhat differently, for severe burns.

The collective effervescence also didn’t bubble up the fact that Iron Age Indians had been firewalking on coals since 1200 BC, when the current Fijians were still living an aboriginal existence on Taiwan. We all left the party after the situation was dormant, burning with togetherness and assimilation.

Reece's Place 1

                                   Reece’s Place

                                                         Fiji

   “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet...”

                                          Rudyard Kipling, The Ballad of East and West

The big Fijian island of Viti Levu is divided by more than its central mountain range, and West is East, and East is South. Robyn and I found out about the West is East part, during a two-week Fiji diversion, on our way to begin a new life in New Zealand. We landed at Nadi’s airport at the same time we would always land at Nadi’s airport- in the heaviest frangipani-laden tropical torpor of a Southern Sea predawn. We carried our packs and lethargy onto the tarmac, and into the dimly-lit incandescence of the shabby open terminal. We were greeted by massive moths on mustard walls, and massive black men, with massive black brillo hair. A deep resonant noise came out of the blue shirt and white triangle-hemmed sulu skirt, who took our passports.

“Bula.” He said, stamping them with such force that the imprint, but for the fixed date, might have been good for a few more arrivals. Colorful posters were tacked on the walls, warning of AIDS and elephantiasis. Outside, the insect swarms around the streetlights grew smaller with the increasing crimson of the horizon, and the flame trees that burst into the day, along the curb. Robyn and I had landed on the Cannibal Isles. All we needed now, were cannibals. Instead, a thin dark moustache pulled his car alongside, and rolled down his window, like he was using his last ounce of energy. A flock of mynas, black heads on chocolate brown bodies, squawked and foraged around us.

“Nadi town?” Asked the Indian taxi driver. West is East. We negotiated a price that converged on correct, when his head bobbled, and piled in the back. He drove out of the airport slowly.

“First time to Fiji?” He said. But he didn’t really care.

I was reminded of what James Mitchener had written. It is almost impossible to like the Indians of Fiji. They are suspicious, vengeful, whining, unassimilated, provocative aliens in a land where they have lived for more than seventy years. They hate everything: black natives, white Englishmen, brown Polynesians and friendly Americans. They will not marry with Fijians, who they despise. They avoid English ways, which they abhor. They cannot be depended on to support necessary government policies. Above all, they are surly and unpleasant. It is possible for a traveler to spend a week in Fiji without ever seeing an Indian smile. I wasn’t convinced that any of this was true and, if it was, I had some understanding of why.

The tragedy of Fiji’s Indians began in 1879, with the arrival of the Leonidas, a Mayflower of misery, bringing 463 indentured workers from Calcutta to the sugarcane plantations beyond the port of Levuka. It was the predecessor of other labor transport ships that would land another sixty thousand over the next 37 years. Indentured Hindus and Moslems from Madras and Calcutta were herded down into the lower decks of these coolie ships. The women were often victims of sexual predation by the European crew. Condemned to eat, sleep, and sit amid their own waste, many did not survive the long brutal ‘middle passage.’ Their dead bodies were unceremoniously thrown overboard. Every one of them had signed agreements, which they knew as ‘girmits,’ requiring them to live in the squalid shacks and work in the cane fields for five years, before their bond would be repaid, until the planter paid their passage home. It seldom happened. Their descendents were called ‘girmityas,’ like the one driving our taxi.

“The Polynesians brought black rats, and the British planters brought us, and the mongoose to kill the rats in the cane fields.” He said. “But the mongoose is awake during the day, and the rats are awake during nighttime. They never meet.”

Just like the Indians and the Fijians. I asked how everyone was getting along.

“The situation is dormant.” He said, like he was describing a volcano. The Prime Minister at the time was Major-General Sitiveni Ligamamada Rabuka, OBE, MSD, OStJ, otherwise know as Colonel Steve Rambo. Rambo had previously staged two military coups the year before we arrived, and was on record as wanting to ‘send the Indians home,’ even the ones that had been born in Fiji. The Indians considered the Fijians ‘jungalis,’ poor backward hillbillies occupying the southern coasts and mountains, and the capital of Suva. East is South. Mitchener liked the Fijians as much as he disliked the Indians. It is doubtful if anyone but an Indian can dislike Fijians. They are immense Negros modified by Polynesian blood. They wear their hair frizzled straight out from the head...They are one of the happiest peoples on earth and laugh constantly.

