Sadly, we've recently had a death in the family--my uncle Arun passed away in London this week after a long illness. He was a good man and father and I learned a lot from him. He'll be missed. I'd like to dedicate all of this to his memory and to my aunt Rita and cousins Purvi and Trupti. I love you all.

And sometimes you get a break. Cyclone Jim, which would be a great nickname for a baseball player, started out in the Coral Sea near Australia and now is swinging east. Already the surges from it are hitting Fiji, causing very heavy rain and flooding along the western coast, including Nadi, where I was staying a week ago just minutes from the beach. My guess would be that the area I was staying in has been evacuated. It is not expected to hit Fiji, though. They're expecting it to hook south a bit (away from Tuvalu and Fiji, where I am and will be for the next couple of weeks) and really hit New Caledonia, a French colony, and southern Vanuatu, where I spent that day in Port Vila a couple of weeks back.

This is, in case anyone was wondering, the thick of the cyclone season in the South Pacific.

A maneapa is a sort of open-air Tuvaluan meeting hall with a roof. They are used for special occasions the way any banquet hall would, but in many ways they are the centers of Tuvaluan social life. During the day kids play in them at night people might sleep in them for the breeze. There is an especially large maneapa with a concrete floor and a modern roof--my guess is that traditional ones would have a coral sand floor and a thatched roof--in between the airport and my guest house, and just across a small square from the government building. On days that flights come in it is full of people; from inside you can see the plane land and the passengers disembark. (Note: the plane was fixed and flew out on Saturday, but the flight scheduled for Sunday was cancelled--apparently no one from the flight crew showed up in Suva.) This particular maneapa is also where parliament meets and serves as a makeshift courthouse.

This weekend it hosted to a large wedding reception, island-style. Tuvalu was converted to Christianity--the Protestant Church of Tuvalu, of which 97 percent of the islanders are members--more than 100 years ago, so the wedding itself took place in a church somewhere with the bride in a white gown.

She later changed into more traditional island clothing, a dress decorated with pandanus leaves and flowers. I believe that is her directly to the left of the festive woman in red. A number of pigs were slaughtered for the occasion and brought in in giant woven baskets. For a reason I do not understand, the pig pictured here was stabbed through with skewers that had cigarettes, which you can see in the picture, along them. Unfortunately, I didn’t see anyone drinking hot toddy, the local homebrew made of fermented coconut sap, which I am determined to try before I leave. The whole thing was wrapped up by 10:00 because everyone had church in the morning.

Addendum to the Nauru-Tuvalu comparisons:

I think that getting off Tuvalu on Feb. 9 may be as much of an adventure as getting off Nauru was. Tuvalu is serviced by one carrier, a small airline called Air Fiji. It runs one plane from Suva to Funafuti a few times a week. There was a flight scheduled yesterday, and as always when there is a flight, people congregated near the airport to see off friends and see who popped out of the plane. Plane-spotting seems a pretty common pastime here.

A man I had dinner with the other night, Hugh, who works for an NGO based in Suva, was scheduled to leave. As I lingered around outside the guest house, I heard the plane rev its engines as if it was preparing to taxi for takeoff, but then they wheezed to a stop. Half an hour later, I saw Hugh standing next to the government building with his cell phone and a phone card, and covered in the shell necklaces that locals often adorn people with when they are about to leave. He was trying to call his son, whose birthday he would miss.

"Something was leaking," he said with the smile of someone accustomed to the uncertainty of island travel. "Better here than up there," he said, as I recalled a story he told me over dinner about one of the engines breaking down on this very plane while it was in the air. Apparently they are flying a mechanic in from Fiji today to fix it, but there will be a little backlog of passengers, as another flight was supposed to arrive and leave on Sunday.

Not sure what will happen when I am scheduled to leave in two weeks, but I'm prepared for anything, I guess. Or nothing, such as it is.

On a day-to-day level, it is hard not to see similarities between Tuvalu and Nauru, where I spent most of December. Both are bizarre, intimidatingly isolated island nations of around 10,000 people each. Each is among the smallest sovereign nations in the world. They share the problems attendant to island life and the same aggressively laid-back lifestyle that surely suits people living on these islands but can be a little tedious for a person from a different island, namely Manhattan.

Nauru has two hotels, Tuvalu has one and a few guest houses, one of which I am staying in. While Tuvalu has a little more fresh food than Nauru—more people fish here and there are a couple of small banana/taro plantations—white rice and tinned meat are still the preferred dietary staples. The small general store down the street here has shelf that runs half the length of the store full of different varieties of potted meat, including the same frightening pink tins covered with Chinese writing and the phrase “Pork Luncheon Meat” that I saw in Nauru. Fresh water is scarce on both islands. While the water appears to be on all the time here, the pressure is very low and the shower is usually little more than a rivulet squirming down the tile. As in Nauru, bucket showers will be common.

