I've just posted a few photos from my South Pacific cruise in the blog entries I wrote from the ship. Sadly, there's not enough time for me to organize and post all the pics I took, but if the winter chill is starting to get to you, you'll find a few palm tree shots to brighten your day. (Click the thumbnails for larger versions.)
I've been home a week now, hibernating and hiding from the rest of the world. I'm scrambling to finish the final draft of my book before my next frenzy of travel kicks in in a couple of weeks. I'll be in Maryland for Christmas, the Netherlands in early January, swamped with meetings in mid-January, and on a top-secret mission in late January. (Stay tuned.)
Okay... I'm back.
Sort of.
My friend Lisa and I disembarked the ship I was working on in Hawaii a week ago Friday. We were on land at 9:30 a.m., lamenting the fact that we had only one hour in Honolulu before we had to leave for the airport.
Alas, the travel gods were smiling on us. When the gate agent checking us in for our flight told me there was a five hour delay, my first instinct was to groan. I wasn't in the mood to spend five hours in an airport. Fortunately, however, Ryan was there to whack me. "It's a five hour delay in Hawaii," he said. "Waikiki is just down the road."
Ryan was another guest speaker on the ship, a professional "mixologist," lecturing on the history of American cocktails. The guy was (I mean this with the utmost respect) a hard-core cocktail geek. Like... he can talk at length about ice cubes and make it interesting. Ryan made a quick phone call and then told us that Dale DeGroff, a man considered by many to be the best mixologist in America, happened to be working at a Waikiki hotel that week. "You're about to meet the Michael Jordan of cocktails," Ryan said. So we spent the afternoon at a beachside bar, talking ice with Mr. DeGroff, drinking the most orgasmic Mai Tais ever concocted, and learning why a splash of Angostura Bitters is the unexpected way to perfect a Mojito.
If only all flight delays could be so productive.
Christmas Island, Kiribati
9:30 a.m.
I was determined not to go to the crew bar last night. It’s the one bar on this ship that stays open past midnight. It’s the one bar on this ship where the majority of patrons are my age or younger. It’s the bar on this ship where I have been on the night before every other port of call, which has led to some sleep deprived days on land.
Last night I managed to stay away from the crew bar, but I was kept awake nonetheless.
When I was giving my travel journaling lecture two days ago, I asked the audience what sorts of themes they saw surface in their travels that might make for good essays. One man answered, the life stories of other passengers on the ship. It wasn’t exactly the answer I was looking for, but last night I understood what he meant when, in spite of the fact that I was staying out of the crew bar, I was kept up past my bedtime. I was having a fascinating conversation with… (take a deep breath; this is a long description…) a gay rabbi who was a high school foreign exchange student in Germany until he got kicked out of his program for a week of unapproved sightseeing in Israel, and then tested positive for HIV 25 (!) years ago and has been traveling fanatically because, as he put it, “I should have been dead a long time ago. I’m very lucky.”
He wants to be a writer. He doesn’t think his memoir would sell. I told him he is wrong.
So I am sleep deprived again today, but I woke up at 6:30 this morning nonetheless. I couldn’t sleep. Nervous energy was keeping me awake – the same sort of excitement that keeps kids awake on the night before Christmas.
‘Twas the Night before Christmas Island.
The local name for Christmas Island is Kiritimati. In the local language, the letters “TI” together are pronounced like an English letter “S,” so it’s pronounced, “Kee-rees-mas.” Christmas.
(Strange spelling? Not really. Spell and pronounce: action, friction, portion, etc.)
I didn’t think we’d be going to Christmas Island. The cruise director told me a couple of days ago we might not be able to bring the tenders – small boats that transport passengers from the cruise ship to land in places where it’s too shallow to dock a large ship – because the water might be too shallow even for the tenders. But we’re here, just off the coast. I'll be heading for shore as soon as the tenders queue gets shorter.
Christmas Island is one of 33 islands that comprise the Republic of Kiribati. This particular island was discovered by Captain James Cook on December 24, 1777… hence the name. Very little grows here. Canned meat is a delecacy. Fresh meat… forget it.
