Fogg’s Horn The Miscreant Meanderings Of Our Man Markus
The Living Legends of Fiji
We’d suffered a “puncture” on our way from Suva, the capital, to Deuba on the south coast of Fiji’s principal island, Viti Levu. My driver/guide, Stino Elliot, had tried dealing with the flat tire himself, but decided he needed professional help, so we stuttered into a filling station on the outskirts of the capital, fortunately just a few blocks from our misfortune. Stino had bought a bag of powdered kava root at a farmer’s market in Suva, tossed it into the glove box and told me we’d mix some up with water when we got to our hotel in Deuba. But now we had some time to kill, so he took a chipped porcelain bowl he kept in his van, grabbed the bag of powder and headed for the men’s room to mix us some potion. Everything I’d read
about kava was considerably less than revealing. It produces a euphoria but isn’t a drug. It has side effects that affect the brain and/or the liver, or it doesn’t. What the hell, I was in Fiji to write about some of the inexplicable things Fijians do that seem to have no rational explanations, except some preposterous legends that the locals say explain them. Stino emerged from the bathroom with his chipped bowl sloshing a brownish liquid that looked like runny cement, balanced on the clenched fist of his left hand. It seemed a bit of a chore to balance the bowl that way, but I assumed there was a ceremonial process by which you imbibed, even if the ceremony was performed in the parking lot 5
