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.
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.
posted by Samir S. Patel at 5:02 PM
2 Comments:
Being proactive, I tried to get some information for you on how to get out of there. Unfortunately travelocity does not seen to want to book flights in or out of Tuvalu (even using FUN code). Are you sure you really are there? I'm starting to think that you just went down to Florida (the story about the golf course) and then to New Orleans (probably diving into some old police cruiser and telling us it's the USS Coolidge..."it doesn't even begin to photograph well"...I bet!)...I guess the Keys are islands too, just like Manhattan. Well, in case you are really in Tuvalu, I just hope that travelocity.tv works better than travelocity.com.
Fair enough--but trying to book another flight out of here isn't going to do much good when there is only one plane. I guess I could be almost anywhere right now and no one would be any wiser for it.
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