Around the World in 50 Years (34 page)

In some ways the capital island of Tarawa was akin to Dune Road in the Hamptons. It's a 25-mile-long spit of sand no more than a few hundred yards wide and less than twelve feet high, with the ocean on one side, a ten-mile-wide lagoon on the other, and a two-lane road down the middle. Just make a few adjustments. Change the Hamptons sand to finely crushed coral; put a 22-mile-long reef a mile offshore on the ocean side; add six or seven serpentine twists and a couple of causeways of crushed coral and sand to connect several dozen separate islets; change the road to crumbled tarmac with open sewers and storm drains on either side instead of bike lanes; remove three zeroes from the value of the homes on each side; replace the carefully manicured gardens and hedges of the Hamptons with crabgrass, hibiscus, palm trees, breadfruit, and frangipani; deposit about 500 multicolored shipping containers along the road edge for use as stores, storage, and housing; throw in some lethargic, skinny mutts dozing in the sun, scampering chickens, and pigs grunting in the shade; add a dilapidated hamlet of weather-worn, corrugated tin-roofed shacks about every four miles or so, plus five or six down-scale lodges and handicrafts shops; and, wherever houses concentrated, a dark and dingy little stall selling dusty necessities at high prices; and, along the entire route and on all the beaches, strew every conceivable kind of refuse, wreckage, and rubbish, and you've got the picture—and an understanding of why only ten tourists alighted from the 737B that brought me there.

There are few private cars and almost no traffic in the poor island-nation of Kiribati, even here on Tarawa, the capital island. The country is only a few feet above sea level and will sink beneath the waves of our warming planet before the end of the century.

Another drawback is the absence of competitive banking. The nation has only one bank, resulting in monopolistic, obscene exchange rates. The guideline I use to determine if I'm getting a fair deal, even when I don't know the latest rate, it to compare the rate at which the bank is buying dollars to the rate at which it sells them. If the difference is around two or three percent, as it is in most big tourist cities, it's a fair shake and the bank is making a fair profit. The ANZ Bank on Kiribati had a spread of 12 percent, plus a 3 percent commission. If I had given them 108 USD, they'd give me 100 AUD, and if I gave them back those same 100 AUD, they'd give me only 92 USD. I'd lose 18 percent of my money! To make matters worse, no place in Kiribati let me pay for anything with USD, so I was compelled to exchange at the bank.

Kiribati could be a paradise if it cleaned up its act physically and fiscally. It has miles of potentially exquisite beaches unspoiled by any high-rise developments, a splendid abundance of collectible seashells, safe swimming, excellent reef and big-game fishing, no harmful snakes or animals, almost no mosquitoes, a constant, refreshing breeze that dissipated the heat, no beggars, nobody going hungry, no serious crime, and some of the world's most gentle, kindly, hospitable inhabitants. You could buy a house for less than your annual rent in the States. And no matter how poor your sense of direction, with only one road, and water on each side of it, you'd always find your way home.

It was an ideal place to lose track of time and get away from it all. The four-page weekly newspaper featured only sports stories and an occasional political scandal. The TV—despite the huge dish antenna outside my room—carried only one channel, and it was slavishly devoted to rugby, following the sport with the sun, almost 24/7, across the British Commonwealth, from Fiji to New Zealand, across Australia, to South Africa, to England. The only break was a program called
Monday Night Raw,
which I mistook for adult entertainment.

Mary's Motel, where I stayed, had Internet access, but it took more than half an hour to log on because the national system could handle only a few users at a time.

Kiribati had none of the street corner repairmen who flourish in most of the Third World. I found no cobblers (because many of the indigenes went barefoot and the others wore flip-flops they fixed with pieces of tape); no watch repairers (because the precise time in TomorrowLand was not vital, and you could get an inkling of the hour from the bright sun and shadows); no tailors or seamstresses (because it was cheaper to sew it at home); and nobody to repair or replace the cracked frame on my reading glasses (because there were no opticians, just a couple of shops that sold magnifying glasses).

Well aware how difficult it could be to buy essentials in a place like this, I'd packed three pair of glasses and a repair kit, but I sat on two of them in three days, cracking their frames, while a baggage handler crushed the third, whereupon I found, to my dismay, that my Krazy Glue had dried up since Africa. I commenced a nationwide glue search, covering six mini-marts, four hardware stores, and three office supply shops, in the last of which I found three tubes of Super Glue, only one of which was still usable. I liberally applied it to bond glass and rim so I could keep reading my paperbacks rather than go bonkers from boredom.

Many of the indigenes were Micronesians who understood some English, and most of the teenagers spoke fair English they learned in high school, but they all preferred to speak their own i-Kiribati, one of the 450 Oceanic languages. Long gone from the Pacific was the pidgin adapted from the 1940s GIs, which was still widely spoken when I first visited the South Seas in 1981. I missed it because it had a distinctive charm and was fun to puzzle out—as long as the message wasn't urgent. Some of it was simple, “Hurry, chop chop, me kickee ass bilong you.” Some was simplified, as when Apollo 14 landed two astronauts on the moon: “Tupela igo daun wokabout long mun.” (Two fellas went down and walked along the moon.) Some was a touching transformation rather than a literal translation, as when the first line of “The Lord's Prayer” became: “Papa bilong yumi Istap Antap.” (Father on top belongs to you and me.) And some, like the delightfully salient difference between women and men—“Bokis along missus”—I'll let you noodle over.

