Nik Maack’s Reviews > Transit of Venus: Travels in the Pacific > Status Update

"You couldn’t say the Americans were evil. But they were terrifying."

Best part: our hero gets kerosene poisoning because of all the beer he drank. Turns out the locals store kerosene in the beer bottles, and then they return the bottles to the brewery, where they aren't properly cleaned before being reused. Result: narrator spends two days stuck in bed.

The surface of life was as bland as a commercial, & if you were happy when the sun shone, & when there was a grog bowl or a drinks waiter nearby, then Fiji was the place for you. I hated it. The world was full of torture for fun, conspiracies of silence, cruelty much worse than this dullness. But people – tourists and Fijians – wandered around in teeshirts that said ‘Don’t worry – Be happy’ & I wanted to shoot them.

"There were three days to kill. In the mornings I swam in the murky water of Nadi bay; I tried all the Chinese restaurants in town; at nights I drank too much Fiji Bitter. These seemed to be the things everyone did: in fact they were most people’s idea of a holiday."

"In the dark low room he said: ‘So. How did you like New Caledonia?’ I said I thought the French might be the most comical and dangerous nation in the Pacific."

"Kipone, the Tongan steward, shimmied to the table, carrying gammon embalmed in gravy and garlanded with tinned vegetables. Like the decor, it had the flavour of something abandoned out of lack of interest."

Very light and very drole. The description of angry drunken Australians is what hooked me.