Both countries are among the few in the world to maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and therefore both get a lot of aid from it. In Nauru now, Taiwan is about to prop up their ill-fated airline, while here on Tuvalu, Taiwan donated a three-story building, by far the island’s largest, to house most of Tuvalu’s government offices, which formerly were scattered around the island in small buildings and private residences. Both countries are also dominated visually by their airstrips, and both have slightly bizarre economies that include territorial fishing licenses, phone sex operators (not located here, but using their phone numbers) and trust funds. Both also use Australian currency, but where Nauru's national bank has collapsed in spectacular fashion, Tuvalu's is still operating.

Nauru’s decrepit phosphate-based economy gives way here to an economy based on money from the sale of the “.tv” internet suffix and remittances from overseas. These remittances come, for the most part, from sailors who are trained at Tuvalu’s maritime training school and have a reputation as hard workers with a great knowledge of the sea. Interestingly, a huge portion of these remittances once came from Nauru, where Tuvaluans worked in the phosphate mines by the thousands. A few of them are still there, not working but waiting, probably in vain, to be paid for work they have already done.

But where Nauru is a single, kidney bean-shaped island, Tuvalu is a smattering of nine coral atolls, usually tiny slithering strips of land with lagoons on one side and the open ocean on the other. Only the main island, Funafuti (ironic airline abbreviation: FUN), is heavily populated and at all involved in the modern world. People on the outer islands live traditional subsistence lifestyles and may be visited by a boat once every few months. On the thickest part of Funafuti, it takes literally five minutes to walk from the lagoon, across the airstrip, to the ocean. I timed it, and it took that long only because I stopped to look at some pigs in a smelly pen.

Finally, despite the fact that both islands might inspire thoughts of a prototypical “island paradise,” neither is especially pleasant for a visitor to be in for any long period of time because of water, food, heat, insect and crowding issues.


p.s. I’ve had pretty good luck—touch wood—with electronics everywhere I have been, despite what I thought was an ant infestation in my laptop (Three times I saw one crawl out from between the keys, but I haven’t seen any for about a week). Even in Nauru, the power came on at predictable times and here the power seems to be pretty stable. With the chunky adapter set-up I bought from Radio Shack before I left, I have been able to charge my computer, iPod, camera batteries and phone/alarm clock with no problems. But this bloody setup is heavy and because there are two adapters, a power converter, a surge protector and whatever power supply I am using attached, so the plug alone will not support it and I haven’t even seen an extension cord in two months.

Everywhere else, I’ve found plugs reasonably low to the ground or above a table of some sort, so it was little problem to stack some books, a bottle of water or an electric kettle under it to prop the thing up. But here, for some reason, all the outlets at the guest house are above eye level. I stared at the problem for about half an hour before I came up with the following solution, involving moving a table, duct tape and the luggage cart I’ve been lugging around but not using for the last two months. May be amusing only to me. But I managed to charge my computer so I could write this. Hoo-rah.

I’ve been pretty woeful about posting pictures. There are all sorts of excuses, like the fact that there was not much to look at in Santo that wasn’t underwater (at least the part of Santo that I was in; the hills and highlands are, I hear, very scenic, but I never went to see them), that it rained all day in Port Vila and that Nadi is notorious for pickpockets and conmen and it is advisable not to draw attention to oneself. But they’re all just crappy excuses.

Local Ni-Vanuatu kids are always hanging around the little staging area where divers prepare to make their entrance to the Coolidge down a gently sloping beach between two stone breakwaters. On a non-diving day, I just sat with a few of them while they fished for guppies with spools of string. Incidentally, in a number of countries here—namely the Solomons and Vanuatu—both natives and expats refer to native children, perhaps offensively to American ears and sensibilities, as “pickaninnies.”

Gerard Cole, an Australian I dived with a few times, took these pictures on one of the night dives on the Coolidge. Diving the Coolidge--day or night--can be pretty hard to capture on film. David Doubilet, one of the great underwater photographers, tried for a 1998 issue of National Geographic. His pictures look great, but at that time only limited parts of the wreck were accessible, and most divers now, even relatively inexperienced ones, reach all of the places he photographed on their first two dives. I don't know how one would capture the sensation of actually being inside or the scale of the bloody thing. But it doesn't stop people from trying.

And this is why I did not take more pictures in Santo--this is most of what there is to see there if you stay dry and don’t make it up to the mountains and villages.

I'm in Tuvalu now, being constantly reminded of how frustrating "island time," or using clocks and calendars as only rough guidelines, can be.

Because of all the islands and sets of traditional beliefs, Vanuatu has some 106 indigenous languages. In the towns, because of the Anglo-French Condominium, English and French are widely spoken. But the national language is a reductive, musical form of pidgin English called Bislama.

Me drinkem kava. (I drink kava.)

Yu save tok tok long Inglis? (Do you speak English, or Do you savvy talk talk long English?)

The word that stands out the most in Bislama is “blong,” presumably a shorter form of “belong,” that is used, by turns, as “of,” “to,” and “is.”

Dipatmen Blong Agrikulta. (Department of Agriculture.)

Tabu blong ting bia, waen o kava. (No outside beverages, or It is taboo to bring beer, wine or kava.)

