Surviving Paradise

Travel Stories: Visiting Fiji in the midst of a coup, Jim Benning stumbles over the line that divides stimulating anxiety from real fear. He has the T-shirt to prove it.

The next morning, I boarded a twin-engine plane for the 20-minute flight to the capital. Once in Suva, I’d planned to find an ethnic Fijian cab driver to take me to the Internet newspaper’s downtown offices. Since the ethnic Fijians were the aggressors, I reasoned, I’d be safe in one of their cars. They wouldn’t attack one of their own.

I couldn’t find one at the airport. Only two cabs sat out front, both driven by Fiji Indians. I finally picked an aging sedan driven by a sharply dressed, gray-haired man, hoping wisdom or experience or the Hindu gods would see us through.

We drove toward the center, passing single-story modest homes and businesses, and by several military checkpoints, where armed soldiers studied the contents of passing cars. Burned-out business buildings, testaments to the violent mob that had stormed through weeks earlier, came into view. Finally, we stopped in front of a blackened storefront. An acrid, smoky odor wafted from the ashes. The Internet office, the taxi driver said, sat across the street.

My eyes darted up and down the road, searching for signs of normalcy. Young men and women hurried by in business attire. A couple of aging Fijian men walked past in pressed button-down shirts and long, dark sulu skirts. I made a beeline for the building.

Upstairs, the website, Fijilive, was produced in several small adjoining offices. Half a dozen ethnic Indian men in slacks and button-down shirts studied computer monitors, pounded on keyboards and chatted on the phone. A poster of model Elle MacPherson dominated one wall. The Backstreet Boys played on a small radio, apparently having conquered Fiji without a single shot fired.

For the next five hours, I talked with several editors and reporters about the coup. One younger man had a look of shock I’d once seen in the eyes of a mother whose son had just been murdered. The editors recounted the horror they’d felt the night the mob raced through town. They’d extinguished the lights in the office and shut off the elevator, fearing an attack. Through it all, with TV transmissions down but the Internet still up, they offered the only accounts of the coup to the outside world.

Their stories shook me. I took a cab back to the airport and caught the last flight to Nadi, thankful to escape Suva. The next morning, I arose early, relieved that I’d be returning to Australia. I checked out of the hotel and walked to the airport.

I found the Air Pacific desk dark and unattended. The information board above offered no details of a flight out that morning. In fact, all of the airline desks were dark, and the airport was nearly empty.

I walked over to a travel office to inquire. The lone agent frowned.

“Flight’s cancelled,” she said.

“What?”

She pointed me to an Air Pacific office upstairs.

I raced up a dark stairway. The office was closed, its doors locked. I’d have to wait an hour for the morning staff to arrive.

I paced the hallway, recalling what the clerk at the U.S. consulate had told me before my trip: “Of course, things can always change.”

Then another troubling thought hit me: Perhaps things already had changed. Violence could have broken out overnight. Maybe that’s why the flight had been cancelled. I could be stuck here for weeks, months even. For the first time, I began wishing I’d never come.

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