Kiribati became a country in 1979, after the British colony of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands peacefully divided. The mostly Micronesian Gilberts became Kiribati and the principally Polynesian Ellices became Tuvalu. Until 1985 Kiribati had only 16 mini-atolls, totaling less than 100 square miles, strung across the Equator, only one of which was more than a dozen feet above sea level. All but one were classic coral atoll lagoons set atop a submerged volcanic chain, just flat arcs of coral sand adorned with coconut palms. Over many hardworking generations, the islanders had been able to create pits of fertile humus in the barren sand by mulching organic material, and there grow bananas and taro, papaya and pandanus, melons and breadfruit, tomatoes and cucumbers. Periodic shortfalls of rain make agriculture difficult, and the intense heat makes it impossible to grow leafy salad stuff and most vegetables, which are imported from Australia on refrigerator ships. These narrow isles lack potable aquifers; every drinkable drop came from collected rainwater or desalinated seawater, or, if you were really rich, from bottles of imported FIJI Water.

Shortly before 1860, American missionaries arrived and persuaded the natives to stop their island-against-island wars and modify some of their harsher rules of behavior. The old practices permitted a husband who found his wife being unfaithful to bite off her nose, and punished a male philanderer by putting him in a canoe, in a strong offshore wind, without water, food, or even a paddle. I'm not sure if the doomed lover was allowed to take his inamorata's nose along as a memento. Or a snack.

Tarawa was the scene of one of the foremost battles in U.S. military history. At the start of WW II, the Japanese seized and fortified dozens of islands throughout the Pacific to form a ring of defenses around Japan. Tarawa was garrisoned by 5,000 crack Japanese troops and studded with more than 100 concrete machine-gun nests, 55 large artillery pieces, many Type 95 Ha-Go tanks, and underground blockhouses made of concrete and reinforced steel, their roofs curved in low arches to deflect shell impact and covered over with layers of logs and dirt to conceal and protect them. So essential did the Japanese High Command regard Tarawa that, after they captured Singapore, they relocated British 8-inch coastal defense guns here to beat off a potential Allied invasion. The Japanese commander boasted that a million men could not take Tarawa in a century.

Then came November of 1943. American amphibious troops landed on the island and took it in four days, at a cost of 3,200 dead and wounded in some of the fiercest fighting in the Pacific Theater. After the drawn-out, seesaw battles for New Guinea and Guadalcanal, Tarawa was the first quick and decisive land victory for the U.S. in two years of Pacific warfare, our first such penetration of Japan's ring of defenses, our first overwhelming demonstration that the Japanese Army was not invincible. America confidently marched from Tarawa to victories at Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Saipan, the Marianas, Tinian, Guam, Peleliu, Leyte, Luzon, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the end of the WW II in Tokyo Bay 20 months later.

I visited the landing beaches on the tiny islet of Betio, now connected to the rest of Tarawa by a mile-long causeway recently built by a peaceful Japan. I saw that wild coconut and breadfruit trees were beginning to obscure the remains of the war: the armor plate scorched black by American flamethrowers; the rusting axles and motors of U.S. landing craft piled on the shore; the outsized, oxidized cannon barrels lying in the shallow waters; the grotesquely twisted shapes of the coastal guns blasted by U.S. battleships; the blockhouses and pillboxes, still intact more than sixty years after the bloodshed; and the Japanese military cemetery, bright with tokens of remembrance left by the loving families who visited.

Many cannons—this one on Tarawa—litter the coasts of several dozen islands in the Pacific where the Japanese had bases in World War II. The nearby jungles hold the rusted carcasses of tanks and artillery pieces and destroyed concrete pillboxes and machine-gun nests.

A number of the smaller islands that now comprise Kiribati had been owned until recently by the U.S., pursuant to an obscure Act of Congress passed in August 1856, officially titled the “Guano Islands Act,” but more commonly called the Bird-Poop Bill, which declared:

Whenever any citizen of the United States discovers a deposit of guano on any island, rock, key, not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other government, and not occupied by the citizens of any other government, and takes peaceable possession thereof, and occupies the same, such island, rock, or key may, at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.

Hundreds of islands and islets around the globe were covered with various kinds of guano, often piled up to 150 feet high, and the U.S., pursuant to the Guano Islands Act, appropriated dozens of them on behalf of its far-flung citizen miners, including such larger places as Kingman Reef, Johnston Atoll, Palmyra Atoll, and Baker, Howland, Jarvis, and Midway Islands. This Bird-Poop Bill is still in our federal statute books today, as Title 48, U.S. Code, Sections 1411–1419.

Since this law is discretionary, it does not require that every such crappy island be annexed to the U.S. or retained in perpetuity. Accordingly, Congress, in 1985, as a gift to the new nation of Kiribati from the people of the United States, relinquished control of, and ceded to Kiribati, those guano islands within its domain. And that's the straight poop.

Although international news was hard to come by on Tarawa, I heard rumors that the U.S., in retaliation for North Korea's increasing militarism and threatening behavior, had barred visits there by American citizens. Since the Korean War armistice agreement had been signed back in 1953, I was too stunned to believe that my dear government had waited 55 years, for the very week that I flew off, to suddenly ban travel to Pyongyang. This seemed so improbable that I dismissed it as a fantasy and stuck with my itinerary.

Then Murphy's Law, which is grounded in the perceived perversity in the universe, took over: Whatever could go wrong did go wrong.