In some peculiar Disney fashion, the unintended admixture of Fijians and Indians worked for us, tempering happy, sleepy and dopey Melanesian dysfunction, with an Indian dose of bashful, grumpy and stealthy Indian efficiency.

Our taxi turned off onto a dusty side road lined with multicolored Bougainvillea, yellow orchids, red hibiscus, bananas, palms and papayas, and pulled up in front of a white trellised façade. There was a hand painted sign above the entrance. Sunseekers.

“It is the most economical hostel in town.” Said our driver. We paid him, and entered to a hospitable reception, scoring the only double room in a ramshackle rabbit warren of dorm beds. I locked the door with our own padlock, and Robyn and I headed back down the lane, across the Nadi River Bridge, and down the single market street of double-storied pastel houses, demarcated by external air conditioners, like rows of double-six dominoes. The shops sold clothing and jewelry and too many duty-free tchotchkes and trinkets, heavy on the trinkets. The largest emporium of artifacts and handicrafts and souvenirs was Jack’s of Fiji. Robyn and I entered the air-con, to look at jack shit. Inside were brash Australians, sizing up the Kava tanoas for salad bowels, and the hardwood cannibal weaponry for serving implements. I picked up an iculanibokola replica, the multipronged fork that had been used by attendants, for feeding chiefs considered too holy to touch their own food. I seemed to have touched off a homing signal, and was immediately surrounded by several Indian floor staff.

“Fork.” Said the tall one who had closed the gap the fastest. “For eating.”

“For eating people.” I said. Head bobbles all round.

“You are needing one perhaps?” Another asked.

“Perhaps.” I said, picking my teeth with a fingernail, and watching them all back away.

Aground in the Abode of Love 8

                    “You can throw your luggage down
                     Lose your cool and stomp around
                     But there's nothin', nothin' you can do
                     Wipe away your girlfriend's tears
                     Go to the bar and have some beers
                     There ain't no way that bird's gettin' through”
                                          Jimmy Buffett, No Plane on Sunday


