March 2012

The amazing Miss Siteri. Photo by David Lansing.

Every morning when I sit down at one of the tables on the deck of the Banyan, Siteri arrives within moments and slips a latte in front of me. Without my asking. Without my having even thought about asking.

And in the evening when I come down to the bar she puts a glass of Australian pinot gris in front of me before I’ve even settled in to my bar chair. Again, no words are exchanged. It’s just there.

A couple of days ago, Marguarite and I were having lunch together and I mentioned to her that the previous evening I’d spilled something on my white shirt and hadn’t realized it until the next morning. “Well, that shirt’s ruined,” I lamented as Siteri brought our meals.

By the time I got back to my room, the shirt in question had been laundered, the stain removed, and was sitting all nicely folded atop my bed.

“Siteri,” I said that evening as she placed a glass of pinot gris in front of me, “did you have my shirt laundered?”

“Of course, Mr. David.”

I find this amazing. Particularly since Siteri has nothing to do with housekeeping. She’s the food and beverage manager.

Yesterday I told Christopher, Royal Davui’s marketing director, that I was taking Siteri home with me when I left.

“Really,” he said without looking up from texting on his smart phone.

“I’ve decided she’s going to be my personal assistant.”

“Is that right,” he mumbled. He finished his e-mail and put his phone on the bar. “Have you told her this yet?”

“Not exactly.”

“Ah.”

Christopher smiled at me. A few minutes later, Siteri brought over the half-coconut shells filled with kokoda that both Christopher and I were having for lunch.

“Siteri,” Christopher said poking a fork in to the raw fish marinated in coconut milk and lime juice. “David here says he’s taking you home with him so that you can be his personal assistant. What do you think of that?”

Siteri giggled. “That sounds very nice. But where does he live?”

“California,” said Christopher.

“Have you heard of California?” I asked her. She shook her head. “Well, no matter. You’ll like it.”

“I’m sure,” said Siteri.

“So do you think you’d like to go?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “And so will Ben.”

“Who is Ben?” I asked her.

“My husband.”

“You’re married?”

“Yes, Mr. David.”

“Ah.”

Well, I’m not sure what to do with Ben in California but I’ll think of something. Siteri may not know where California is but she wants to go anyway. I can’t imagine why Ben would object, can you?

My bed at the Royal Davui. You can see the turtle above the headboard. Photos by David Lansing.

Every night while I’m having dinner down at the Banyan, someone sneaks into my room. They dim the lights, open up the mosquito netting over my bed, and turn on the A/C. I don’t normally sleep with the A/C on but I’ve discovered it’s necessary here. My bedroom, which faces south, has windows on three sides and faces the sun most of the day. The windows are actually accordion doors so I just fold them open during the day to get the sea breeze, but at night you’d be inviting a lot of critters (most with wings) into your villa if you left the folding doors open.

I’m not a good sleeper. In general. But every night at the Royal Davui I’ve felt like I’ve slept in a drug-induced coma. In a good way. I pull back the mosquito netting, slip into the pillowy bed, and often times don’t wake up for seven or eight hours. Which is amazing, for me.

I call it Turtle Sleep. Because there is a carved wooden turtle (which the Fijians call a vonu) above my bed and I’ve convinced myself that the vonu sings me to sleep. This is because of something Siteri told me one morning after I’d told her how well I was sleeping. She said that just south of Davui is an island called Kadavu and on this island is a village called Namuana.

According to Siteri, the women of Namuana have a very strange ritual called turtle calling. All the young women of the village will gather on the rocks above the water and begin singing a melodious chant. “The vonu hear the song,” said Siteri, “and one by one they rise to the surface and fall into a dream-like sleep.”

Is this true? I asked her.

I have never seen it, she said, but I have heard about it since I was a little girl.

So I think sort of the reverse is going on in my villa: At night, the vonu above my bed hums some mysterious turtle song that makes me sink deep into an ocean of sleep. And only I can hear her.

The carved turtle above my bed.

A shipwreck with Beqa Island in the background. Photo by David Lansing.

When we got back in the skiff, Grahame decided it was time to let Cindy drive, since she’d never piloted a boat either. I’d like to say that Cindy had learned from Katie not to over-correct when steering but I’d be lying. Like a drunken sailor she steered the boat way to the left and then way to the right, but never straight ahead.

Like Katie, Grahame had instructed Cindy to head towards what looked like a dark atoll out in the middle of the water. When we finally reached it, after much zigging and zagging, I realized it wasn’t a land mass at all; it was a ship wreck.

A Japanese fishing boat, Grahame said. Gone aground on the soft coral reef during a typhoon back in the 90s.

I told Grahame that I imagined such an event would end the career of fishing boat captain.

Not necessarily, he said. “Sometimes these poor guys are told to ground their boats on purpose. For the insurance.”

As we approached, a flock of seabirds—cormorants, seagulls, terns—rose up from the wrecked deck squawking. Most of the birds made a slow circle around the wreck and then landed again.

One other interesting thing Graham told us: He said a couple of years back, a couple had gotten married on the sand quay where we’d just been and then the bride and groom had gone over to the shipwreck to have their wedding photos taken.

