Well, no news yet on a flight out. Rumor has it they're trying to line up a Nauru-Tarawa-Nadi flight for next week (which is the same way I came in). It would be a lot to hope for I think, but what else is there to do here.

Actually, I've been really busy lately meeting with government people, hiking around, sitting in on a session of their 18-member parliament. At parliament, Air Nauru was certainly a topic of discussion, but in truth it has to get in line behind the island's other problems.

Spent a day hiking around an inland lagoon up on a hill, called Buada, where the locals used to (I saw only a little evidence for it now) raise milkfish. At one point, the entire lagoon was subdivided into family plots. People would catch milkfish larvae in the ocean, rear them in coconut shells and then raise them in the pond. It seems like a part of Nauruan culture, along with the capture and taming of frigate birds, that fell off dramatically during the rich years and only now are starting to be revived. What better to fill the void left by cash than with traditional culture?

And on the way back I took a choking, dusty and probably very dangerous trip through the now decaying Nauru phosphate works--giant crushers, dryers, storage facilities. They have investors and plans to clean up and fix all this decrepit heavy machinery so they can start mining again. Whatever estimates I've heard strike me as low--this stuff is in bad shape. But I will defer to the mining executives.

Got pics to post from that day, but need a little time to run through them.