The Republic of Kiribati is a sprawling chain islands scattered around a two-million square mile area of the Pacific Ocean. Kiribati’s capital is called Tarawa. Christmas Island is located 2,000 miles west of Tarawa. There are four villages on Christmas Island. They are called London, Paris, Poland, and Banana.
The capital....
AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Just as I was typing that last sentence, about to explain that I was extremely excited about visiting a place called Banana, Gary, the cruise director, announced all tenders to the island have been canceled due to dangerously shallow waters. I had planned to type up this bloggage and head to land in an hour or so. But it’s not happening. Christmas has just been cancelled.
I ran down to Gary’s office to plead with him to let me on one of the tender boats that’s attempting to shuttle the 176 passengers currently on land back to the cruise ship – just so I could take a quick look – but he says it’s not safe. Two tenders have run aground in shallow waters. A rescue operation is underway to get our passengers off the island and back to the cruise ship.
3:20 p.m.
From what I’ve read, Kiritimati is not a good place to get stranded. There’s not much there. The island only has a few hundred residents, according to one passenger on this ship. An info sheet on the ship says, “A cafeteria near the government building serves plated lunches and coffee.” Otherwise, you’ll find one hotel, two churches (one Protestant, one Catholic), an airfield, and a bank, which is odd since the island doesn’t even have any shops. Kiribati also does not have currency. They use Australian dollars.
This begs the question: Why would I care about going to such a place? My answer: I wanted to meet the people. I wanted to find out what the hell they are doing there.
As we waited for our stranded passengers to be located and brought back to the ship, I wondered if the island might have a brewery. A passenger on this ship says no, which was a relief. Otherwise, I would have felt compelled to start swimming.
By 1:30, everyone had been brought safely back to the ship. We have now set sail for Honolulu, four hours ahead of schedule.
Gary and his staff made every effort they could to get us safely to the island – and canceling a port of call is never a popular move, but as he told me the full story, I realized his safety concerns are legit. Pilots living on the island, whose job is to guide the tenders safely to land, had misjudged the depth of the water. (I suspect they did this on purpose. Cruise ships like this bring big revenue to the tiny island. It’s to the islanders’ advantage to get us there.)
It would have been another wild cultural experience… but considering the rest of this trip, I can’t complain. And I reminded myself of my two rules for foreign travel:
So four hours ahead of schedule, we have set sail for Honolulu. We’ll arrive there on Friday, and from there, I’ll fly back to Seattle.
We are back in the Northern Hemisphere, which is nice. All the blood was starting to rush to my head in the South.
Apia, Samoa
(Written in the Pacific Ocean, just south of the Equator)
After a stressful arrival in Fiji on Friday, I expected a repeat performance two days later in Samoa. Fueling my fears were the following warnings from my guidebook (“Moon Handbooks: South Pacific” by David Stanley):
…Nobody means any harm, and violent crime is almost unknown, but be careful: The concept of individual ownership is not entirely accepted by the Samoans. Don’t leave valuables unattended. Someone might even steal your laundry off the line….
…Another unique Samoan characteristic is musu, to be sullen. A previously communicative individual will suddenly become silent and moody. This often bears no relation to what’s happening at the time, and when a Samoan becomes musu, the best approach is just to sit back and wait until they get a grip….
Last night, Seth suggested that he, Lisa, and I rent a car for the day. We decided against that plan after reading the following:
Some Samoans in remote areas resent sightseers who drive through their village in rented automobiles…. Cases of local children shouting insults, baring their bottoms, and even stoning motorists are not unknown….
…You’ll often see people walking along a paved highway oblivious to approaching traffic, especially in the late afternoon. If you’re forced to swerve dangerously to miss them or have to stop to avoid hitting another car, they’ll just laugh. If you do hit something valuable, like a large pig, drive back to Apia and turn yourself into the police (tel. 22-222). If you stop you could be stoned, and heaven help you if you hit a Samoan! One Apia car rental company has this line in their brochure: “Stopping to verify the extend [sic] of possible injuries to a third party could prove fatal to yourself….”
I showed Seth and Lisa what the guidebook said. We decided a taxi might be a better plan, though the book had little positive to say about the cabbies either.
I’ve been ripped off by cab drivers in more countries than I can count. I avoid taxis whenever possible. But to get around the island, we had no choice. We flagged a driver down. His name was Jerry.
