Bitters on the road to Pacific Harbour

After arriving three hours late from Melbourne, Feroz and I drove from Nadi through the night to Pacific Harbour on the southern end of the island.

I woke up Sunday morning knowing that getting from Tasmania to Fiji was going to be difficult. Here’s the set-up. I had to leave Hobart very early Sunday morning, drive to the airport, return my rental car, fly to Melbourne, wait for my bags, go through customs and immigration, change airline terminals, and get on a flight to Nadi, Fiji where, supposedly, someone would be waiting to drive me half way around Viti Levu, the main island, to Pacific Harbour.

There were just too many opportunities for things to go wrong. And they did.

Getting to the Hobart airport was no problem, but then things got interesting when the flight coming in from Fiji was late. By a couple of hours. That meant I’d have less than an hour to go through customs in Melbourne, transfer terminals, and check-in for my flight to Nadi. I won’t go into all the bloody details but the way it worked out, I arrived in Fiji about three hours later than expected. Amazingly, my driver was still waiting for me, albeit slumped over and snoozing in one of the plastic bucket seats next to the luggage carousel. His name was Feroz and, he told me, he’d been at the airport for eight hours waiting for me. Poor guy.

So we loaded up and headed off into the Fijian countryside, in total darkness, up little country roads, passing by all the locals walking along the side of the narrow road and the dogs sleeping on the warm tarmac. It would be just nothing and nothing and nothing, and then a little village that we’d pass through in about two minutes, and then more nothing and nothing and nothing.

As we were entering one of the little nameless villages, Feroz asked me if I was thirsty and would like to stop for a beer. I told him I was fine. A few minutes later, he asked me if I needed a bathroom break. I told him that wouldn’t be a bad idea. So he pulled the taxi over onto the side of the road. In the darkness of the night, we headed off into the jungle, he in one direction, I in another. We did our business in the bushes and got back in the taxi.

After about an hour or so I told Feroz that I’d changed my mind; a beer sounded good. So we pulled into one of the little Indian-owned markets the size of a rural post office which has iron grates on the front and where you tell someone what it is you want and they go find it in the back and bring it out for you and hand it through the grate. These markets are ubiquitous in Fiji.

It was about ten o’clock. The Indian family that owned the market was sitting behind the grated counter watching snowy images on an old TV. A single bare light bulb lit the store. A girl of about fifteen or sixteen, wearing a sari, got up from the TV and came to the grated window. I asked her for a beer.

“Gold or bitter?”

“Umm…bitters.”

“Just one?”

“Yes, please.”

When she walked away I thought maybe I should have asked for two. Afterall, we still had hours of driving ahead of us. She came back with a paper bag and handed it to me through the grate.

Now, I was thinking that I was going to get a regular-sized bottle of beer or maybe even a can. But when I opened the bag, I saw that I’d bought one of those liter-sized beers that aficionados of Colt .45 and Olde English “800” seem to prefer.

“Big beer,” I said to Feroz as I got back into his taxi.

He laughed. “Very big, sir.”

We drove on, Feroz talking to his girlfriend on his cell phone and me drinking my big beer out of a paper bag. The thing is, it tasted pretty damn good. And I rather enjoyed the decadence of sitting in the front seat of a Fijian taxi driving like a bat out of hell through the pitch-black countryside drinking a big ol’ beer. There was a certain gonzo aspect to it. (As Hunter S. Thompson said, “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”)

Sometime after midnight, we arrived at The Pearl in Pacific Harbour, my lodgings for the night. Feroz looked even more tired than I did. I was worried that he still had a three-hour return trip to Nadi ahead of him. But he told me that wasn’t the case. He lived nearby. “I’m going home now,” he said. I shook his hand and thanked him for the admirable driving job. And for stopping to let me buy a beer.

“It was not a problem,” he said. “I hope you enjoyed it.”

And I did.