Every once in a while, I get drawn to a place with absolutely no idea what it is that’s drawn me there. Today, we were in Suva, which is the capital of Fiji, or at least one of the largest cities in the area. I had been here before and honestly there is not a great deal to see, and the heat is well…hot. But I did a little digging and found a museum that was at the top of all the review sites and decided that that was where we were going. Didn’t matter that I had no real idea what was there, for some reason, that was absolutely 100% where we were going.
Of course, we didn’t get there right away. We didn’t get off the ship until around lunch and food is important after all, so we wandered until we found a beautiful little floating restaurant anchored just off the harbor. For the first while we were there we were their only customers, which surprised me because this place was only a few minutes walk from the ship, and it was a lovely sit down restaurant with very friendly staff. Granted, it did run on Island Time, which meant it took what felt like a very long time just to get our drinks, but the food was worth it and the sea breeze even more so.
Once we finished lunch we just started walking. I had no idea how far away the museum was, I was just determined that even if it took us the rest of the afternoon, we were going to get there.
As it turned out, it took a lot less time than we anticipated. Because it turned out we didn’t have to walk hardly at all. Amras spotted a music shop about four blocks down the street we were ambling along, so we stopped in and started chatting, and the owner actually offered us a ride to the museum!
Any other country I would have balked at the offer, but these people (this was a little family run music store) you could tell they were good people, and we had been chatting with them for a long time by then. These were not the type of people that were going to drive you off somewhere and never give you back. So we climbed into their store van and they zipped us up the rest of the way to the museum.
There *are* still good people in the world.
This fact was emphasised by the fact that the clerk at the museum counter let us in for half price…I’m still not exactly sure why, but I think it may have just been a slow day and she felt kind of sorry for us having come all this way and ending up not able to get in.
So in we went.
Right as we walked in there was a full-sized double-hulled Polynesian voyaging canoe, which all by itself was absolutely breathtaking. These things were running across the oceans before most cultures were even considering going near the sea. Looking at something that huge and that historical knocks the breath out of you for a moment.
But that wasn’t – as it turned out – why I’d had to come.
I wandered through the various displays of different antique vessels and found myself stopping in front of a large glass case with what looked like an unimportant lump of wood. I walked closer, and then I stopped dead, and I found that my finger tips were on the glass – something I have realized I do in museums, much to the annoyance of some museum guards – because it lets me read the object I’m looking at.
Um…honey…?
Yeah?
Amras was still looking at the canoes, but I was unwilling to look away from what I was staring at for more than a second to call over to him
I think I found why I had to come here…
Oh?
I pointed at the sign in the case: HMS BOUNTY – RUDDER
That shapeless lump of wood was not just a piece of random driftwood. That was the actual last surviving known piece of one of the most famous tall ship wrecks in history. Sitting there, right in front of me, in a tiny museum in the middle of Fiji. I was crying before I even realized I was crying. The only time I have ever been sideswiped like that is when I stumbled on the Strad violin in Florence. I could have stood and stared at that case for hours. I wish I could describe what it was like to stand there and know that I was looking at something…so incredible.
I…don’t believe it…
I don’t remember what was in the rest of the museum. A great many beautiful textiles, butterflies and beetles the size of a closed fist (I wouldn’t really want to run into one of those in living form) and a great many ancient ceremonial sorcerer’s tools…but I had already seen what I was supposed to see.
After all the years I’ve been doing this…sometimes it is amazing to be totally surprised by what somewhere has to offer you.