Around the World in 50 Years (20 page)

Tuvalu is too impoverished to help itself. It has no natural resources, little income, no potable water save whatever rain can be collected on roofs and stored in tanks, and no longer any agriculture since salt water has invaded the pits that the natives had for centuries dug into the sand and filled with compost so they could grow
pulaka,
a form of taro that was their dietary staple. All that these 10,000 ethnic Polynesians have left are a few scrawny chickens pecking along the almost-deserted single-lane road; a pig or two in a pen out back of a collapsing tin-roofed shack; sometimes a peeling old fishing dory; and a flower-filled burial ground in their front yards where they inter their ancestors, whom they dearly respect, but whose spirits they no longer worship after being converted to Christianity.

Tuvalu's only income is derived from remittances sent by workers who toil overseas, some international aid, and the sale of stamps and commercial fishing licenses. Nothing tempts more than a thousand tourists a year to visit this flat, plain, quiet community that has no lamb, beef, diet sodas, beauty parlors, theaters, cell phones, HBO, or reliable Internet.

Since I can endure only so much sadness and tranquility, I wanted, after three days on Funafuti, to go diving, but there was no dive shop in the nation—and for good reason, as I learned too late. I trudged back and forth along the main (and only) road down the center of the capital island searching on both sides for boat mooring places and finally found a 19-year-old who agreed, for a $100, to borrow a boat and throw together some snorkeling stuff. I went back to the Vaiaku Lagi, the country's only hotel, and rounded up a group of receptive guests: two Kiwis, an Aussie, an Italian, and a shy, deaf Japanese woman named Midori who was an Olympic badminton player. She told us, through her sign-language interpreter, that, although she'd never gone snorkeling before, she was eager to try it because, in the silent world beneath the waves, she would be, for the first time in her life, equal to all the rest of us—no longer the child of a lesser god.

But it was not to be.

The next morning dawned bright and cloudless, and the boy I'd hired took us 40 minutes out to a flat, shallow reef, covered by six to 15 feet of water, near a steep drop-off. We backflipped into the clear water, but inexperienced Midori jumped and landed atop some spiny coral heads and cried for help. She had badly scraped her leg and was bleeding profusely. We gathered around her and gently lifted her into the motorboat, where the Aussie elevated her leg while I applied pressure with a handkerchief to staunch the bleeding.

When we were certain her bleeding had stopped and that she was not in shock, we gulped some air and went back down to explore. We'd only been under a few seconds when in zoomed a large, blunt-nosed monster with faint vertical stripes along its sides—the dreaded tiger shark, a voracious hunter with powerful jaws; sharp, highly serrated teeth; and a superb sense of smell that had undoubtedly enabled it to home in on Midori's blood.

I froze as the brute brushed past me, heading toward the back of the boat where Midori had been. The tiger is one of the three deadliest sharks to humans but, unlike the great white, which will often take a bite of an arm or leg and decide it doesn't like the taste, the tiger will usually devour its entire prey. Tigers generally live deeper but will venture onto small shallow reefs like the one we were on.

I held my breath for the longest I ever had, let myself slowly rise to the surface without making any motion to attract unwanted attention, gently rolled onto my back, and directly sculled my way to the boat and lunged in. According to our Italian companion, who stayed down the longest, the shark nosed around, as if searching for something, but, not finding it, headed back down to the deep drop.

When we were all in the boat, I berated the “captain,” who was by now slightly conked on kava, for taking us into shark territory. He pulled up his T-shirt to show us a jagged, dark purple, partly healed wound in his chest, the size of a serving platter, where he said a tiger shark had taken this bite out of him a few months before
at this same spot
. He looked at us with little sympathy and shrugged: “What's the big deal? None of you was hurt.”

The only unpleasant occurrence on the next leg was caused by a huge breadfruit—about the weight of three grapefruits—that dropped 40 feet from its tree and beaned me while I was exploring the ruins of an ancient civilization on the island of Nan Midol in the Pohnpei Group in Micronesia. Luckily, as my friends have frequently pointed out, I have a rather hard head, so it takes more than an errant breadfruit to do me in. (A coconut falling 100 feet might do the job, so I looked up frequently during the rest of this tropical island foray.)

