Secret Royalty On Tour

I have been to Fiji eight times. Eight. Not once did it rain more than what we all know as a sun shower.

I want that on the record before I tell you what Samoa did to us.

This trip was a gift.  Literally. Five years ago, the Latino left Argentina, left his family, his job, his apartment and an entire life that fit him and moved to New Zealand for reasons that were, at their core, entirely my fault. I mostly gave up some wardrobe space. He gave up his entire existence and relocated it to the bottom of the world on the strength of what he thought we could be. Bravo to this courageous man.  

Five years felt like the right moment to mark. And I had been selling him this particular dream for most of them. Blue sky. Sea at blood temperature. Colourful fish darting around your body like you are suddenly, briefly, part of something luminous. Turtles in the wild. People so warm and friendly they make you feel chosen.

I had told him all of this with the confidence of someone who has been to Fiji eight times and knows exactly how the Pacific works.

Reader, it rained.

Not politely. Not briefly. Not in the apologetic way of a place that knows it is interrupting something. It rained apocalyptically. For five days, the lagoon we had come to snorkel in was the colour of wet concrete. The coral stayed mute. The fish had the sense to stay out of it.

The resort delivered umbrellas to our room the moment they understood the rain was not passing through. This was their way of acknowledging reality while maintaining complete deniability about it. The staff continued to smile The Smile. Nobody said the word rain. Nobody said anything that would require them to look directly at what was happening to the sky.

The latino, for his part, was fine.

That’s the thing about travelling with someone from his part of the world. He had already assumed the worst. Not out of pessimism exactly, more out of a philosophical position refined over a lifetime, which is that the universe is broadly indifferent to your plans and the correct response is a kind of elegant resignation. He had not built the dream the way I had built the dream. He had arrived open to whatever Samoa decided to do, which, as it turned out, was the correct emotional posture.

I, the architect of the dream, the woman who had sold him turtles and warm water and luminous fish with the certainty of someone who has done this eight times in Fiji, was the one standing under a tartan umbrella feeling personally affronted by a weather system.

We laughed. A lot, actually. There is something about shared absurdity with the right person that becomes its own kind of holiday.

And then, on the last full day, Samoa relented.

The sky opened into the blue I had promised. The sea was almost the temperature I had described. We snorkelled twice and saw reef fish and coral and the kind of underwater quiet that makes you forget you have been standing under an umbrella for five days feeling sorry for yourself. It came true, all of it, at the last possible moment, which is exactly how optimism works and exactly how it justifies itself.

The latino celebrated by staying in the water for ninety minutes.

He has come home with the most spectacular sunburn I have ever seen on a human being. The man who survived five days of rain, vindicated at last by the sun he had been waiting for, was immediately and thoroughly destroyed by it.

I have been to Fiji eight times. It never once rained.

I am choosing to learn nothing from this.