They sent a dump truck. We certainly hadn’t expected that. Robyn and I were back out at Fua’amotu International airport, on a day when the King had parked his bicycle. We were scheduled to leave Tongatapu, back to Fiji, on to Canada, into the blue again after the money’s gone. It was time for us to ‘get on with it,’ get on with the rest of our lives. But time, as it turned out, was holding us, and holding us back, after all.
No one saw it coming. From where we were, at the ticket counter, more importantly, nothing was leaving. Air Pacific, Fiji’s national airline, had just experienced a wildcat pilot’s strike, and we were aground in the Abode of Love.
The fat Flying Dutchman ahead of us in the queue hadn’t started there. He had pushed his way there, because of his obviously greater importance, relative to ours. He was an important businessman, he said, waving his obviously important arms around the solid head cube of muscle, on the other side of the desk. He needed to get out of Tonga, and he needed to get out today, and what was the solid head cube of muscle going to do about it. The solid head cube of muscle smiled. The fat Flying Dutchman wasn’t flying today. In fact, it wasn’t clear when any of us would fly. The strike could last several weeks. And the only place any of us were going, was the International Dateline. Not the dateline itself, the International Dateline Hotel. The fat Flying Dutchman was angry that he had just come from there. Robyn and I were delighted, that our trip had just been bumped into business class. It still might all be worth the price of the flight cancellation.
And that’s where the dump truck came onto the scene. The fat Flying Dutchman had already secured his taxi back to the Dateline, and he wasn’t in the mood to share his ride. Robyn and I may have been promoted to the best hotel in the country to wait out the flight delay, but no one had told Air Pacific that they owed us a deluxe way to get there. We piled our packs in the back of the dump truck, and roared the 35 kilometers back into and through the vowel-saturated streets of Nuku’alofa, to beat the fat Flying Dutchman, by a hair. It seems that his taxi driver was on a meter, and in no particular hurry, given the fact that there were no passengers at the airport from any incoming flight, whereas out dump truck driver had other places to go, and people to meet. Call it differential motivation. Of course this didn’t matter to the fat Flying Dutchman. He pushed his way in front of us again, at the Dateline Hotel reception, because of his obviously greater importance, relative to ours. He was an important businessman, he said, waving his obviously important arms around the solid head cube of muscle, on the other side of the desk. The solid head cube of muscle gave him back his room, but it wouldn’t be cleaned for several hours, as they hadn’t expected his return. From the look on the face of the solid head cube of muscle, no one was likely to be in a hurry to accommodate him, likely because of their recent experience with him, whereas Robyn and I were brand new appreciative faces, and our room was ready for us, because Air Pacific was paying.
“Up deah.” The solid head cube of muscle pointed. “Turd floah, tree-too-tree.” And we carried our own bags up the stairs.
What Air Pacific was paying for was not only the room, but the meals as well. Which was about to sound the death knell for Air Pacific. For on the menu, among more plebian business fare, was an item that, since my marriage to a beautiful New Zealander, I had come to appreciate as one of the four basic Kiwi food groups. Crayfish. Big, tender, succulent, delicious lemon and butter and sauvignon blanc-compatible crayfish. At the International Dateline Hotel, although crayfish was only listed on the lunch and dinner menus, our first discovery was that, as long as Air Pacific was paying, they would serve it for breakfast as well. Robyn and I ate big crayfish for breakfast at a table by the pool, next to the fat Flying Dutchman, whose breakfast was toast.
If the time in Greenwich was mean time, the time at the Dateline, on the opposite side of the world was not only kind, it was fabulous. Every day, Robyn and I would wake up and have crayfish for breakfast. We would swim in the pool, and lounge around the pool, until it was time for lunch. We had the crayfish. In the afternoon, we would swim in the pool, or lounge around the pool, until it was time for dinner. Then we would have the crayfish. And so it went for us, aground in the Abode of Love. Letting the days go by, letting the days go by, letting the days go by, once in a lifetime.
Every morning we would check in with the front desk staff, to see how the pilot strike was doing. Every day we would find out the pilot strike was going well. And we would retreat back to the seemingly unending pleasures of swimming and sunbathing and crayfish.
One morning we went to the Friendly Islands Marketing Cooperative, to look at their handicrafts. In a country that produced nothing but banana-shaped postage stamps, Protected Persons Passports, and expatriate Tongans, handicrafts were the biggest local business going. The bone and wood carving, weaving, and tapa cloth were finely done, but the baskets were truly amazing, and Robyn and I bought two, to take home. Which was exactly the problem because, after a week of indulgence at the International Dateline Hotel, we were still castaways, and not only becoming shipwrecks, but at risk of becoming truly amazing basket cases. I couldn’t swim another length, check out another beach towel, or look at another crayfish. In Polynesian, Tonga meant ‘south,’ where nothing and everything appeared to be headed. The only fun left was watching the fat Flying Dutchman decompensate slightly ahead of us.
And then, just when we thought we were marooned forever, the word came one evening that Air Pacific was sending a special charter flight next morning, to rescue us from paradise. At dinner we celebrated with crayfish. Next morning we bid farewell to the reception staff, and climbed into the back of our dump truck, for the return journey to the airport. Robyn had suggested that I dress up, ‘in case of an upgrade.’ I told her we didn’t stand a chance, but I was wrong. Beyond the ticket counter, beyond the duty free, was a ramp to business class, and a new beginning.
Things didn’t go too well for the Dateline, or the Abode of Love, after we left. Thirteen years after our salvation, the International Dateline Hotel was sold to the People’s Republic of China. Five new clocks appeared behind the front desk, the biggest one in the center showing Beijing time. The Chinese manager was unavailable, and spoke no English. The swimming pool was closed because of an outbreak of disease. It was apparently bought to introduce the Tongans to the concept of Chinese fishing rights, and anger.
In 2006 riots broke out in downtown Nuku’alofa, killing six people and destroying eighty per cent of the central business district.
Puleʻanga Fakatuʻi ʻo Tonga, a kingdom which had never been invaded, occupied, colonized, immigrated to, or invested in, which had no desire to look beyond its own archipelago of 176 islands scattered over 700,000 square kilometers of remote Southern Sea, was about to have its vowels replaced by glottal stops and palatal glides and alveolar sibilants and tones and retroflex consonants, and its pa’anga currency replaced by renminbi.
Back in the palangi sky-bursting Business Class, Robyn and I were seated across from the fat Flying Dutchman.
“How did you get up here?” He asked.
Almost unconsciously, from my daypack, I pulled out my translucent castaway from the deep, the most spectacular gigantic spotted cowrie.
“Where do you get that?” He asked.
“King.” I said.
We had the crayfish.