Bia blong yumi. (Our beer, or The beer that is for you and me.)

That last one is the motto of the Vanuatu national beer, Tusker. Perhaps not by coincidence, the national beer of Kenya is also called Tusker. In Kenya the bottle features the silhouette of an elephant, but it’s obviously a different tusk we’re talking about here—warthogs or bushpigs, which were brought to the islands.

Michener explained some of the tusk-related rituals in Tales of the South Pacific. The tusks of bushpigs, which grow up and curve inward from the front corners of the lower jaw, are symbols of status in some traditional Ni-Vanuatu cultures. The longer and more curved the tusk, the more status it grants. So to get the best tusks, villagers would confine the pigs so they could not file the tusks down as they would in their normal foraging. As a result, the tusks grow out and then loop back in, eventually, and likely very painfully, piercing the skin and embedding back in the pig’s lower jaw. A full looped tusk would represent the most elite status symbol and that image of a looping tusk (separated from the pig) graces both the bottle of Tusker and the national flag of Vanuatu.



These bushpig tusks, and lower jaws with dual tusks, are also among the most common and expensive souvenirs for sale in stores and markets here. A modestly curved tusk can bring as much as $50US, and I didn’t even ask after the price of the fully looped ones or the full mandibles in which both tusks curve and grow back into the jaw.

These items and many others were available for sale in the large open-air market of Port Vila, Vanuatu’s capital, which I passed through for a day on my way back to Fiji. Vila is a charming town crawling up a hillside from a clear blue bay (amazingly clear for a bay that gets a lot of boat traffic) with a faded French colonial atmosphere, some great little restaurants and a surfeit of duty-free shops. In fact, there are so many of these stores that the town resembles a cross between a beach town and an outdoor international airline terminal—the variety of booze, electronics, jewelry, tobacco and tchotchkes for sale in a few short blocks just boggles the mind. The town, the countryside, the people, the water and access to resorts and traditional outer islands would make this my recommendation for people looking for a vacation spot in the South Seas.

I’ve spent the last couple of days in Nadi, which is the tourism capital of Fiji (I passed it over for Suva, the capital, last time through). It provides access to resorts, but the town itself is a fair bit sketchier than Vila and instead of duty-free stores it features overpriced tourist mega-stores, one of which has an entire section devoted to coasters. Outside of one of these stores, a man in a grass skirt and face paint and carrying an ominous Fijian war club (for pictures with tourists), warned me to hold my bag close under my arm and avoid being surrounded if I ventured to the seedy south end of town. I had already been there, looking unsuccessfully for a money changer willing to convert my leftover Solomon Island dollars. I was advised that they’ve stopped using that currency entirely, but I don’t think that’s true because I spent them there only three weeks ago. I think there is just very little confidence on the Solomon economy.

I’m really just passing through Fiji on the way to Tuvalu, but it’s clear that the rumors of a coup appear to have been exaggerated. Life continues here as normal and the coup furor appears to have been, at least for now, just high-level jawing within the government. It could flare up again, I suppose, but even then it would be quite different than the popular ethnic uprisings that have happened before (and will probably happen again).

I was interviewing Allan Power, the grand old master of diving in Santo, on his verandah when Tim Gilder, manager of Allan’s dive operation, walked by and said to Allan, with a smile, “Looks like Fiji is going to go again.” Without an explanation, I knew exactly what Tim was talking about.

On December 6, I wrote here about the history of ethnic tension and coups in Fiji and noted that it seemed just a matter of time until they had another. Well …

Last week, Commodore Frank Bainimarama, the head of the Fijian military, threatened to remove the current government. Sandhya, my wife, is always trying to grasp the exact definition of irony. Well, sweetie, the reason Bainimarama wants to stage a coup is just dripping with irony--he thinks the current government is being too lenient with those who took part in the last coup in 2000.

Bainimarama, who as military leader put down the 2000 coup, is also accusing a former subordinate of threatening to kill him and conspiring with the government to remove him.

Rumors have filtered through to Vanuatu that the coup already happened (not true), and that there are curfews and police are preventing public gatherings (veracity unknown). But I've been in touch with people there and they now tell me that everything has been blown a little out of proportion and that it should not affect my travel plans. That's good, because I'll be back in Fiji tomorrow night.

In the meantime, I want to say more about Vanuatu. I haven’t written as much here as I have in other places because there is simply more to do. In addition to diving and hanging out with divers, there is a friendly community made up of expats and aid volunteers who are nice enough to invite visiting journalists out for kava or a beer. (There are also just scads and scads of missionaries. They travel in packs and I find myself crossing the street when I see them coming.) White people like these expats have passed through or settled in Melanesia for centuries, but around WWII, a strange little phenomenon started to pop up--the cargo cult.

