Date One: Strangers in a strange place.
The clouds were the biggest and puffiest ever seen. The airplane meal the most delicious, and I had just had the most riveting conversation with the passenger next to me. My head was in a rare place with everything bright and beautiful as I headed to Fiji, searching for an elusive sponge.
In the early ’90s, I had a dream job. Some scientists looking for a cure to cancer hired me to search for sponges and microorganisms in some of the most remote spots in the world. We dived in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Fiji, and Hawaii and successfully found an endless supply of strange and wonderful creatures, including your father.
Because the Fijian islands are renowned for their waves, it seemed like an excellent place to learn to surf, so I set out three days ahead of my fellow scientists. I had my portable laboratory and dive equipment, and a few clothes, no space for a surfboard. Hopefully, I could rent one there. I read about a windsurfing spot called Sigatoka, and the manager of my very basic hotel said I could safely hitchhike a ride there, as it wasn’t far. He was the manager, so I believed him.
The next day I stood next to the Queen’s Road, which back then was an empty road lined with farms and tropical trees. I didn’t realize what a strange sight I made, a tall blond woman in shorts waiting alone on a deserted road in Fiji. Of course, immediately, a truck stopped and offered me a ride to the remote beach. Everyone knows women shouldn’t hitchhike, especially in foreign countries, but my new vision of the world made me ignore any feelings of foreboding, and I climbed aboard. Feeling excited at the possibility of windsurfing or surfing, I happily chatted away at the man. It was only when he said how he would like to take me home and have sex that I reclaimed a little sensibility and realized I had just put myself in a stupidly dangerous position.
I pulled at my door handle, demanding he stop right there and let me off, or I would report him to the police, but he just laughed and said he was joking. Remember, this was before mobile phones. After a stilted conversation in my non-existent Fijian and his English, we reached the remote dunes of Sigatoka River, and I jumped out of the truck into an abandoned windsurfing resort.
The resort lay beside some dunes leading to a beach, surrounded by a farm with banana and palm trees. It looked like an excellent place to windsurf for beginners, but there was no surf, no boards, and nobody around. The resort was more of a surf lodge with basic rooms and a lounge area on a beach, but nothing else. I found the guest book among some old novels lying on a table in the empty reception area and read the entries from past lodgers. They all said they enjoyed the place, but about a year earlier.
My open-minded feeling drained away and trepidation oozed in. I needed to get out of the eerie ghost resort before something terrible happened. I jogged back down the dirt road through the dunes and island brush to a small town on the main road and was lucky to find a bus heading back to my hotel.
The second day of searching for a surfboard began after an early swim in the lodge’s small pool. The manager told me I could find a surfboard at a posh hotel in Pacific Harbor, and there was a bus that would take me there. Still trusting the manager’s knowledge, I was waiting again beside the empty road in front of my lodgings when a muscular man with a great tan walked across the street.
“Are you Danish?” he asked, giving me a strange look.
“No, I’m sorry I’m from California.” I was wearing pink flowered cycling shorts and a large Powerbar T-shirt, so again was a rare sight on the side of a road in Fiji. “I’m here on a research trip diving for sponges, but I arrived early, so I could learn to surf, and now I’m looking for a surfboard. My hotel manager said I could find a surfboard in Pacific Harbor.”
He raised his eyebrows and smiled. “There is no surf in Pacific Harbor, but I have a spare board.”
What he didn’t know is that I had no idea how to surf. We climbed on the bus to Hideaways Resort, where he had been staying just down the road and talked the whole way about our shared passion for sea sports. The bus left us at a stunning resort that looked out on to a perfect reef break. The tropical trees and huge verandas with hammocks were perfect for a surf holiday. Your dad had been staying there with friends, but the clerk had mistakenly checked him out when they had left, so he had sought refuge in my basic lodge down the road, leaving everything behind for the night.
We reclaimed the boards, and I spent the rest of the day trying to surf on perfect waves. I'm sure your dad wished he had never offered the use of his board as he watched me tumbling about over a sharp coral reef. Both the board and I survived that adventure, and my new friend invited me to stay at his nice hotel. The next day we would take a boat out to the remote reef breaks. How could I turn that down?
That evening after kokoda, raw fish marinated in lime and rourou a spinach-like dish, we stood drinking Fiji Bitter, watching the moon on the waves beside the hotel. I felt like I was part of a novel when your dad wrapped his arm around me and kissed me for the first time. My heart and mind swirled with intensity and confusion. I had gone to Fiji looking for a world of adventure only to meet this ex-naval officer who entertained me with his stories of surfing and the British Navy.