                            “No plane on Sunday
                             Maybe be one come Monday
                             Just a hopeless situation
                             Make the best of it's all you can do
                             'til they get through”
                                     Jimmy Buffett, No Plane on Sunday

Tongan Girls Juggling

Aground in the Abode of Love 7

As I sang, I thought of the riddles that the princess to which she had demanded Turandot’s answers. The first, ‘What is born each night and dies each dawn?’ could have only been ‘hope.’ The answer to the second, ‘What flickers red and warm like a flame, but is not fire?’ I remembered as ‘blood.’ But then, I never got to the third riddle, did I? Because I also remembered, that, while I was having the most wonderful time of my life singing operatic arias at the top of my lungs inside Mariner’s Cave, everyone on the boat outside Mariner’s Cave was waiting for me to emerge. I had no way of knowing, of course, that Robyn, especially, was flickering red and warm like a flame and, in fact, was afire, up top, and was almost beating the skipper around his head, in her frantic attempt to get him, or anyone else, to swim back into the cave, to see if I was still alive.
I bit into my snorkel, and drank in the only lungful of air I would be allowed to take onboard, for this long day’s return journey into daylight.
“Just hold your breath.” He said. I asked him for how long.
“Until you’re there.” He said. I asked him how I would know.
“You’ll be out of breath.” He said.
I swam towards the light. Just as I thought I was going to suffocate in one large saltwater gasp, my horizons widened out and up, and I surfaced onto an ocean of cursing and screaming. It was a rough ride back to the hilltop.
There was no way that Robyn and I, nor Jean Pierre and Maria, as couples or even collectively, could have afforded to rent a sailboat. The islands around Vava'u were the most pristine examples of idyllic South Pacific paradise that we would ever see. And it almost didn’t happen that we saw them. A wayward Spanish couple fixed that for us. We met them outside the Morris Hedstrom corned beef concession one morning. They told us they had a sailboat and, for fifteen dollars a head, they would take us on a day trip around the islands, and include a fish barbeque in the price. We quickly agreed.
Nothing quite prepared us for the experience, however. They had left Spain some fifteen years earlier, and had been trying for almost as long, to make enough money to sail home. I did the math in my head, and decided they would likely be here awhile. Their sails were original, but now the same Joseph coat of many colors as their frayed and tattered clothing, patched and quilted into a psychedelic rainbow of their nautical and personal history. It was as if Picasso had painted their trip on their canvas. But, as thin and gaunt as they were, they were also as good as their word, and we were once again the pirates, siphoning off Spanish treasure, at two bucks an hour. They sailed us through the most magnificent tropical dreamworld, of palms and frangipanis and clear liquid lagoons, to islands like little pancakes of white sand and whiter surf, where forests and other caves and serenity waited. They juggled coconuts, like the Tongan women used to, and caught parrotfish the same colors as their sails, with their held breaths and spear guns, and grilled them over an open fire on some secluded beach, on an island without a name. We were all deliriously and deliciously happy.
Live like a captain. Play like a pirate.



            “Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
             Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
             Into the blue again after the money's gone
             Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground”
                                              Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime

'Stories of the Southern Sea' is now available on Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Southern-Sea-Lawrence-Winkler-ebook/dp/B00HJCY5XK/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1388361277&sr=8-2&keywords=lawrence+winkler