American soldiers came at that time with all the wealth and waste that follows Americans around the globe. Across the region, groups of natives with no particular contact with one another began to believe that all that wealth, known as “cargo,” came from the spirits of their ancestors, was intended for them and had been hijacked by the whites. Many dressed and acted like soldiers, and even built fake airport, planes and radios of coconuts and palm fronds, to attract a windfall of tinned beef and consumer goods. Most of these cults faded away when the cargo planes never arrived, but here in Vanuatu, on Sulphur Bay on the island of Tanna, one of them persists--the Jon Frum Movement. (I should note here that some cargo cults seem to have arisen well before WWII, although that was seen as their heyday.)

Jon Frum is a mythical figure with a cloudy, bizarre history. He is described variously as a god who lives with an army of the dead in the cinder cone of Mount Yasur; the “king of America;” a black American GI; the son of god; a native named Manehevi who smeared white paint on his face; or an amalgam of Santa Claus, Uncle Sam and John the Baptist. To believers, he is a messianic figure who will one day return with all sorts of “cargo” for his chosen people. Occasionally people can commune with him. Kava is usually involved. And instead of a dour Sunday ritual, Frum is celebrated each Friday with drinking and dancing.

It is believed that Frum will return on February 15, so every year on that day, believers raise an American flag (and the state flag of Georgia, oddly) and march about the village with fake rifles made of bamboo. The elders wear old army uniforms while the younger men wear blue jeans and paint “USA” on their chests. Interestingly, even though acting like whites is part of the Jon Frum rituals, Frum is more commonly thought of as black, and the core of the belief system is that people should return to their traditional (or kastom) lifestyles--it is not some kind of strange American-worship. In fact, the Frum movement was the first real popular uprising against the goofy Anglo-French condominium government and all the missionaries that still prowl the islands. Some see in it the seeds of Vanuatu’s independence, the leading edge of political and social reform. Plus, Frum is a black messiah for black people in the same mold as Jesus and Mohammed, a truly original mash-up of Christianity and traditional beliefs. Others, however, see the movement as an anachronistic embarrassment to a legitimate developing nation.

I don’t want to make Vanuatu seem like a sideshow with all these odd little stories, but they are a little too interesting not to tell. It is just a hugely diverse place for such a small country. Even though everyone is Melanesian, I think that person-for-person there are more languages and more diversity of beliefs here than almost anywhere else in the world (including Queens).

The vast majority of the press clippings I pulled on Vanuatu before I came here related to a season of Survivor that was shot here a couple of years ago. I didn’t see any of it, but it strikes me that that show must be the least interesting thing to write about this country. It is wildly odd and beautiful and--at this risk of sounding like a travel brochure--seems to bring out the best in the people who visit here. I’ve met some great tourists and expats (mostly Australian, but not exclusively).

Granted, I have restricted my trip to just one island and have focused on the world-class reef and wreck diving here*, but there is all kind of wonderful strangeness going on here and on other islands. Here are a couple of things I've come across.

-- Let’s start with kava, the local narcotic drink made from a bitter and horrible-tasting root. Drinking kava (which is also drunk in other countries, but people here swear Vanuatu kava is the best) is something of a national pastime. You get a coconut shell full of the bitter, peppery, dirty-tasting gunk for around $1, rinse your mouth out in the spittoon next to the bar and then sit outside under a hut. Your lips and mouth go numb but beyond that the reaction can be an intensely personal thing, ranging from nausea and a headache to a floating euphoria to a complete inability to use your limbs to religious visions. If you feel up to it after 20 minutes, you give it another go. Word is that kava has 14 different analgesics and anesthetics in it and has anti-bacterial, diuretic and decongestant effects. And it can get you nice and toasty.

Traditionally, the drink is made by crushing the root with a coral mortar and straining it through a leaf mesh. For another variety, people chew it and spit it out and then strain it and serve it (this is supposed to make a smoother kava). But now most places run it through a meat grinder and strain it through panty hose. I gave it a go a couple of nights ago with a mixed group including the manager of a local dive shop, some expats in the logging and coconut oil business, a handful of Australian medical school students and divers, and a globe-trotting Belgian air guitar champion. Strange experience, but its effect on me was not much unlike alcohol except with a worse taste in my mouth and a strong sensitivity to light. I may give it another try, but not when I plan to dive the next day. Not again, that is.

-- I’m spending almost all of my time on the island of Santo. Southeast of here is the long, thin, mountainous island of Pentecost, which features a ritual that made up one of the classic National Geographic specials that make people marvel at how big and weird the world is: N’gol, or land-diving. In southern Pentecost, to celebrate the local yam harvest, the men build 50-foot-tall towers of sticks and vines and tree stumps and leap off the top of them with nothing but a vine tied to their ankles. They clear the ground in front of the tower of rocks because they are going to hit it. Then the divers select their vines. If the vines are too long, the diver will break his neck on the ground below. If they are too short, and the diver will swing back into the tower and break bones. The idea is to have only the hair touch the ground when they dive to make the soil fertile for the yam harvest. Before each dive, the man yells his innermost thoughts to the crowd below and then tips off the edge. The ritual is said to have inspired A.J. Hackett to invent the bungie jump, but bungie jumping is nothing compared to this. I won’t be able to see it--I’m on the wrong island and it's the wrong time of year--but those must be some seriously great yams.

