This is part two of my travelog from Track II diplomacy in the Pacific. I have no idea how many of these I’ll have time to write but thanks for reading! ✌️
I needed to get to Suva to start the Track II work. You can take a 40-minute flight from Nadi airport to Suva, but I opted to tap into my inner Tom Friedman (f*ck that guy) and take in the sites while chatting up my driver for the three and a half hour trek.
The drive cut into rolling green tropical forests, ran along oceanside roads, and passed through a few shanty towns that appeared to be smaller versions of Nadi. The billboards along the way were surprising. Mostly ads for Fanta and Coca-Cola, which I imagine would do fine out here without a marketing campaign.
The ocean views along maybe an hour of the drive were spectacular, but not an improvement on what I’ve experienced in Hawai’i or New Zealand. The hills and tropical foliage were, you know, green. I’m spoiled.
The most notable sight during the three and a half hours was tens of thousands of little busted shacks. The houses dotted the landscape everywhere, and they were constituted of whatever was available—cement blocks, wood paneling, rusted metal sheets. Improvisational chic. Many had rectangular holes where windows were meant to go. Instead of favelas concentrated in tightly packed patrollable areas like in Brazil, what you had was a giant island with favela-type housing strewn everywhere.
The thought I kept returning to is that this place would be really hard to conquer. Its square acreage is much larger than most islands in the Pacific, the landscape would favor guerilla locals, and the population is fairly spread out. As Fiji’s political history would seem to confirm, it’s a place where it might not be that hard to orchestrate a takeover of the government, but if you faced any serious opposition at all, you’d have a damn precarious hold on power.
When I get to Suva, they have all of us speakers staying at the Holiday Inn. Not the Sofitel, to be sure, but nothing is, and it’s surely the world’s nicest Holiday Inn. Also, my room is oceanfront, so I can hardly complain. On some level, I’m way more comfortable here.


As it happens, the hotel is across the street from the parliament building, which was the site of a military coup led by a spicy young lieutenant colonel in 1987 (read on because this story gets crazy).