The Suva Bay Fiji Story

                                                                        The Suva Bay Fiji Story

                                                                                         1993

                                                                             Written 01/04/2017

                                                                                 Howard Yasgar

                                    A true story that happened in Fiji, it was a one in a million chance

In Dec of 1993, I was talking to my good friend Neil Metcalf  who was living in Brisbane Australia.

Neil suggested that after my yearly business was done in Taiwan, my wife Katherine and I should come and visit him in Brisbane.

Neil said that if we could come to see him and his wife Roselyn , he would then like us to join hem a trip to Fiji,

It was where he and Roselyn had spent their honeymoon.

Neil said that he wanted to take us to the very same resort where he was married. It all sounded pretty exciting so we told Neil that we would do it.

Now, here comes the interesting part of the story.

At my business in Miami we have a room where we kept our fax and copy machine.

Over one of the desks, someone had put up a beautiful 8-1/2 x 11 picture of swaying palm trees with water in the background, I assumed it was a Florida picture someone had  cut out of a magazine.

Every time I went into the room, I looked at the picture, thinking it was taken somewhere in Florida, and finally one day, I went over and looked closely at it to see where the picture had be taken. In fine print it said  “Suva Bay Fiji”.

Wow, what a coincidence, here I was, planning a trip to Fiji, and here was a picture that must have been taken somewhere in Fiji.

So I gently removed the picture off of the wall.

I showed my wife the picture and we decided to take the picture with us to Fiji, who knows, there was possibly one chance in a million we would recognize the place where the picture was taken.

We were on a mission.                    

Well once we were in Fiji, Our friend Neil was a perfect tour guide, and he took us sightseeing everywhere.

Eventually we ended up heading for a hotel in the capital city of Suva.

On the way to the hotel we passed Suva bay.

I took out the picture, but nothing around Suva Bay looked even close.

After checking into the hotel in Suva, I decided to give finding the picture one last shot.

When we went downstairs for supper my wife and I walked over to the front desk clerk and I took out the picture and showed it to him.

He studied it for about a minute and said, sure, he said, I know this picture, it was published in a magazine years ago. It was taken from the balcony of room 235 upstairs on the second floor.

He said the room is presently unoccupied, would you like to see it? Sure, we said, so he took us upstairs.

At room 235 we walked out on the balcony with the picture in hand, and sure enough there it was, the swaying palm trees with Suva Bay in the background. We had actually found the exact spot the picture was taken from, our mission in was accomplished.