While scubaing off Truk and Palau, where dive tourism accounts for nearly half of the local economy, I did see squids, sharks, and octopi, but they were not large and acted more frightened that I'd eat them than the other way around. I saw no sea snakes, which are aggressive and had almost gotten me on the Great Barrier Reef in 1981, and none of the pain-inflicting, paralyzing stonefish, scorpion fish, and lion fish I'd often encountered in the warm waters of the Red Sea and Indo-Pacific region.

The Truk Lagoon was fascinating from underwater, filled with haunting relics of WW II. It had been the forward anchorage of the Japanese Imperial Combined Fleet, home to more than 20 warships, five airstrips, a seaplane base, torpedo boat station, submarine repair shop, and communications center, the Rising Sun's most formidable stronghold on a conquered island.

Until February 16, 1944.

That's when the Navy launched Operation Hailstone and battered Truk Lagoon for three days with dive bombers and torpedo planes from five fleet carriers. We sank 15 warships, 32 merchant vessels, and sent more than 250 enemy planes to the bottom, where they remain today, as the “Ghost Fleet of Truk Lagoon,” almost all lying virtually intact and clearly visible in their shallow tombs after more than 60 years, with just a bit of seaweed and coral encrustation, all resting in peace in the largest ship graveyard under earth's oceans.

When I came upon the well-preserved remains of a Curtiss Helldiver, one of the 25 American planes shot down during the attack, resting level in less than ten feet of clear water, I swam slowly down, slid into the opened cockpit, and silently thanked the missing pilot, and the others of the Greatest Generation, for having rid the world of the Axis menace and preserved our liberty, as I teared up and my face mask misted over.

Three days later the Aussie quarantine service finally got me. When I flew back to Brisbane to change planes, I reentered Oz with the same PNG souvenirs I'd taken both in and out of Brissie three weeks before, but got a much tougher inspector. After a heated argument, he agreed to allow in my dog bones and boar tusks, but insisted that the ornaments strung
between
the bones were not beads, as I averred, but “dried seeds of a noxious weed” that could not enter. I offered to leave the ornaments in quarantine at the airport overnight, but he rejected that, disdainfully cut both necklaces apart, and chucked out the seeds—I mean beads.

I flew out the next day and established a new personal worst by touching down in seven airports in one 24-hour period. While I was in Japan, and despite my having a reservation, Air Nauru had decided to discontinue their flights from Honiara, capital of the Solomon Islands, to Majuro, capital of the Marshall Islands. To make it to the Marshalls, I now had to fly from Honiara back to Brissie, sleep in the transit lounge, fly to Cairns, change planes, fly to Guam, change planes, fly down to Truk, then to Ponepae, Kosrae, Kwajelein, and, finally, Majuro. This was like flying from New York to Boston via Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Montreal. But I had to do it: The Marshalls were a country.

I also set a personal worst record for most continuous days of rain—33! I spent much of Day 34 drying clothes to vanquish nascent mold.

On the island of Tongatapu, the largest in the Kingdom of Tonga, the challenge was to buy gas and food on a Sunday. Tonga is one of the world's most devoutly Christian nations; hence, all commerce ceases from Saturday midnight to Sunday midnight, and
nothing
is open except the emergency room at the hospital.

The natives were long ago converted and are now either Catholic, Free Wesleyan, Methodist, Mormon, or Church of Tonga. The converts turn out in droves to Thank the Lord for whatever they have, all wearing their spotless, bright Sunday best, all walking in smiling family groups to church, where they romp and stomp and sing and clap and have a grand old Godly time. One minister told me that some parishioners have apologized to him for the devouring of his great-great-grandfather by their great-great-grandfathers. Or was this his attempt at missionary humor?

