It can be a little jarring to hear so many Christmas songs when I’m on a miserably hot island just a few miles south of the equator, where snow, Christmas trees and one-horse open sleighs are as fictional as Santa, but I’ve heard little else out of Nauru the last few days. Most everything on the island was shut down between Friday and today, but I made an excursion to the good grocery store on the other side of the island--perched precariously with my bags of instant noodles and cereal bars on the open back of a flat-bed truck--so I was good on food and water. But there was little else to do, so I spent most of the last four days reading and wandering around the island taking pictures and taking advantage of the few people who stopped and offered me rides. The quantity of traffic has noticeably declined since I have been here as the gasoline shortage gets more and more acute. It’s usually the first thing on people’s minds.


This country is so small that I’ve now seen just about all of it. It’s worth noting that you can hear and see the ocean from almost anywhere on the island and from each vantage point there is nothing--literally nothing, all the way around the island--on the horizon. No other islands, no ships, no nothing. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

I got a chance at the end of last week to tour Topside, the mined-out interior of the island, with a frank and interesting Nauruan named Joe Hiram. He knows the mining operation inside and out, having formerly been general manager of Nauru Phosphate Corporation (NPC) and a member of parliament for a brief period. He is now engineering manager of RONPHOS, or Republic of Nauru Phosphate, NPC’s successor.

The next day, which was Christmas Eve, I was wandering north when I bumped into Joe again, on the first green (term used very loosely, I’ll explain why) of Nauru’s nine-hole golf course. I tagged along with his friendly foursome through the rest of their round.


First designed when dapper Englishmen in white suits and flat-brimmed straw hats ran the phosphate trade, the golf course has managed to hold on and I saw several groups playing through. It is as hardscrabble a golf course as I have ever seen--the fairways, which criss-cross one another to make nine holes in the space of one hole on larger courses, are covered is weeds, bare patches, small piles of trash. The occasional motorcycle cuts through.


The greens are actually made of coral sand and course rules say you can smooth out the path between your ball and the hole twice per hole, so everyone carries a flat-bladed shovel in their bags. The hazards are more or less depressions that are never mowed and a ball that goes into them tends never to come out.

The seventh hole is particularly rough. Maybe 60 yards from tee to hole, it abuts the poorest area of Nauru, called "Location," where the mine laborers from Kiribati and Tuvalu (they’re called K&Ts) have traditionally been housed. At any rate, it is far easier to toss trash over the wall than haul it up to the dump on Topside, so the hazard in front of the green is especially dire.


I was helping look for lost ball in this mire when I noticed the ground I was standing on was especially bouncy. I realized I was standing on an overgrown pile of rusted-out mattress springs.

The foursome had a great time playing through and talking trash about their standing beer-per-hole bet. There’s something a little heroic about hanging on to the homegrown, hard-to-love course. But there are worse ways to spend a Saturday in Nauru. The country even sends a golf team to the South Pacific Games (I doubt Vijay Singh, who is from Fiji and is one of the best golfers in the world, competes in those). But unaccustomed to long courses and greens with grass on them, they tend to get thrashed.

Nauru actually finds its greatest success in weightlifting and power lifting, in which the country excels at the regional and even global level. It is said that these sports suit the stocky Nauruan physique. The other day in parliament, the minister for sports, who is also the minister for health and for transportation, read off an impressive list of accomplishments and titles for the year.

More travel difficulty: I am booked to leave on Saturday, which takes me to Brisbane. I'm still trying to explain why I shouldn't pay $1000 to get from there to my original destination in Fiji. The hotel in Fiji is charging me for the days I'll miss, which I tried to cancel (now I realize I will need one of those days back, provided I make the one-hour connection time in Brisbane). Anyway, still nothing is settled and I don't suppose it will be until the moment I arrive back in Fiji, which will maybe be either Sunday or Monday.