Ovalau

Photo by David Lansing.

There’s no big story here, but I just had to run this photo. Sunday morning I got up really early so I could walk around town and do some photography in the early morning light. I took some shots of the French clock in the tower of the Church of the Sacred Heart and was on my way to shoot the Ovalau Club, which has kind of a famous history that I’ll write about later this week, when I came across this guy out walking his pig.

No, really, that’s the whole story. I stopped and chatted with him for a few minutes and he told me that every morning he gets up around 6:30 and ties a rope onto the back leg of the family pig and he takes it for a stroll around town.

“He likes to get out,” he said, kissing the pig on the snout.

Well, yes, of course. Who doesn’t?

Photos by David Lansing.

I’ve become rather addicted to walking around Levuka early in the morning as the children flit about in their school-coded blouses and shirts—pink for one school, blue for another, and green for a third—like flocks of bright-colored birds.

Dawdling seems natural; two young boys use sticks to poke at paper boats they float down the ditch in front of the Marist Convent school; several girls stop in at Emily’s to grab a roll for breakfast; a group of older students linger along the sea wall, flirting and gossiping.

The trip from home to school may be only a block or two, but it drags on for the better part of the morning. There are no scolding parents (or at least none I’ve come across) telling children to hurry up and get to school. In fact, the adults seem to hold themselves apart from this little morning ritual, unlike helicopter parents back home.

The children have organized themselves into little packs and determined how long it will take them to get where they have to go, and sometimes it’s five minutes and sometimes it’s the better part of an hour, but when the French clock atop Sacred Heart Church strikes the hour, everyone is, somehow, exactly where they need to be. And on time.

No matter how long it took to get there.

Built in the 1860s, the Royal Hotel is the oldest hotel in the South Pacific. Photo by David Lansing.

There is a little handwritten sign at the reception desk of the Royal Hotel that says “Levuka Guided Tours.” When I asked the manager about it, he said, without looking up, “A tour? Certainly. When would you like to go?”

“When are they normally scheduled?”

Without answering me, he rang the bell on his desk and an old man of indeterminate age using a whittled stick for a cane, came up the steps of the hotel. His name was Meli and he told me that sometimes he cleaned the pool and sometimes he took people’s bags to their rooms but mostly he helped out in the garden. He didn’t mention it but evidently he was also a tour guide.

Meli and I walked down the gravel road in front of the hotel, stopping before we got to a bridge where some young boys were jumping into a canal that flowed out to the ocean. Meli turned around and looked back at the hotel as if something had just occurred to him. “That there is the oldest continuously run hotel in the South Pacific,” he said. We stood there looking back at the low-slung clapboard building with its tin roof. It had to be the most modest historical venue I’d ever seen. After silently taking it in for a few minutes, we started walking again.

Along the main road, Meli used his walking stick to point out Mission Hill, to the north, telling me that if I had the gumption to climb the 199 steps to the top, I might just get lucky enough, on a clear day, to see the mystic isle of Mborutu. “That’s where the spirits of the ancient Fijians go,” he said. “I figure I’ll be joining them soon enough so there’s no need for me to climb that hill anymore.” Then he laughed at his own little joke.

We strolled into town, town being a single block of weather-worn clapboard buildings—like something out of a Western movie set—that harken back to the days when Levuka was one of the main ports of call for trading ships and whalers in the South Pacific. Meli pointed out the sights: “Levuka has three restaurants’,” he said when we stopped in front of the Whale’s Tale. “That’s one of them. They serve English food.” And then he looked away and turned up his nose. I’d eaten at the Whale’s Tale the night before and while I could understand why he’d turn up his nose, I didn’t know what he meant about it serving English food since it is run by local islanders and the food is pretty much what you’d get in Suva or Nadi, which is to say curried dishes and chow mein and walu and your choice of rice or chips with everything. Maybe Meli thinks it’s English because you can get a hamburger here.

Photo by David Lansing.

Despite the “English” thing, the Whale’s Tale looks like a merchant’s store from someplace like Lahaina during the whaling boom of the 1880s. The heavy thick wooden doors are guarded by a sleeping dog who takes up most of the doorway and just dares you to disturb his rest. At night, just a few low-watt bulbs light the small room, not so much for atmosphere, of which there is none, but because light attracts the bugs at night. And electricity is expensive.

Meli also pointed out the town’s two banks which, oddly enough, are in the same building and share the same counter. Seems one burnt down a few years ago so, in the interest of neighborliness, was taken in by the other and things have stayed that way. “We’ve had some odd fires in this town,” Meli said cryptically. “You seen the Masonic Lodge yet?”

I told him I hadn’t.

“Hmmm,” he said mysteriously.

Our next stop was the old post office. “A hundred-odd years ago, there was a roost ‘round here for the carrier-pigeons that carried mail to Suva some 40 miles away as the bird flies,” he said. “My grandfather sent love letters to my grandmother that way.” He nodded his appreciation of this fact. “Took less than an hour to get a reply. Now it takes a week if you’re lucky.” We both thought about this for a moment and then Meli shook his head in disgust and spat out, “Progress!” as if it were a plug of tobacco he’d had stuck in his lip.