Samoan taxis have no meters. You negotiate a price at the start of a journey. Jerry agreed to take us to a waterfall, famous for its flat and slippery rocks you can slide down, for 15 Samoan tala – about 6 US dollars. He promised to return 90 minutes later to take us back to Apia.
We climbed down a steep staircase to the falls, painfully aware we’d have to climb back up afterward. Late morning temperatures were already flirting with 90 degrees Fahreinheit. We frolicked in the water and survived the 7-million-step climb back to the top, where we were greeted by a girl who sold us about 20 small bananas for 2 tala. We tried to buy fewer. We even offered to pay 2 tala for half the number of bananas she wanted to give us, but she was firm in her price and her quantity.
Jerry returned with his taxi right on schedule. We hopped in and argued about what to do next. Seth and Lisa wanted beaches. I wanted downtown Apian culture. Jerry told us the best beaches were several hours away, but he knew some sea caves worth splashing in that were only 45 minutes from town. So we headed toward the caves.
The road wound around the coast past a trillion palm trees and scattered towns. Every few miles, we’d screech past a roadside barbecue. We talked Jerry into stopping at one. Five tala (about two US dollars) scored us a plate heaped with barbecued chicken legs, sausages, turkey tails, and bananas. One plate was plenty for two people.
At the caves, we encountered kamikaze children diving off a small cliff into a shallow pool. Jerry told me all children spoke Samoan at home and didn’t learn English until they started school. But these seven- and eight-year-olds spoke English as well as they dove – with accents that sounded like American-Australian hybrids. Older Samoans spoke English with a stronger Polynesian accent, but foreign television is affecting the way young Samoans speak English.
We swam for a while at the caves, but I was insisting we head back to Apia in time for some Samoan city culture. I wanted to meet more people. The best place to do this, I suggested, was a bar.
“You want to go dancing?” Jerry asked us. We thought he was joking. It was 3 in the afternoon. But he took us to a club that had live reggae from 1 p.m. until late in the evening. It was a dirty, rickety building, scant with tables, packed with friendly, tipsy people. Temperatures were in the mid 30s Celcius – low 90s Fahreinheit – but that wasn’t stopping people from moving around the dance floor as if they were posessed by the ghost of Bob Marley.
The next thing I knew, I was surrounded by men asking my permission to dance with Lisa (who they assumed was my wife). Lisa told me she hates dancing... which is why I told them they absolutely had my permission to dance with her. She did well under the circumstances. The building had no air conditioning. Temperatures were well into the 90s now (mid to upper 30s Celcius) with humidity that made our clothes gooey with perspiration even when we stood still.
A cute girl named Lazzi started hitting on me. She gave me her phone number. She told me Samoan boys bored her and she was falling in love with me. Alas, my ship was leaving. I had to leave the club with Jerry the cab driver instead. He drove us back to our floating five-star hotel.
Jerry stuck with us the entire day. He showed us places we never would have seen in a rental car – from the sea caves to the barbecue joint to the sweatiest, happiest reggae dive bar in the South Pacific. His fee for spending the day with us was 95 tala – around $35 US, divided by three people. We tipped him heartily. He deserved it. He didn’t even bother to count as I crunched the bills into his palm.
I didn’t just give him the money though. I gave him a hug. I told him he had restored my faith in taxi drivers. I asked for his phone number. If I’m ever back in Samoa, I want him as my guide.
You have to take guidebook warnings with a grain of salt. Authors of such books usually have a passion for the places they write about. They also have a responsibility to their readers to warn us of pitfalls. I don’t doubt there are places in Samoa where visitors might not be welcomed so heartily as we were. But I had felt edgy as I arrived – in part because of the guidebook warnings, in part because of my less than tame arrival in Fiji two days earlier. Maybe it’s because my expectations were low that I had one of my most amazing travel days ever in Samoa.
Few times in my travels has leaving a place been so hard… in spite of an air-conditioned luxury cruise liner to return to.
Four hours from now, we cross the Equator back into the Northern Hemisphere. Next stop, tomorrow morning: Christmas Island, Kiribati.
