The Fiji Diaries – #2

8 July 2023 – {early AM}

As I was just here lying in bed I couldn’t help but think of work health and safety – or the lack thereof in Suva. And yet no one has seemingly died in the time we’ve been here (which lets face facts has probably got more to do with a lack of reporting rather than a lack of deaths).

Take in point Suva airport – the baggage carousel was literally a tiny, rubber carousel that all the passengers milled around before the baggage handlers just drove up beside and threw the baggage onto. No safety barriers, just people being told to move by a tired, disgruntled Fijian. 

Also take in point McGregor road on Thursday, when we walked by roadworks and the excavator driver was very kind to stop his work for us to walk by without being forced into oncoming traffic. A smile, a wave, a thank you. That’s all.

And – my personal favourite thus far – the intersection of Scott and Edward Streets in the CBD has a traffic light/pedestrian crossing like the ones back home, except the crossing light never changes from red. One must instead observe the traffic lights themselves and cross when they change to red, cross your fingers and hope you didn’t fuck up. To say there is a somewhat steep learning curve from our gentle, refined ways is an understatement, but there’s something very normal and natural about how life in Suva works. Think batshit crazy fever dream and you’re pretty much there.

We hopped in a taxi yesterday and popped over to the Fiji Showcase – no one knew what to expect, and it was, in a word, very Fijian. The inside of Vodafone stadium was filled with stallholders – it is here you can get anything from nappies, milk powder, taste testers of Watties baked beans, Nescafe Blend 43 *and* a robotic vacuum cleaner. The world is your veritable oyster at Fiji Showcase. Outside was the loudest band in the North Pacific and a gamut of food stalls. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this earlier but food in Fiji is a really weird mix of Indian, colonial (strong ties there) and local, and these food stalls were no exception. I braved a sausage roll Hot Bread Bakery – the biggest (although I am not knowledgeable enough to say the best) bakery in Suva. FJD$1.80, and it tasted like home. Anyways, food deserves its own entry entirely, so I won’t carry on.

Another interesting point here in the Peninsula Hotel is that there’s a general cocophony of noise – life, in essence, is contained within this microcosm of the hotel. Right now there’s a choir singing somewhere nearby (update, it was the U19s Cook Islands girls soccer team), two ladies discussing something loudly outside our door and the noise of traffic on McGregor Road is a constant hum that is louder between 7:30-9:00am and 3:30-5:00pm, the hum of cars and buses interjected with the odd car horn here and there. The Samoan U19 Girls soccer team is here, and we got invited to watch them practice a Taualuga – but of course it’s the Pacific so the song they were practicing the dance to was an Islander version of Michael Bublé. In a weird way, it just worked. There’s no use fighting the strange – the sooner one embraces it the sooner you can really start enjoying the city for what it is.

In a nutshell, throw all ideas of what this place is, and you’ll be getting closer to the truth. Except for kava – it’s bloody everywhere.

Carpe diem