Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
it up. The bill came to fifty dollars. I was about ready to hand the cash over when Gavin
piped up, “How about forty dollars? We are extremely low on funds.”
“Ooh, you drive a harrrd bargain,” the Indian said, his foxy face breaking out in a yellow
leer.
“OK mon, make it forrrty dollars then, American that is.”
Later, we had just managed to get the two remaining seats on the last bus out of town, back
to the yacht club and I said to Gavin, “Well, you saved us ten dollars there; that's very
good.”
“You've got to bargain with these sharks; they love it. They don't call them the black Jews
for nothing.”
I looked idly out the bus window as we waited to pull off into the traffic. I saw several
vendors squatting under the windows with their meager piles of produce they hoped to sell
to the passengers. This was where we first invented a saying we would get a lot of mileage
out of. There was an old Indian man, more skin and bones than a soup kitchen, hunkered
over his pile of green beans. His knobbly knees looked like clubs. He looked up at me
with his bright, birdlike, black eyes and sunken cheeks, his dark turban askew, and said in
a strange, tinny, high-pitched voice, “Bin bin bin, bin bin bin.” He pointed to his pile of
“bins.” “One dollar for da bins.” Gavin and I repeated this over and over again in great
amusement.
When we got back to the club, we heard that a boat had been totaled and was high and dry
on a reef, utterly destroyed. Apparently the owner had tried to take a shortcut through the
reef and had paid dearly for his mistake. I can't imagine how I would feel if that had been
us. What would we do? It was very tragic for anyone.
The southerly shore in the Suva bay was very shallow and had been marked off by a series
of red buoys, warning you keep to the right of them if you had them on your port side un-
like the U.S. system which was exactly opposite. There the saying goes, “Red right return.”
Or, if you were returning to a port, the red buoys would now be on your right side. Clearer
than low tide mud?
This may explain why the American boat, Southern Star, had run aground just a few days
after the disastrous wrecking of the other boat on the reef. We had relocated to the lovely
protected bay where Dave had suggested, outside the abandoned hotel. It was late one af-
ternoon, and I was hanging up some laundry when a distress call came in on the radio. Ap-
parently the Southern Star had run aground in the mudflats in these shallow waters. What
got our attention was the fact that this boat owner was the same Navy man that had thrown