“Can you imagine having your wedding photos taken on a shipwreck?” said Grahame. “Seems like asking for bit of bad luck, doesn’t it?”

I do. But if the couple ever gets divorced, it will be an iconic photo of a marriage gone bad.

Elina and Christopher modeling for us on the sand quay. Photos by David Lansing.

The sand quay was like something out of a dream. An ivory round of sugar-fine sand the size of a backyard swimming pool ringed by cerulean water a foot or two deep that sloped out to a coral reef. And on the white patch, out here in the middle of the ocean, was a woven straw mat, two teak deck chairs, and a white umbrella. The whole thing was so surreal that all any of us could do was gape at it. And grab our cameras.

“Okay,” Elena said to me as we made our way through the shallow blue water to the white sand. “You’ve been all over the world. Have you ever seen anything like this?”

Katie coming out of the ocean.

I hadn’t. I walked along the edge of the miniature island while some of the others took photos. There were thousands of tiny little white shells on the sand and if you stepped into the shallow water, schools of blue and yellow and orange fish darted left and then right, all in unison.

Katie came over. “Take my picture,” she said.

“Doing what?”

“Just walking out of the water. I think it’s going to be my Christmas card.”

For a girl who grew up not knowing who the Brady Bunch was, she’s a natural ham. She stripped down to her bikini, walked to where the water came up to her knees, and then turned around and shimmied her way out of the water, throwing her arms up and tossing her hair back like she was Cindy Crawford doing a Sports Illustrated cover.

Then someone (perhaps me) suggested that Elina and Christopher sit in the deck chairs and pretend like they were a young couple on their honeymoon, and after that we had Grahame and Christopher pose together with Davui on the horizon behind them.

By the time everyone had taken as many shots as they wanted, the island had started to retreat; the tide was coming in. We packed up our gear and waded out to where the skiff was anchored and climbed back in. Grahame circled the white island once, then again, and before we’d made it all the way around the second tiime, the sand quay was all but gone. Disappearing beneath the emerald water, just a mirage on the shining sea.

Grahame and Christopher Southwick, owners of Royal Davui.

The sand quay just before it sinks beneath the sea.

Off to the sand quay with Katie, in the middle, behind the wheel. Photo by Christopher Southwick.

Katie, who is from Sandpoint, Idaho, wants to do everything. She has been trying for two days to get someone to go out kayaking with her because she has never been kayaking. And she’s never gone sailing so she wants to take out a Hobie Cat. And she has never been snorkeling so, of course, she wants to go snorkeling.

“Wait,” I said to her. “You’ve never been snorkeling? Ever?”

She shook the damp locks of her dark hair. “There’s not a lot of snorkeling in Sandpoint,” she dryly said.

I just don’t know what to think of Katie. On the one hand she’s the most intrepid person I’ve ever met; on the other hand, she’s never done anything. I’ve subtly tried to tease out more information about her. Like yesterday I asked her if her family were like those Idaho white supremacists who stockpiled guns.

“Of course not,” she said. “We weren’t wealthy enough to stockpile.” Later she told me that she and her siblings were home schooled and not allowed to do certain things.

“Like what?”

“Like listen to music.”

“Do you know who Jim Morrison is?”

She shook her head.

“Michael Jackson?”

“Of course. Everyone knows who Michael Jackson was. But I never listened to his music.”

Then she tells me that she didn’t have sex until after she got married.

“I just thought that’s the way it was for everybody,” she says casually.

Okay, so she tells you this and you start to form some sort of Mormon-teen-living-on-the-compound picture in your head and then she goes on to tell you that she got divorced less than two years after getting married partially because her husband wasn’t really into sex.

“I just liked it a lot more than he did. Which didn’t seem right.”

Yesterday morning, Grahame offered to take us all out on a little cruise to a sand quay about fifteen or twenty minutes off Davui. The sand quay comes and goes with the tide so you have to time it just right. What you want to do is arrive at this little spit of white sand in the middle of the ocean exactly at low tide. Which yesterday was 10:03. So Grahame instructed us to be down at the dock by 9:45.

Everyone slathered on the sunscreen and got their hats and sunglasses and we pushed off. As we all scrambled to find seats on the tiny skiff, Katie ended up behind the wheel. After Grahame pushed off and got on board, Katie tried to scoot over to give him room to steer.

“That’s okay,” said Grahame. “You can drive.”

“I don’t know how,” said Katie.

“Not a problem,” said Grahame. “You see that island on the horizon? Just aim for that.”

Katie gripped the wheel tightly, straightened her back, and pushed down the throttle. We were off. Sort of. The thing is, boats, unlike cars, take awhile to respond and so you have a tendency to constantly over-correct. Which is why rather than going in a straight line, Katie had us going in big loopy S turns. First one way and then another.

“You’re pretty good at this,” Grahame lied.

“Thank you,” said Katie, smiling broadly. “It’s easier than it looks.”

And like everything she says, I couldn’t be sure if she was serious or just joking. None of us could.