Turtle sleep

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.