* I did a night dive on the Coolidge the other night. Kava is interesting and all, but this was the real mind-bending, consciousness-raising, utterly terrifying and exhilarating experience. It’s taken two days to wipe the dumb, quivering smile off my face.

Vanuatu is not so different from the other places I’ve been--it is still recognizable as a developing island nation in the first stage of its independent history. But it feels a bit different, a little fresher, kinder, more receptive to inquiry. It’s a place that does not seem to be perpetually sabotaging itself. There was some secessionist weirdness involving some of the northern islands around independence in 1980, but in general the country seems to be doing well enough while still maintaining close ties with the island chain’s myriad traditional cultures. Around 80 percent of the Ni-Vanuatu, as people here are known, still live in traditional villages of less than 50 people.

This village life has survived despite some inspired colonial silliness that affected the island in the century prior to independence. Known then as the New Hebrides (bonus points and a Vanuatu souvenir to anyone who can say where the original Hebrides are without looking it up), the island chain attracted both English and French settlers. In 1906 they formed something called the Anglo-French Condominium, a joint colonial government. In other words, it was both French and English and every basic governmental service--immigration, money, education--was supplied and maintained independently by both countries. Separate and largely ineffectual, but equal, I suppose (except that the Ni-Vanuatu had almost no status at all).

It was a positively daffy arrangement that led to some surreal moments. In a chronicle of the history of divers in the region, one tells a story of arriving on a simple airstrip next to a small hut that was the airport for the island of Santo, where I am now. When he went in, there were two desks: one with a Frenchman in uniform behind it, one with an Englishman. Behind each was a flag on a pole and neither flag was allowed to be even an inch higher than the other. Instead of the Condominium, some called it the Pandemonium.

Neither England nor France had much interest in the New Hebrides in 1942 for obvious reasons. Two other countries were interested, though--the US and Japan. Japan wanted the island to cut off Australia, but the US headed off the Japanese sweep through the region and established, on Santo, its largest base in the Pacific outside of Hawaii. Among the many thousands of soldiers who were stationed here was the author James Michener. Much of the novel Tales of the South Pacific and the musical based on it were set here. There don’t seem to be many Americans here now, but the signs of American occupation are still around--quonset huts, downed planes, bunkers, air strips, amazing vintage rubbish heaps both underwater and on land, and, of course, the inescapable gravity (for divers, at least) of the SS President Coolidge. Unfortunately I can’t take underwater pictures and I honestly don’t think they would do much justice to the experience of diving this behemoth anyway. I’m actively researching the wreck and its history as a ship, a salvage site and a world-renowned dive location, so I’m not going to say too much about it now. But I can say it is terrifying, unforgettable and irresistible.

Some pics from around the island, some more tales of Vanuatu and the skinny on other dives here are all coming soon.

From my hotel room in the Solomons, there were two kinds of animals that stubbornly made their presence known: birds and ants. The tiny ants can almost always be seen scuttling along the baseboards in orderly lines and the birds keep up the chatter, a steady and persistent racket that is impossible to ignore (I think several live just outside my window). Scientists must find them impossible to ignore as well. The birds and ants of the Solomons, and the Pacific Islands in general, have long helped scientists try to understand how species develop.

Usually studying one of these two groups, birds or ants, researchers such as Robert MacArthur, Edward O. Wilson, Ernst Mayr and Jared Diamond used the Pacific Islands as ocean-spanning natural laboratories to create theories about why certain species are where they are, how they got there and how they evolved to their present forms.

One of the long-held assumptions was that islands are evolutionary dead-ends; species go to islands, evolve to suit the environment and then eventually go extinct with the arrival of other species or some change in the habitat. The trip from continent to island is a one-way affair, it was thought, and all island communities, no matter how far flung, are descended directly from continental sources. For example, the flycatchers in Marquesas, on the far eastern side of Polynesia, are descended directly from birds that arrived there from Australasia. Same for the birds in the much closer Solomons and Fiji in between. This led Mayr to conclude that there are really no Polynesian birds, only birds that arrived there and changed.

This work was based on taxonomic data--descriptions of the birds and their behavior--which has obvious limits in reconstructing the natural history of a species. Chris Filardi and his colleagues at the American Museum of Natural History recently applied DNA analysis to the same question (and the same birds) and have now overturned many of the long-held assumptions that came from Mayr’s work. Essentially, Filardi found that islands are hardly evolutionary dead-ends, but rather engines that may help drive diversification all over the world. His results were published Nature in November 2005 (if this sounds familiar, the work generated some media attention when it came out, including a piece by Carl Zimmer in The New York Times).

Filardi found that the 50 or more flycathers found throughout the Pacific were the result of a single radiation. Flycatchers therefore do not go to an island from the continent, diversify then die. Rather, they hop between islands, diversify and hop some more. And some have even made it back to the continent (namely, Australia). This might be the big finding of the study, that islands are not dead-ends but rather can generate biological diversity and then send it back to a continent. And all of this seems to have happened in a relatively short time, perhaps 1.5 million years.

