Page 17 - Fiji Traveller Issue 3

By Sera Tikotikovatu-Sefeti

It was a beautiful morning in the capital, a
perfect day for a walk, and I’m heading off to
one of Peter Sipeli’s guided walks of Suva. I
thought I might be about to relive the tedium
of my childhood history lessons, however, the
two hours with Sipeli have made me question
what I learned in high school.
“Too often when the history of Suva is told,
it’s still from a colonial perspective; the people’s
reflections are on the built environment, and I
think it’s almost unfair,” Sipeli says.
“The story of Suva must also be about
immigrants like my parents. I tell the story of
my parents, my mother got here in 1953 from
Samoa; she’s Samoan-Scottish, and my dad is
from Lau, Vanuabalavu, and he came to Suva
in the 1950s."
We started the tour at the busy Suva bus
station, where we sat and soaked up our
familiar surroundings at a different pace.
"There’s more to the life of the city than the
built colonial environment; the 50 landmarks
don’t make up the true story of the city, and the
reason I want to start here is that over 20,000
people use the bus station each day.
“The bus station was built in the late 1940s,
at the same time that they were building the
port, as they were rethinking Suva as the port
of entry into the Pacific," Sipeli said.
As I listened to him talk about the bus
terminal, the bean carts, and the market, I
reflected that the busyness of our daily routine
means we often forget to sit and really see our
surroundings. I soaked up the activity around
me, old men and women pecking at their
packets of bean, the guy that sells newspapers,
the conversations that washed over us.
As we looked across to where Indian sweet
stands are all lined up, Sipeli noted, "The
transition from mobile bean carts to stationary
sweet stations occurred due to laws prohibiting
them from moving around in the 1990s." My
eyes grew wide as I took in that information.
"The power of these sweet stations is in the
afternoons, when schoolchildren flock to these
stands to buy their favourite snacks before
boarding the bus to their final destination," he
said.
I hide my smirk because, when I was one of
those schoolchildren 19 years ago, my friends
and I would scrounge together every little coin
we had, even looking on the ground hoping
somebody dropped 10 cents, to meet our bean
and tamarind fix for the afternoon.
Right next to the bean carts are food vendors,
where women prepare dishes over kerosene

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