On the ms Amsterdam, en route from Fiji to Samoa
I’m a night person. I love being awake late at night when I know nobody is going to bother me. I love flying home from Europe after a season of tour guiding, and not fighting my jetlag. I go to bed at 4 p.m., when it’s already 1 a.m. in Europe, and then wake up in the middle of the night, sitting alone in front of the fireplace and listening to the stillness.
I’ve found a new night routine on this ship. Late at night, maybe 1 a.m., after the restaurants and bars have all closed and all the other passengers have gone to bed, I walk outside and stare out at the blackness.
My state room is on deck three. Deck three is also the level of the ship where the deck raps all the way around the ship. In daytime, the deck always has motion – other passengers doing laps around the ship. Three and a half laps equals a mile. But late at night, deck three is my private deck. The ocean is my private ocean.
The ship plows through the water, throwing waves to the sides. The water never stops moving. Never. The sound of the ship’s waves is constant, yet constantly changing. Each slice of time, each millisecond, has its own shape in the water.
The Pacific Ocean is littered with thousands of ships, yet I could circle deck three until sunrise, and probably never see a single one of them. That’s how huge this ocean is.
My vision extends maybe 20 feet into the blackness. There is no end point, no defined place where it all stops. I stare into nothing. I can’t tell what is out there. I can’t see where the sea and horizon meet. I feel incredibly small.
As we sail closer to the equator, the humidity is growing heavier, like a warm, wet blanket that weighs me down.
At 1:30 a.m., I hear a voice behind me. It’s Seth, an American who lives in Tokyo. His brother is a guest lecturer on the ship. He had been up in an abandoned bar, at the only time of day when he could practice on the piano there.
I tell him what I’ve been thinking about – about the smallness.
“This entire ship,” he says, “is just a speck in the ocean.”
He is right. And I am just a microspeck.
Suva, Fiji
Buy a space heater and put it in your bathroom. Crank it up to high. Turn on the shower, full blast, at its hottest temperature. No fan allowed. Wait 20 minutes for it to get good and humid.
There. You have just simulated Fiji’s November climate in your own home.
Oh, and by the way, Fiji is a conservative culture. According to my guidebook, long pants are recommended when you’re not at the beach.
Fiji has a reputation for being a tropical paradise. Unlike New Caledonia, it’s a place most Americans have some concept of. But the palm tree beaches in the tour brochures don’t exist in Suva, the country’s capital. They are elsewhere on the island.
Suva is a chaotic place with a third worldly feel. At first glance, it’s intimidating. It’s got a hard exterior. You have to struggle if you want to get below the surface to its sweeter parts.
We docked at 8 this morning. Lisa and I argued over who would shower first. We both wanted 10 more minutes of sleep. The crew bar the night before – a bar below sea level in the lower recesses of the ship that’s off limits to regular passengers – had been a lively scene – not the kind of place you should linger too long if you have sightseeing plans in the morning.
We were on land by 10. The second we left the shipyard, we were surrounded by friendly Fijians. But it wasn’t the kind of friendly I encountered in New Caldonia. It was the kind of friendly I had feared in New Caldonia and never discovered – the “special price for you, my friend” kind of friendly. My guidebook described typical scams on the island, and our new found “friends” were in the first steps of exactly what the book was describing.
We ran the gauntlet of con artists, made our way to the center of town, and tried to locate an ATM. We found one, with at least 20 people waiting. We took our place in line.
“Bula,” a man said to me – Fijian for hello. “Are you wanting to take out money?”
I answered in Norwegian. “Jeg snakker ikke engelsk.” I don’t speak English.
He persisted. ”You can’t use this machine here. It’s only for local bank cards. If you want to use a Visa card, you must go around the corner.”
He was telling the truth. He was the first person to approach us who really wanted to help. I felt irritated with myself that I’d felt a need to keep my guard up. I suddenly learned English and thanked him.
But the next two machines we tried would not give us money, and our American cash was back on the ship. We had to return to change it into Fijian dollars.
Once again, we made our way past the Suva welcoming committee. I didn’t want to deal with any of this.
I needed to reframe my thinking.
I’ve encountered aggressive selling and/or brazen scamming many times in my travels. It’s sad that it happens because it gives visitors an unfair impression of a place. Take the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, for example. I used to feel intimidated there. Now I understand Turkey well enough to love the chaos. But Fiji was too distant from the cultures I am familiar with. In new surroundings, the hassles felt so much more intimidating.