The sad part of the story, of course, is that many of the birds from this family are seriously endangered or have recently gone extinct. In that sense, islands are to some extent evolutionary dead-ends because species there are always at high risk of extinction.

I’ve left the Solomons for Vanuatu, which, refreshingly, lacks the history of ethnic tension that has affected other islands. While Vanuatu only has 83 islands to the Solomons 900, it is just as culturally diverse. Like the Solomons, many of these cultures and languages are still alive today and most people still live in small traditional villages. I’ll be spending my time here on the largest island, Espiritu Santo, where I’ve started diving the enormous SS Calvin Coolidge, a luxury liner that was converted to a military transport and sunk by American mines in 1942. It’s enormous, quite deep and bloody terrifying to be inside. I’ve got two weeks to explore the whole thing.

(I've been in it four times by the time I finally got around to posting this entry. The Holy Shit factor is just off the charts.)

Besides divers, the only other travelers the Solomons, and Guadalcanal in particular, have ever attracted in numbers are former GIs, drawn to the steep hills where their fellow soldiers died by the thousands, rushing up without cover to claim the hilltops from the Japanese. James Jones’ The Thin Red Line (and the Terence Malick movie based on it) was set against this backdrop. Today, the rusting remnants still litter Guadalcanal where a great deal of fighting, on both sea and land, took place within a relatively small area, including all of sprawling Honiara. When people dig to lay the foundation for a building, they routinely find bodies. Expats wander old battlefields with metal detectors looking for souvenirs. Antiquated (even in 1942) Japanese cannons and small American tanks with popped treds settle to the earth in front of homes. A well-manicured golf course near the coast was once a series of fighter strips and is built on mounds of old jeeps and equipment. The bunker-like shed that was the American command post for the island is now a makeshift toilet along a rutted and pocked back road. The same remains provide the iron of Iron Bottom Sound. Out there, under the gentle waves and the Chinese fishing ships, are dozens of American and Japanese ships and probably hundreds of planes.


Honiara itself was a US supply depot and everywhere you turn, every patch of coast, every inland ridge, every broad flat field, has a name and a story and a battle associated with it. The flow of GIs who come to have a look at the past has slowed in recent years, for obvious reasons besides the “tension.” The Solomon Islanders, who welcomed the Americans as a more humane alternative to Japanese occupation, are forgetting this time even more rapidly. A young population growing up with these rusting hulks around them has, I think, more pressing concerns.

In summer 1942, US troops arrived in Guadalcanal, where the Japanese had recently dug in. The Japanese responded quickly with a naval attack, one of six major naval battles here. The Battle of Savo was a serious defeat for the US and claimed 1270 American lives. Slowly American forces recovered and eventually claimed Guadalcanal. In six months, 67 boats had been sunk, and 7,000 American and 30,000 Japanese soldiers were dead--drowned or blown up or shot down or quaking in their cots with malaria.


The only part of the memory of Guadalcanal not currently decaying in some form is the US War Memorial, which is maintained by an American agency for the preservation of monuments. Gareth took a couple of us up there and to a few other WWII sites yesterday morning after I finished with the dawn dive. Apparently it has suffered badly during the “tension,” but is now in great shape. A series of marble slabs with text explaining all the significant battles in the war surround a tomb for an unidentified soldier; the memorial provides a wonderful (and incredibly strategic) view out over all of Honiara on one side and a series of lumpy ridges, visible in this image, that the GIs scrambled up on the other.


Later, we visited the Japanese War Memorial, which is decidedly less impressive. While it provides another great view, it lies on the other side of a very dodgy neighborhood and is never maintained. It has become a graffiti-covered drinking spot littered with broken glass. With this exception, I noticed Japan has a very visible presence here now; the country donated everything from the airport to the computers in the Internet café.


Gareth also took us to see a few places where some of wrecks that were not dumped at sea or built over are amassed. They’re unmistakably beautiful as they settled into the earth, and I’m amazed that they’ve lasted as long as they have in this climate. This plane, a P39 Aerocobra, was a strange one. Unlike most WWII fighter planes, which have their engines mounted in the front, its engine was mounted in the middle and the drive shaft for the propeller ran between the pilots legs (!). It also had two machine guns that fired through the propeller blades and a cannon mounted in the center of it.

