Around the World in 50 Years (41 page)

On my final morning in Hanoi, seated for breakfast across from the poster promoting
Hamburger Hill,
I was unexpectedly served by my waitress with a start-off bonus plate of shredded pineapple, which, through my glue-smeared glasses from Kiribati, looked like the scrambled eggs I'd ordered. I liberally doused the yellow mound with pepper and ketchup and didn't realize my error until the first, strange bite. To save face, I felt obliged to eat it all, while smiling at the bemused waitress as if this were the way I started every morning. Sixty-five consecutive days on the road had taken their toll. It was time for me to head home.

 

CHAPTER 25

A Tropical Depression

East Timor, the first of the four sovereign states created in the 21st century, has a history of sorrow. The island of Timor, whose eastern half it occupies, was first subjugated, enslaved, and divided by the Portuguese in 1769, while the Dutch moved in and took over the western half. The Portuguese refused to invest in East Timor and it became a backwater trading post. World War II brought a harsh occupation by the Japanese, during which 40,000 to 70,000 natives died. This was followed by a locally resisted reassertion of Portuguese colonial control, which Lisbon finally relinquished in 1974, after the Dutch half had become part of Indonesia.

East Timor declared its independence in 1975—and it lasted nine days. Indonesia, which is predominantly Muslim, invaded, occupied, and annexed East Timor, which is predominantly Catholic. The East Timorese rebelled and fought a bloody 20-year guerrilla war, during which 100,000 to 250,000 of them died and 300,000 were forcibly abducted to the western part of the island, while the world stood idly by, tsk-tsking but doing nothing. Finally, in August 1997, the UN sponsored and supervised a referendum in which the East Timorese voted, overwhelmingly, for independence. But that was not the end of their sad story.

The anti-independence forces, armed and aided by Indonesia, commenced a savage scorched-earth campaign of retribution, destroying homes, irrigation systems, schools, the water supply, and the entire electrical grid in the country, devastating the infrastructure and bringing ruin to the new nation. The guerrillas withdrew in April 2008, allowing East Timor, by the time I arrived, to have experienced three years of peace, its longest ever. So many people died during the past decades that only three percent of the population is older than 65! I was an ancient there.

Recovery will take decades. Among the one million people surviving, the death rate is close to the world's highest. Their life expectancy ranking is 155 of 195. Forty-two percent live below the poverty line. And the country ranks an abysmal 176 in purchasing power parity and 120 on the Human Development Index.

I saw little industry—just printing, soapmaking, and weaving—although oil and gas had recently been discovered in the Timor Sea and a pipeline had been built to Darwin, where the gas was cooled and liquefied for shipment. They grow some coffee, rice, corn, cassava, sweet potatoes, cabbage, mangoes, and bananas, but livestock is costly and scarce.

The signs of poverty were everywhere. I saw few private vehicles, most of them old, a third of them motorcycles. The people wore worn, old, drab clothes. The first pop-up ad I saw on their Internet was for repairing generators, and the next was for repairing pumps. The wharf area of Dili, the capital, was crammed with empty shipping containers stacked four-high, evidencing a glut of imports and a paucity of stuff to export. There were almost no new buildings. Vehicles from the UN and NGOs abounded, as those agencies endeavored to aid the struggling nation. Large businesses were rare, and they, and the hotels, and the travel agencies, and the dive shops, were owned, and usually operated, by Aussies, while the other shops and stores belonged to overseas Chinese, leaving little for the locals beyond sidewalk cigarette-and-candy stands, and fish markets where they hung the day's catch from trees bordering the corniche.

A few visionary dreamers tout the land as “the next Bali” because of its numerous beaches, calm waters, isolation, and laid-back nature, but it has a long way to go. The roads are poor and the vegetation is not as luxurious or charmingly “tropical” as in most of the South Seas, just dowdy. The beaches are narrow and often brown, covered with discarded plastic bottles and other garbage, bathed by a muddy sea filled with raw sewage, and abutting the noisy main road around the island. Almost nobody speaks English. The denizens are friendly, but shabby. The water is not safe to drink. Flies are everywhere. Dengue and malaria are common. It has a few good reefs, but no other tourist attractions, no breathtaking scenery, no impressive palaces or exotic temples, although I did bike to an unimposing statue of Jesus on a hill overlooking the ocean that they claim is the second largest of any. But I don't think Bali has to worry.

The daily downpours are so heavy that—no exaggeration—they completely drown out the sound on the TV, even at its loudest level, and when they get really intense, even block out the TV satellite feed and the Internet. They leave large puddles all over, which seldom have time to dry before the next deluge, making mosquitoes abundant and walking difficult. I did not see a patch of blue or a spot of sun in the five days I stayed because the La Niña effect was fully dominant, as it had been for more than a year, even during what was supposed to be the annual dry season.

Going from bad to worse, I arrived at long last on sleepy Nauru, a speck in the Pacific, 25 miles south of the Equator, little known and rarely visited, a sad story and a strange piece of work, the 185th nation on my quest.

At 26 square miles, it is the third smallest nation, larger only than Monaco (0.7 square miles) and Vatican City (0.2 square miles). With fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, Nauru is ahead of only Vatican City (population 850), the smallest internationally recognized independent state by both area and inhabitants.

Nauru was first settled about 3,000 years ago by Micronesian and Polynesian peoples who eked out a subsistence living on fish, pandanus, and coconuts. Germany conquered and annexed the island in 1888 after a ten-year guerrilla war, that reduced the population to 900, most of whom were poorly treated by the conquerors.

