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.