Back at the ship, we both confessed we didn’t want to leave. Sitting by the pool all day would be so much easier. But we were in Fiji, damn it. Fiji! Tropical paradise or not, we needed to give it another chance.
Suva, Take 2: I left my little backpack on the ship this time. Not having it dangling from my shoulder, I felt like less of a target. Now anything worth stealing – my wallet or my camera – were both in my pocket. Pickpockets don’t worry me anymore. I know their games.
When we reached the center of Suva, we started to relax. Away from the docks, people were the sincere kind of friendly. Some streets felt more like India Lite than the South Pacific. Fiji has a sizeable Indian population – descendants of indentured servants brought to the islands long ago. We ate lunch at a vegetarian Hare Krishna restaurant. It came recommended by an American friend of Lisa who used to live in Suva. Four Fijian dollars – about $2.50 US – was enough for a feast. We struggled to fit the food inside of us. It became downright painful, but in a poor part of the world, American visitors leaving food just wouldn’t be cool.
Shop owners and taxi drivers had no qualms about telling us all Americans are very rich. We tried to explain that isn’t true. American visitors to Fiji are mostly rich. (Or they are cruise ship employees.) It was hard explaining we have poverty in America too – and it felt unnecessarily defensive.
On our way to the museum, we stumbled across a volleyball tournament. We watched until we couldn’t take the heat anymore. Then we continued, through a peaceful garden of tropical fauna, to a building housing centuries-old outrigger canoes and cannibal forks. Cannibalism existed here as recently as the 19th century.
In the mid afternoon, we stumbled upon a local market. We thought we’d stick our heads in for a quick peek, but we ended up lingering. Vendors sold taro root and some of the strangest fruits I’ve ever seen. Young children played in their parents’ stalls. One girl of about two was running around with an eight-inch butcher’s knife.
Walking back to the ship, random people would smile and say, “Bula.” This was the friendliness I’d seen in Nouméa two days earlier. It was real. It’s how most Fijians live.
As we waited to sail onward toward the equator, a perfectly timed thunderstorm began. Seattle rarely has thunderstorms and I miss them. The skies opened up.
A sail away party was just getting started on a covered deck. Down below, on land, a Fijian marching band was playing for us, and dock workers were dancing in the rain. Between songs, the tuba players would turn their instruments upside down to empty out the water.
The band was hired by the cruise ship. They needed the work, I’m sure. But financial incentives aside, I had to admire people who would stand in the middle of a pounding downpour to play music.
I told myself I must remember this day in my future travels. First impressions of unfamiliar places are often negative. Give yourself time to get beneath the prickly surface and you’ll be rewarded.
Nouméa, New Caledonia
I arrived this morning in New Caledonia expecting either an unfriendly reception or a too friendly reception from the local residents – unfriendly because the native New Caledonians aren’t pleased with the way their French colonizers have treated them (and I look more French than I look native to the South Pacific), or too friendly because they’d want to sell me stuff. Instead, I found a remote island with delightful people who say “bonjour” to you on the street just because it’s the social thing to do. I wish Seattlites were more like New Caledonians.
I wandered the streets of Nouméa wondering if I could ever move to a place like this if I were French. Given the island’s history, I’m not sure I’d feel morally comfortable doing that, but I found myself wishing the United States had an equivalent tropical paradise. Then I remembered we kind of do. It’s called Hawaii. But there’s a laid back air to New Caledonia’s capital that seems more sincere than the commercialized “hang loose” mentality I encountered in Honolulu last January.
At first glance, downtown Nouméa is an awkward mix of palm trees and concrete buildings with an almost ramshackle feel. The center of town isn’t all that picturesque. I groaned when I spotted McDonald’s. But the beach, a short bus ride away, is flanked by a much cozier town. Lunch today was locally caught prawns in a coconut curry sauce and a pitcher of the house sangria.
At the end of the meal, the waitress asked me if I was French. How she missed my bumbling grammar is beyond me (my French is absolutely not at native proficiency) but I wanted to hug her for the question. I whined that I only had one day on her island. She told me I must come back and stay longer when I’m not working. Easier said than done, given the location, but I’m realizing here, like I did in Hawaii, that in mainland America, we have a tendency to trivialize tropical islands and view them as nothing more than touristic beachfronts. Beneath the commercial surface lie some of the world’s most underrated cultures.
