Waiyevo is the village where Frank’s exhausting walk toward the 180th meridian brings him into contact with Libby Lesuma, a shopkeeper whose hospitality reshapes the journey. The village becomes a hinge between his solitary trek and his renewed encounter with Ana and José, while its Cannibal Café sets the island’s cheerful present against the remembered violence of its past.

Setting and Arrival

After meeting the Spanish couple, Frank decides to walk the five kilometres to the 180th meridian, where he expects to find a monument marking the International Date Line. The long walk gives him time to observe island life, but by the time he reaches Waiyevo his feet hurt. The village lies less than a kilometre from the line, making it a resting point near the journey’s destination.

Libby Lesuma’s Hospitality

In Waiyevo, Frank meets Libby Lesuma, a friendly Australian married to a Fijian man. She runs both a grocery shop and a souvenir shop and is surrounded by children. When Frank points out a coconut palm and asks whether she fears a falling coconut might hit one of them, Libby says sharks worry her more, though she cannot forbid the children from swimming. A scratch, however, means they must stay on the beach because sharks can smell blood from far away.

Learning that Frank has walked from Maravu, Libby asks whether he is hungry. He admits that he is ravenous and jokes that he had not expected to find a hamburger restaurant along the road. With a warm, maternal smile, she leads him to a small tavern tucked behind the two shops by the water. Frank is its only customer; the simple meal gives him a chance to gather himself before the remaining kilometre to the date-line monument.

The Cannibal Café

The tavern is called the Cannibal Café, and its conspicuous red-lettered sign reads, “We’d love to have you for dinner”. The joke gives the meal a disquieting double meaning. Frank reflects that the cheerful and considerate people around him are only a couple of generations removed from a time when, as he imagines it, he might have been put in a cooking pot. Their gracious service and the tourists’ welcome bring his attention to the unsettling proximity between hospitality and the history being playfully invoked.

Frank also wonders whether the descendants of cannibals feel a frivolous connection to that past, and whether their welcoming greetings might coexist with an appetite for outsiders. He speculates, without claiming certainty, about whether an attraction to human flesh could persist in the genes, and whether those who disliked it might have been less likely to survive. The café’s name thus turns an ordinary stop for food into a moment of dark, self-conscious reflection on historical memory and inheritance.

Return to the Monument

After reaching the monument, Frank is preparing for the long walk back to Maravu when a large black four-wheel-drive vehicle pulls up. Ana and José get out. Ana explains that Libby told them they might find him there: they had business in the village, heard that he had passed through, and thought he might want a ride back. Frank is relieved; he had misjudged the time, the distance, and how far his feet could carry him along the dusty road, with dinner only two hours away.

Ana takes photographs of the monument, the vehicle, José, and Frank. Waiyevo therefore links the kindness of Libby’s meal with the chance return of Ana and José: Frank’s walk, which had left him tired and uncertain about getting back, ends with the people he had encountered earlier offering a ride and preserving the meeting in photographs.