In going for my goal, I've often had to visit some unappealing places, but Nauru is, literally, a shithole, having once been covered by some of the thickest guano deposits on earth. Guano is the untreated excrement of fish-eating seabirds, and it became extremely valuable as fertilizer after its discovery off the coast of Peru and its study, in 1802, by Alexander von Humboldt, who determined it was high in phosphorous and nitrogen and low in offensive odor. Its worldwide exploitation on a massive scale began in the 1840s and continued for more than a hundred years, until guano was partly replaced by synthetics. Although Peruvian guano is the finest (because it was deposited in one of the globe's driest climates, thereby preventing the erosion of its valuable nitrates), Nauru's guano was so rich and abundant it made the Nauruans, from 1967 to 1974, the wealthiest per capita cats of all mankind. But almost all those centuries of bird droppings have now been stripped and shipped away, and the funds they brought have disappeared.

Nauru's boom-to-bust saga began with a
doorstop
. In 1896, during his ship's brief call at the island, a cargo officer of the Pacific Island Company picked up a pretty rock he thought was a piece of mineralized wood. He planned to polish it and make some marbles for his children, but that got postponed and the rock got detoured to his office in Sydney, where it served as a doorstop. Two years later, a management official in the company's phosphate division was transferred to Sydney, saw the doorstop, had it tested—and found the world's highest-quality phosphate! That find brought several billion dollars into Nauru's treasury during the next century but, unfortunately, lured the population into dependence on this sugar teat, away from which it has been difficult to wean them.

From 1914 until 1968, Nauru had a bewildering procession of landlords and foster parents: Australia, Britain, New Zealand, the League of Nations, the Japanese (during WW II), who used the people as slave laborers, with only 800 surviving, and the UN.

A brighter day looked to be dawning in 1968, when Nauru became a free and independent nation. The funds earned from selling the phosphate were deposited in a royalties trust that, for several delirious decades, funded a welfare state that gave its citizens the second-highest GDP per person and the world's highest standard of living.

But nobody saved for a rainy day. When the last good phosphate reserves were exhausted in 2006, the nation had no other source of income. It was an environmental wasteland—an ugly, barren, strip-mined mess of innumerable coral pinnacles largely unfit for human habitation.

The Nauru Phosphate Royalties Trust was 90 percent depleted as the result of large-scale siphoning of funds by Britain and Australia and stupid investments by the fund managers in Australian-rules football teams that lost and London musicals that flopped. Nauru's government changed hands 17 times in five years. The Nauru National Bank became insolvent. Unemployment officially topped 49 percent and was surely higher. Most of the inner island, from whence the guano was excavated, is pockmarked with unsightly holes ringed by limestone pinnacles up to 40 feet high. Rising seawaters are lapping at the thin strip of level ground around the island's perimeter, which stands only about five feet above mean high tide. And its poor citizens are left to try to live in a land that is all pooped out.

A crumbling tower and a ruined conveyor belt that once supplied the world with phosphate and made Nauru the richest per capita nation for several years are sad reminders of that once-flourishing industry now that the guano has run out. Ugly limestone pinnacles scar the country's interior where the guano was extracted.
Tony Wheeler

Nauru appealed to the International Court of Justice in 1993, seeking compensation for the damage done by a century of rapacious phosphate strip-mining by foreign companies. It reached settlements with Australia ($50 million paid over 20 years), New Zealand ($12 million), and Britain ($12 million). But the high cost of maintaining an international airline on which few flew, combined with the government's financial mismanagement, led to economic collapse in the late 1990s, and to virtual bankruptcy by the Millennium. Things got so bad by 2006 that the only commercial airplane servicing the island was repossessed by creditors, cutting the country off from civilization for four months—and leaving me, you may recall, in the middle of Micronesia with a worthless ticket and a wrecked schedule.

With their guano almost gone, the entrepreneurial Nauruans tried to make a living in myriad ways, most of questionable legality. The nation became a tax haven, where anyone with $25,000 could open his own bank, no questions asked. It next did what destitute damsels had been forced to do since time immemorial: It sold itself to the highest bidders. First to Russian criminals, who used its banking system to launder money. Then to Australian politicians, who wanted to get rid of the hot potatoes known as “the boat people”—those desperate, poor, unskilled, brown-skinned refugees and asylum seekers who braved the oceans to reach Oz to escape from war, oppression, dictatorship, or poverty in their homelands in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Sri Lanka, and other sad places. The Aussies made an agreement with the Nauruans—the “Pacific Solution”—whereby these undesired immigrants were dumped on Nauru, which shortly thereafter closed its borders to prevent outsiders from monitoring the refugees' condition.

When international opprobrium shuttered these career paths, Nauru started selling its diplomatic soul. In 2002, after the People's Republic of China promised to give it more than $130 million in aid, Nauru withdrew its recognition of Taiwan. But two years later, it broke off relations with the PRC and again recognized Taiwan as the Republic of China. The Taiwanese were now struggling to farm the island and are producing most of its vegetables. Nauru received $50 million of “development aid” from Russia and, in exchange, became one of only four countries to recognize, as independent nations, the breakaway Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. (I met the man, a young American fluent in languages, who handles most of these arrangements for Nauru's Foreign Office and, while he was unwilling to reveal any details about upcoming deals, he impressed me as someone who had a secure job with strong growth prospects.)

Even the U.S. allegedly got into the pay-for-play action, reportedly offering to modernize Nauru's infrastructure in exchange for curtailment of the island's lax banking laws that had allowed the financing of activities that were illegal in other countries. Under this secret deal, code-named “Operation Weasel,” Nauru also allegedly agreed to establish an embassy in Beijing and there operate a spy-like “safe house” and courier services for the Americans. After the deal became embarrassingly public—pop goes the Weasel!—our government denied knowledge of it and refused to make the promised payments, prompting Nauru to sue us in an Australian court, whose initial judgments favored Nauru.