My friend Lisa is along for the ride, courtesy of the cruise line. She’s here with the blessing of her boyfriend, who has promised not to kill me when we return home. I couldn’t help snickering about my own love life today as I dried myself off at the beach. In the last couple of years, a couple of different women have strung me along and then ended things abruptly with the sort of social skills one might expect from a 14-year-old. (“Oops, I guess I haven’t really broken up with my last boyfriend after all.”) Lisa asked me to call and thank them for dumping me.
I have the next two days off from lecturing. We’re at sea all day from tomorrow. Next port of call: Fiji.
[A note about times: This blog gets confusing when I start switching time zones, so all times posted here are US Pacific Time, though I’m currently 18 time zones ahead of Seattle.]
Brisbane, Australia
I really should find out, before I make this big announcement that I’ll be blogging via satellite from the Pacific Ocean, that the technology will be in place… and that I will have time to get any writing done between my time spent preparing for my lectures and chasing kangaroos. It’s taken me a few days to get this South Pacific blog up and running, but I am pleased to report I am still alive.
I landed in Sydney, Australia, Monday morning after a delightful 14-hour flight in economy class. Upon arrival, I went straight to the airport first aid station to have my knees surgically removed from my chin, where they had become stuck in an upright and locked position thanks to the seat in front of me.
But really I shouldn’t complain. The flight to Sydney felt more humane than the non-stops I fly a couple of times each year between Seattle and Copenhagen. With 14 hours in the sky, I got a full night’s sleep despite the leg cramps. And as a night person, I found Australia’s time zone – five hours behind (but one day ahead of) Seattle to be perfect. I had a jetlag-free entry into Australia.
This was my first time in Australia – continent number five on my list of seven. I’ve always felt irritated by people who travel to places just so they can check them off their list, but in this case, there was little I could do. I checked into the ship I’m working on at 11 a.m. We sailed out of the city 12 hours later.
Sydney is a city a bit like those fruity drinks they serve at Chinese restaurants. The first few sips are tasty, but reminiscent of some sort of alcohol-free punch you were served at a kindergarten birthday party one time. It sneaks up on you slowly. At first the city feels disappointingly familiar, but then, all of a sudden, it intoxicates you. People rave about Sydney’s skyline, the Opera House and surrounding parks, but what makes Sydney so great is its energy – one of those intangible things no guidebook can describe.
Two days later, our ship pulled into Brisbane for a short stop. My friend Lisa and I, and a couple of other lecturers and performers from the ship, hopped in a cab to the Lone Pine Koala Park. They call it a koala park, but it also has kangaroos, emus, dingoes, wombats, and a plethora of other bizarre creatures.
Ryan, another guest lecturer from Seattle, claims wombats are so strong that if you hit one with your car, they will flip your vehicle over. I’m skeptical about this. Any animal that ferocious would not allow itself to be called a wombat.
The wombats we saw were not flipping cars. They were sleeping. The kangaroos, on the other hand, were frolicking. The park is kind of like a marsupial petting zoo. They have “Do not pet the animals” signs on the crocodile cages, and warnings to keep shiny objects away from the emus, who have a habit of swallowing wedding rings. But you could enter the kangaroo playground, feed them, pet them, and hop around behind them.
Then there were the koalas. Koalas are the stoners of the marsupial world. They are some of the only creatures on Earth that can live without water. Their diet consists exclusively of eucalyptus, which sounds benign enough, but the plant leaves the animals lethargic and sleepy all the time.
For an extra fee, you could hold a koala. A fee? I admit I was skeptical at first. People ask me if I want to hold their babies, as if it’s some sort of privilege to have a seven-month-old scream in my ear and regurgitate on me. But koalas are cuter than babies. They don’t cry, and this particular one did not seem to be emitting any bodily substances on its prior customers, so I decided to take my chances.
The koala was warm and cuddly, nestled in my arms, kind of like a cross between an infant and a cat. I decided I would be willing to raise a child if it would look and behave like a koala.
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