The next day we took a small boat to reef surf breaks called Restaurants and Wilkes Pass. Embarrassed by how badly I surfed, I kept assuring him I was much better at windsurfing. I didn’t know these wave spots were famous in the surfing world and not for a beginner surfer. After that hot day on the expensive tiny local boat we had rented, I invited him to join my group, diving for sponges in Benga Lagoon.
My colleagues were a bit surprised when I showed up with your dad, but luckily said nothing and let him join us. It was after he added the wrong sponge to our collection that we realized that he was best suited to just holding the dive bag and not scraping sponges off rocks with a butter knife. We dived with our cameras and butter knives on to an abundant reef, ignoring all the clownfish, parrotfish, barracuda, and numerous other species. We only wanted specific orange sponges that contained a compound active against cancer cell lines. The sponges were called Jaspis johnstoni and Jaspis coriacea, with jasplakinolide and a series of bengamide compounds, named for the location we were diving, Beqa (Benga) Lagoon.
I think I made a good impression on that first date.
Date 2: Hostages
While the whole first date was a fantastic coincidence of two like-minded people meeting on the side of the road, the next coincidence was even more significant. Two months later, my group was scheduled to dive on some of the most remote islands in Indonesia, and your dad was planning a surf trip to Indonesia for the same time. While he surfed some monster waves of Ulu Watu and Padang Padang in Bali, we were on an ancient dive boat floating on perfect diving lagoons in Halmahera.
Our remote island was a place of perfection only reached after a night passage on a boat, tossed about by stormy winds across the Moluccan Sea from Manado. This 200-kilometer trip was filled with diesel fumes and altered by a filter of the drug Lariam. We were not aware that this antimalarial could cause depression and sometimes insanity in some people. I was one of those people.
The untouched reefs of our remote island provided a perfect spot for sponge searching. The plethora of animal species was mind-boggling. Sometimes the density of fish was so high it felt like a hallucination, especially on Lariam. Everything was larger and more abundant, especially the rays and sharks. One day after another incredible dive, we were relaxing with one of our few beers next to the lush green island with a waterfall plunging into the sea from a tall volcanic cliff, when a rib pulled uploaded with men in camouflage with machine guns.
Before the men climbed aboard, all the women locked themselves in their cabins. The gunmen demanded our passports through the locked doors. After giving them up, we felt quite vulnerable. Indonesia, at that time, was not a safe place to be without your passport. We sat on our boat for two more days hearing that the men were going to throw our sponges overboard or sink our vessel, but they didn’t threaten our lives.
After the first ten hours, we crept out of our cabins and sat about on the deck, watching the men drink our beer and eat the candy we had for the village children. The trip manager told me off for wearing a bikini, which isn’t the most appropriate outfit when being held hostage in a Muslim country. Finally, they demanded all our money in return for our passports. We made the exchange and escaped to another sleepless night, powering back to the main island, Sulawesi.
In Manado, one of the main towns, I said goodbye to my workmates and flew to Bali to meet your dad. Not having had much sleep, in a bit of a shock from the hostage situation, and high on Lariam, he says I was a bit strange, and he wondered just what kind of woman he had agreed to meet in that surf mecca. After a few good sleeps, the antimalarial wore off, and we started to enjoy the magical place. We surfed perfect waves then relaxed with a meal of banana jaffles (waffles), thick Bali coffee, and painful massages given by the local women. One woman named Christina and one, Nancy Reagan, seemed to know your dad because he had bought a T-shirt or bangle from them on his last visit, three years earlier.
My new companion soon realized I was hopeless at surfing and bought me a boogie board. However, the waves there were so extreme that even the boogie board was too scary. But in the end, it was all good, and I was able to sit outside the break on the board, getting some closeup photos of him riding in perfect tubes. I had the adventure I was looking for, and he got pictures of himself.
We left Bali together and flew to Singapore. Because we had surfboards, we had to take an old bus, and it couldn’t make it up the ramp to our hotel in that hot, humid city. I stayed with the boards at the bottom of the ramp while your dad checked us in. When men dressed in maroon uniforms started to pick up our luggage, I defended our boards and shooed them away. Your dad had to run down the hill and assure me that these were porters from our hotel. He had checked us into the Ritz Carlton.
The highlight of that stay in the Ritz was the huge bath that lay at eye-level with a freeway and a warning that said the car drivers could see you in the tub. I’m not sure you can get a more significant contrast than that between the old dive boat in paradise and the Ritz in this upscale city. I should’ve known then that my life was going to be turned upside down, and I was starting on the most excellent adventure of my life with a person that shared pretty much all my passions.
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