And then we were at the edge of town. “You want to see the fish plant?” Meli asked me.

Maybe later, I told him. “Okay, then,” he said. He turned around and I watched him walk back up the street to the Royal Hotel, stopping only once, in front of the Whale’s Tale, giving it a look and shaking his head as if he just couldn’t imagine why anyone in their right mind would ever want to eat there. Then he disappeared up the drive to the hotel.

The gardener at the Royal Hotel. Photo by David Lansing.

When I woke up it was late in the afternoon. The air had been on the whole time and I was shivering. I opened up the louvered shutters and looked out. A young man in cut-offs and pink wool gloves was using a small pruning saw to cut the dead growth off a banana tree. Just beyond him was a shallow pool that looked like it was about to be taken back by the jungle. A thick wall of palms and hibiscus and ginger plants creeped right up to the edge of the water; some plants had even dipped an exploring vine into the water.

My head was thick and I had that icky feeling you get when you’ve slept too long during the day. I put on my swim suit and went outside, the tropical heat wrapping itself around me like steam from a tea kettle. There was no one around the pool. The sun was just too hot. Even in the pool, I found I had to stay in the shady section or I’d just cook. I swam for ten or fifteen minutes, trying to clear my head, and then I just walked back and forth from one end of the pool to the other (the deep end was only about four-feet), trying not to think about the pregnant woman who hung herself in my bungalow at the Holiday Resort hotel but thinking about her anyway.

I didn’t know anything about what happened, not a damn thing, but in my mind I imagined her to be a young girl, maybe 17 or 18, and in an arranged marriage, foisted on her by her parents. Maybe she was in love with someone else. Maybe she had even thought about getting off the island, getting out of her marriage, going somewhere else. But then she got pregnant. And felt there was no escape. A young girl in an arranged marriage, pregnant, with a man she didn’t love. So she hung herself.

And those holes in the walls and in the door of my room? Did she put them there? Probably not. Probably her husband. The man who drove me into town. Probably he had been the one to find her. And then, while she was still hanging from the ceiling, or maybe after he’d cut her down, he’d put his fist through the walls, the door. Were his hands scraped up? I hadn’t looked. I’d been too worried that he was going to drive us into an oncoming truck. And I still think he might have. If one had come along.

I wondered what her religion had been. Probably Hinduism. Definitely not Islam or Sikhism. Maybe Christian, but probably Hinduism. Wasn’t there a statue of Shiva in the dining room? And the elephant god, Lord Ganesha? Not good to be Hindu and commit suicide. Set her way back in her development. If you are Hindu, I think, and you commit suicide, you end up stuck on earth as some sort of a bad spirit, wandering aimlessly about until you’ve completed your allotted life span. And then you come back to earth to complete your previous karma.

So what a bummer. She’s stuck on Ovalau. For god knows how many years. And then has to come back and start her journey all over again. Perhaps marrying another man she doesn’t love, having a child she does not want. Karma.

Photo by David Lansing.

I pushed off from the end of the pool and swam under the water to the other end, coming up breathless. I did this four or five times, always trying to stay under water for as long as I could but never getting much farther than a single length of the pool. I’ve read that our bodies can go without oxygen for much longer than we think. For five minutes, six minutes. A woman from Russia, Natalia Molchanova, once held her breath under water in a pool for 8 minutes and 23 seconds. She said it was like dying, only enjoyable. Rapture.

If only the young woman who hung herself in my room could have learned to hold her breath. For just a little bit longer. Or perhaps she had been holding her breath. For as long as she could. Until she couldn’t stand it any longer. And her heart burst. I’d never know. None of us would.

Bundles of taro for sale at Levuka's informal market. Photo by David Lansing.

A few years ago the Levuka town council decided to build the sort of covered market area you’d find in the more sophisticated Fijian towns like Suva. It’s a nice area with clean, covered stalls just along the road outside the Royal Hotel. The only problem is that the old women who comprise the market didn’t like it. “Too far from town,” they complained, though the distance between the covered market and the old sea wall where they liked to throw down their blankets and plastic tarps was maybe a two minute walk.

I think what they really meant was that at the covered market, they couldn’t keep an eye on what was happening along Beach Street—even if there really wasn’t anything happening. It also made it more difficult to say hello to friends walking around town to pick up a bottle of palm oil at Katudrau Trading Market or candles at Young Yet & Sons General Store.

It’s a congenial place, Levuka. Everyone pretty much knows everyone else. So if you are one of the old ladies who lives out in the country and you grow just enough taro to bring in a few bundles for sale on market day, you don’t want to be stuck inside a small stall in a covered market on the edge of town. You want to sit along the sea wall where the air is fresh from the ocean breeze and you want to be able to shout out “Bula!” to an old friend walking out of Emily’s with a fresh loaf of bread.

So that’s what you do. You sit squat-legged on the ground, a cloth spread in front of you, selling a few yams or maybe some breadfruit or aubergines. And though it isn’t a very sophisticated market—and certainly nothing like that in Suva or Nadi—it’s good enough for Levuka. In fact, it’s just fine.