Then this morning, I saw just a fraction of what sits on the bottom of the sound. We made three dives of WWII wrecks--two Japanese transport ships called Bonege I and II and an American bomber (a B19, I thought I heard, but was unable to confirm). These wrecks have been down substantially longer than any others I’ve dived on, and as they slowly cave in, the ocean life has taken over. Some jagged rusty sheets and the general outline of the ships still shows through, but they are now very active reefs, covered in fish, corals both hard and soft, shrimp minding holes and anemones, and the occasional octopus flitting by. Bonege I is probably the most popular dive spot in the Solomons, easily accessible from shore near Honiara and extending from 30 feet to 150 feet. Bullets can still be found in the sand. We had planned to visit the hold, where there is a jeep, but lacked a flashlight powerful enough to cut through the gloom. I particularly enjoyed and was moved by the plane we saw later. Most of the nose and tail were missing, but the cockpit (including the throttle and steering wheel) and wings were intact, as well as some of its heavy machine guns and engines. But it has been totally consumed by life--it is like a quaint oasis in a desert of sand. There is a rumor that this plane was sunk in deeper water, but brought shallower for salvage. That is something almost never done, and the rumor was that a “briefcase” (plans, maps, etc.) that was pulled out. Could just be a local legend to embellish a nice little diving spot. I’ve been told about the dozens of other wrecks, divable and not, but unfortunately I’ll have to make due with what I saw today.

Steeped as I have been in WWII lore, I also made it a point yesterday afternoon to stop by the National Museum, which has a collection of tens of thousands of artifacts from the dozens of distinct cultures that make up the Solomons. By way of reference, there are more than a hundred indigenous and distinct languages spoken here. And because a lot of the outer islands have kept back from the violence on Guadalcanal and generally avoided developing a cash economy, many of these traditions--dances, initiations, body art including tattooing and piercing--survive uncorrupted. Unfortunately, all but a handful of the objects are still in storage for safekeeping, as they have been since the “tension” began. There have been a few things stolen or damaged, but most of the collection is intact. Much of what I saw were spears, shields and war clubs. I’ve read that until the 1930s, this area was considered among the most dangerous in the world--the people were headhunters and cannibals and skull worshippers. Hard to reconcile that image with the friendly people I meet here now. The one staff member at the museum told me they are considering a new exhibition for next year. More interesting than the sparsely populated exhibition space, though, is the park in back with examples of building styles from all over the archipelago.

I’ve been in the South Pacific for more than a month, within view of the ocean almost every moment, and yet yesterday morning was the first time I got wet. I phoned around when I got in to find a local diving operation, but just about everything in town has been closed. But I reached one fellow, an Aussie expat named Gareth, who has run the dive shop at another local hotel for the last three years. We arranged a two-tank morning dive with two other divers--an old Aussie gentleman and a marine biologist from Barbados who studies sea turtles. It seemed like a busy day for the shop, which consisted of only Gareth and his local assistant Johnny. I asked Gareth how much business he regularly gets and he sort of gazed off for a moment. Used to be a lot of divers, he said, the only tourists the Solomons ever really got, but not so much--and here Gareth pursed his lips as if swallowing hard--since the “tension.”

The tension, of course, is ethnic. Here it is between peoples from two neighboring islands basically visible to one another across the Indispensable Strait. It was a relatively short-lived direct conflict, but it crippled the country for several years afterward and the tourist industry has yet to recover.

With so much economic opportunity in Honiara, it has long attracted people from other islands in the Solomons group. It seemed to the Gwale people native to this province that people from the neighboring island of Malaita were coming in, buying up land and getting all the good jobs. So in 1999, a group of young Gwalese banded together as a militia and started terrorizing rural Malaitans, who fled to their home island or joined up with a Malaitan army of their own. The two sides signed a peace accord later that year, but it broke down rather quickly. The Malaitans eventually gained the upper hand, took control of Honiara and deposed the prime minister in June 2000. The other side responded by assassinating a Malaitan cabinet minister. At one point, with air service to the island shut down for six months. The Gwalese tried to reopen the airport, until the Malaitans, who controlled the utilities, shut down their power. In short, hundreds of people died and things generally fell to pieces. Another agreement was reached and the conflict was formally over by October, but the tensions have continued to fester and the government was unable to restore law and order or rebuild its institutions. Oh, and corruption also bankrupted the country. Finally, in 2003, the prime minister asked for help. An Australian peacekeeping force was sent to disarm militias and restore law and order. Their intervention is seen as a significant success; the country is much safer now, the government is more stable and the economy is even growing a little.

But judging from the look on Gareth’s face, the tourism industry continues to founder. Four years of violence and instability will have that effect. Strife or no, there is a lot for divers to see here, especially wrecks in the deepwater sound that fronts Honiara. In a tiny boat, tripping over our gear, we went to see a couple yesterday morning, a recently sunk ferry and an old fishing ship, each about 150 feet long and sitting on their sides in about 100 feet of water. It is difficult to grasp the geometry of a ship when you approach it like that. It is too close, too out of context, too jumbled. Only when you see something unmistakable, like the pilot house, the propeller or an antenna, does it start to make sense. The wrecks had some easy points of entry into mysterious looming caverns where masses of small fish flit by the edges of your vision. Combined with the 100 feet of water over your head, it is claustrophobic in the extreme.

I also tried a night dive with some expats I met, bankers and IT people who have become very serious divers since arriving here, but the entry point was getting choppy, so we agreed to try again at dawn. We were in the water by 6:30, spent an hour down there and saw some nudibranchs. Nice wake-me-up.

