The Suva Bay Fiji Story

1993

A True Story

Written 01/04/2017* 837 Words*

#164 By Howard Yasgar

It was In Dec of 1993, and I was working in my office in Miami.

I needed to make a photocopy, but our copy machine was in an adjoining room.

I went into the copy machine room, and I couldn’t help but notice there was a picture that someone had hung on the office wall.

It was an 8 x 11 black and white picture of swaying tropical palm trees with water in the background.

I could tell it was a professionally taken picture, and I assumed it was taken somewhere in South Florida.

For some strange reason the picture stayed in my mind all day.

The next time I went into the copy machine room I took a much closer look at the picture.

It was a page that someone had torn out of a magazine, and on the bottom, in the fine print, it said, “Suva Bay Figi”.

It was an eye-catching picture, and I wondered why anyone in Florida would hang up a picture taken of all places in Figi.

Every year, our company closed for the Christmas and New Year holidays which gave me the opportunity to travel to Taiwan and visit all our vendors and friends there.

When I was traveling to Taiwan, my wife usually went with me.

After our business was done in Taiwan, we usually took an additional week to vacation somewhere else in the orient.

This year, we hadn’t yet decided where we would go after our Taiwan business was done.

I received a call from my friend Neil Metcalf of Truck Electrics in Brisbane Australia.

Neil was not only a customer but over the years, he and his wife Ros had become good friends with us.

Neil said, he knew we would be in Taiwan around Christmas time, so he suggested that we fly to Australia, and meet up with them.

Neil said that he and Ros were celebrating their wedding anniversary, and they were going to Figi where they had been married, and they wanted us to go there with them.

I told my wife Katherine, and she agreed that a trip to Figi with Neil and Ros would be fun.

Well, I thought, what a coincidence, here I had this picture of beautiful tropical palm trees taken somewhere near Suva Bay in Figi, a place I had hardly even heard of before, and now I am going there.

I took the palm tree picture off the copy machine room wall and brought it home to show my wife.

I said, perhaps when we go to Figi with Neil and Ros, we can find out where this picture was taken.

I knew it was a one chance in a million of finding where the picture was taken, because it could have been done many years ago.

Once we were in Figi, I showed the picture to our friends and they said they also would keep an eye out as to where the picture was taken.

Neil’s company, Truck Electrics did business everywhere in Figi and he knew the country well, but he didn’t recognize the palm tree picture when I showed it to him.

Throughout the entire trip to Figi, Neil was an excellent tour guide, and when we headed for the capital city of Suva, and we were in the Suva Bay area, he stopped the car several times looking for where the picture might have been taken, but we had no luck.

There was nothing we could see in Figi that appeared even close to the picture.

We started to think that perhaps the picture was too old.

Once we were in the city of Suva, we checked into one of the better hotels there.

Because we didn’t have reservations Neil had picked a hotel randomly.

We decided to have an early supper, so late in the afternoon we headed downstairs to the hotel restaurant.

Before we went into the restaurant I decided to give the picture one last try and we all walked over to the front desk clerk.

I took out the picture and showed it to him, telling him the whole story about the picture hanging in my office in Miami, and how we had been looking everywhere around the Suva Bay area.

He studied the picture for about a minute and he said, “I know this picture, it was published in a tourist magazine several years ago.

I remember it because it was taken from the balcony of room 235 on the second floor of this hotel.

He said, “The room and balcony were presently unoccupied would we like to see it”?

We said sure, so he took us upstairs to room 235, and sure enough, there from the balcony were the swaying palm trees with Suva Bay in the background, it was exactly like it was in the picture.

Mission was accomplished.