I'd been looking forward to trying Tonga's famous fruit-bat pie and their flying fox fricassee, but I was warned that these little hairy buggers were off limits to tourists and reserved solely for the nation's king and the royal family. I did detect a loophole—and only a New York lawyer would argue this—in that the king, after a 40-year reign, had died some months before, and his successor would not be crowned until a year later. Therefore, since there was no king …

I decided not to push it and to wait for Palau, where the indigenes also savored these crunchy critters, but where anyone could eat them. I went to a bakery in Koror, the former capital, and found several fruit-bat pies for sale for $35. But they were not what I'd envisioned; I'd hoped for a tart-sized taste, not a ten-inch multimeal. And I'd assumed the bakers gutted and cleaned the bats and ground them all up like mincemeat. Instead, each pie contained ten to twelve whole bats: And I do mean
whole
! Complete! Entire! The Works: wings, heads, fur, feet, and all. And they were all facing
up,
laid out side-by-side inside the fringing reef of brown crust, with their fragile little wings spread and touching, their hair thickly coated with dark purple jelly, hirsute ears erect and slightly pinkish, their tiny pointed teeth shining—and all of them looking, pathetically and accusingly,
right at me
.

I suddenly remembered my vow to never eat an endangered species. Surely these little guys must be endangered, right? I sort of recall having read that in one of my environmental magazines. I decided that I'd better make sure before I indulged. Maybe on Guam, where there were more bats, and the shops might sell me a simple order of fried wings? To go. With a side of slaw.

I tried to make up for this culinary cop-out by eating the mangrove clams in Palau, the mud crabs in Tuvalu, sea cucumber jelly in the Marshalls, the giant coconut crabs in Vanuatu, and drinking the kava in Fiji.

The one thing I steadfastly refused to eat is what has become, thanks to our WW II GIs, the national dish of almost every island nation in the Pacific: SPAM. I never knew there were so many brands and varieties. By my tally, the average South Pacific supermarket devotes 20 percent of its shelf space to SPAM and its progeny, and some smaller shops push it up to 30 percent. The locals eat it for breakfast, creamed, on toast (similar to the chipped beef dish that, in the army, we called SOS and uniformly hated); then cold for lunch, straight out of the can, topped with pineapple or papaya; and in all sorts of disgusting heated variations for dinner.

The other big dish in all these nations—again, blame our GIs—was fried chicken with French fries, the combination of which was producing a Generation XL of Big Fat Mommas and Papas, weighing in at way over 300 pounds, and giving these people one of the world's highest rates of heart disease and diabetes.
Pacific Island nations occupy the seven top spots on the WHO global obesity rankings
.

The majority of the islanders I saw never exercised, but sat all day (except Sunday) gossiping, listening to pop radio, guzzling Foster's, and thinking about
maybe
mending that leaky roof or dead motorcycle next week. At least we can blame the Foster's on the Aussies.

We cannot blame the Aussies for the multiple cups of kava the denizens of these islands ingest every day, a slightly sedating, foul-smelling potion they imbibe with much devotion and ceremony. It tasted to me like the bottled coyote piss I used to spray around my vegetable garden to keep away the deer and rabbits, and it combines the worst effects of Novocain and Dramamine.

Kava is brewed by grinding, pounding, or chewing the root of the kava plant, and is alleged by Western forensics to cause severe liver damage, a malady seemingly unknown to the Pacific Islanders, many of whom couldn't get through a day without a kava infusion, and who often live to their 80s—provided they stay away from burgers, franks, fries, SPAM, candy, and the other junk food to which
we
introduced them.

My next port of call was the island-nation of Vanuatu, birthplace of bungee jumping. More than 30 years ago, when it was a dependency called the New Hebrides, a Kiwi tourist who observed their tower-jumping ritual—a test of manhood among the locals—decided to make it safer, with sturdy elastic bands tied to a firm tower, and imported it to New Zealand, from whence it spread to Australia and around the world. In Vanuatu, however, it has remained for centuries unchanged and unnerving. Where the Kiwi had merely observed, Big Al intended to participate.

I climbed up a rickety wooden tower, as tall as a five-story building, to a shaky platform where they affixed jungle vines to my legs, as a group below turned over the soil beneath the platform so my face wouldn't get
too
smashed up. As I fell, I would
theoretically
break or bend some of the saplings that supported the jump platform, which would
supposedly
slow my descent from deadly to merely dangerous. As I timorously peered down from the sickening height of 60 feet, I suddenly realized that Vanuatu might be short on trauma surgeons and that a broken neck might negatively impact my global goal.