Scary

 

S is for...Steel

 

Steel is what my nerves are not made of. The first thing that got me rattled happened yesterday - hubby had gone on a business trip to Suva and was supposed to fly back last night after work. Rang me up to say his flight was cancelled and there was no space anywhere to be had, so he took a taxi back and was on the road at dead of night for some four hours, came back at 1:30 a.m. by which time I was beginning to freak out. 

 

Then this morning we landed up, by the kind offices of Google maps - at a single track bridge, which was just a narrow slab of concrete without any guardrails on the side, laid over a canal. Now we have been used to cars driving on the right side for 25 years, and Fiji, like India, drives on the left. So we are anyways tending to veer over on the 'wrong' side and have to consciously keep hugging the left side kerb. By the time we realised what we were up against, there was no scene of reversing and taking a different route. Cars on the opposite bank were flashing their lights at us to get a move on, so there was nothing for it but to go on.  Thankfully nothing happened, we got to the other side without any problems. But it was nerve wracking for anyone with soft serve floppy noodle nerves like mine. They were thoroughly wracked.

In the evening around 7:30, we went out in search for some slippers, hubby's have got left behind in that last, forgotten bag, and found much to our dismay that all the shops and markets were firmly shut. Maybe because it's a Saturday, or maybe because shops close early anyway out here in small town Fiji. Incidentally, I spotted a bookstore but couldn't go in obviously because it was shuttered. Then we got lost in the back roads of Nadi and I was terrified that we would somehow land up at that bridge again in the dark and this time there would be no saving us, the car would topple into that canal for sure. There were no streetlights and not much traffic, the GPS was asking us to turn off into even narrower, unsurfaced tracks, no way! So we just went on and on for miles through pitch dark sugar cane fields before we got to a proper lighted road again. From there we  managed to get back into roads which we recognised and ended up at an eatery we've been to before. My nerves by then had turned into wobbly jelly. 

So I came back and made this video from archival snaps to soothe  them a bit. Here it is :

 

 

A-Z Challenge 2022