All these dive spots are in the large, semi-circular sound formed by the triangle between Honiara and two small islands--Iron Bottom Sound. That name must be music to the ears of wreck divers. While there are a lot of civilians wrecks like the ones we dived today, they are only a small part of what gives the sound its name. I’ll be going on three dives tomorrow morning and will have a lot more to say about what is down there. But it is hinted at, especially for history buffs, by the name of the island on which Honiara sits--Guadalcanal.

Back in Nauru*, I was waiting one day for a parliamentary session to start. It turned out to be a four-hour wait, but I had a chance to speak with a few people who were sitting out in front of parliament waiting to speak with their MP about some issue or another. It was a couple, a chatty, cheerful and chubby Nauruan woman and her much quieter, almost somber husband, who is from the Solomon Islands but recently got his Nauruan citizenship. As dour as he might have seemed at first, he brightened when we started talking about his old home. His English wasn’t great, but he told me that the Solomon Islands are so named because the islands were so rich with minerals and gold that they were likened to King Solomon’s mines. Unlike on Nauru, the man explained, they don’t want people to mine there; they like their islands and their simple village life just fine.

What he said rings true. The Solomons, a chain of 992 (!) islands (347 are inhabited) dribbling off the eastern end of Papua New Guinea into the Pacific are known to have commercially viable deposits of phosphate, bauxite, gold, silver, copper, nickel and manganese. The only mining operation in the entire country, which is the third largest island group in the South Pacific, was a single gold mine that recently closed. Logging and fishing are currently the islands’ biggest industries. So unlike Nauru, where a cash economy replaced a subsistence lifestyle with pretty disastrous results, most of the 410,000 Solomon Islanders have kept a largely rural, village-based, subsistence lifestyle involving fish and small agricultural plots and tree plantations. While the logging is an environmental concern, many of the islands are still heavily forested and there is amazingly diverse (and scientifically important--I’ll explain in another entry) animal and plant life. Before I left, I spoke with Chris Filardi, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History who has done extensive work in the Solomons; it is his research on island wildlife I’ll discuss later. But he explained that I should go to the Solomons, even though the country was not on my original itinerary, for just that reason—as a counterpoint to places like Nauru and Tuvalu, a place where a different model of development, one that is slower, more traditional and more in touch with the land, is occurring.

Unfortunately, I will not have time to get to many or any of the outer islands where these villages lie and won’t have the time to try to see how they are developing and judge the value of this model. With my limited time, I am going to try to see and photograph as much of the capital, Honiara, as I can, and hopefully do some diving on the local reefs and WWII shipwrecks. Honiara is really sort of in the middle of the island chain, but I’m told that some of the best diving is out in the Western Province (one of the country’s nine). Another time, perhaps.

I write all this as a New Year’s party goes on downstairs in the bar and restaurant of the hotel. It seems like it is for Aussie expats and the cream of Honiara society, but it is a crowd composed entirely of families who know one another and Japanese tourists. For the buffet dinner, I was seated alone, and there was a ring of empty tables between me and the rest of the party. I’m sure it wouldn’t be so isolating if I went down and struck up a conversation or two, but I’ve always liked the idea of sleeping through New Year’s, and I think I might give it a try. But my room is near the restaurant, so it’s going to be a little loud.

They are playing the Stone’s “Paint It Black” right now. Odd choice.


* Now that the travel saga and all the anxiety are over, I can cease the bitch-fest and go back to writing about more interesting things than my fragile hold on my temper. Thanks kindly for your patience.

One last Nauru story. I found out this morning before I left that I had been a topic of discussion in parliament the day before. A little background. The Nauruan parliament is now mostly relatively young members who ran in their districts on an anti-corruption reform platform last year. There are still two people in parliament from the old guard, one of whom is an old man named Rene Harris. Harris was the last president of Nauru and widely credited by the new government as the worst in its history. To hear it from them, every one of their current problems--insolvency, losing the plane, the decline of the mining infrastructure--can be traced back to his incompetence, corruption, cronyism and criminal hijacking of the island’s economy. At any rate, so many horrible accusations had been leveled at this fellow that I thought it only natural I should try to speak with him. So I called him up, he made a sort of gruff, non-committal answer and I told him I would call in the next day or two. I phoned him the next afternoon, after a spending a couple of hours at Air Nauru trying to get my travel sorted out. No sooner did I say my name than he started yelling at me on the phone, swearing about how he had waited all day for me to call. Before I could respond, apologize or say a single word, he slammed down the phone (people have since warned me retroactively about his volcanic and arbitrary temper). So the next day in the parliament session, he apparently formally confronted the current president, Ludwig Scotty. Something like, “What the hell is an American journalist doing walking around the island, talking to people and taking pictures of rubbish heaps? Who the hell let him in?” Scotty knew that I was there, but since I had not spoken with him directly he had no specific knowledge of what I was doing or how I had gotten in. Looking back, I’m not so sure how I got in either. Ministers I spoke with, including the one who is supposed to approve all media visits, were surprised I got in and was getting interviews. I’ve asked a friend there who is close to the government and who heard the whole thing on the radio about getting a transcript or a recording of the actual discussion.