The last big hurdle of the trip, the thing that oddly had me more nervous than anything else I have done here, was the seminar on environmental journalism that Shalen Singh of the University of the South Pacific Journalism Department has been putting together while I have been hopping around other islands.

It was quite a nice affair that featured three scientists from USP (a conservation biologist, a chemist who works with plastics and a marine biologist), four speakers from local NGOs and myself. After lunch, I gave a little talk about what I think environmental journalism is, how I think there are a lot of great opportunities for stories in the islands and what I found on my trips to Nauru and Tuvalu. It is not a subject given a lot of thought throughout the region, although I think the South Pacific attracts its fair share of western journalists. I think the talk went rather well aside from my talking too fast and sweating like I was running a marathon. It was a full house by the time I went on--maybe 50 people altogether, mostly students, but also some representatives of the local media. It may show some results, as already there was a rare story about climate change in the Fiji Times this morning, written by Ashwini Prabha, the communications rep for the regional WWF office. Shalen has promised to let me know what kinds of stories might come from it; there were a lot of good story ideas in the presentations the stidents were given and I hope I gave them something they can use.

For my last night in Fiji, Shalen took me out for a couple of drinks with some of his former students. And aware that I had yet to try Fijian kava, we gave that a whirl as well. You might remember me writing about the kava experience from Vanuatu, where people mocked Fijian kava as watered down, weak and pointless.

So we pulled up to a kind of social club in the economically diverse area of Suva called Toorak. This social club is made of many guys that Shalen grew up with in the area (even though he lives in an expansive suburb now), mostly reformed criminals, led by a guy who sounds like he was once one of Suva's great break-in artists and spent a great deal of time in prison. Apparently, when there is a break-in even now, the police some to see him first.

Here, kava is often called "grog," and I love the idea of a "grog session." This social club gets together just about every night for kava I think, drinking from the same two shells dipped in a communal bowl. According to Shalen, 10 shells of kava every night for two weeks and you'll be hooked for life. I don't know I could ver get that far.

While one of the club members was preparing the kava, I asked him about Vanuatu kava. "That stuff'll kill you," he said. And sure enough, Fijian grog is quite mild compared with the Vanuatu stuff, which can knock you on your ass with just a couple of shells. This stuff--you could probably have 5-10 in the course of a night with few untoward effects. The spittoons and chasers that are essential in Vanuatu are unnecessary here, and Fijian kava will only make your tongue numb, rather than the entire lower half of your face. A slightly more social experience, I think because the grog sessions can go on much longer. So we stuck around for a few shells, as the break-in artist mused wistfully about gaining access to an American market for kava so he can make enough money to build a block of flats for the club. I'm not sure it's going to take.

So I'm off today. I'll be about 28 hours in transit.

I never saw the musical South Pacific, but I read the James Michener book before I left and I think in the last couple of weeks I've started to understand some of it. One of Michener's themes was that, aside from war, being in the South Pacific, with its combination of beauty, unsettling heat and sun, waiting, isolation, scarcity and generally allowing the world to go by while you are fixed in an unchanging landscape, does really funny things to people. Model soldiers, who would have earned medals or died with valor in Europe became petty thugs in this languorous hothouse, while the most slovenly, ill kempt and insolent guys were the most resourceful and heroic soldiers. It is a matter of pace, of constancy, of inactivity. It takes a mindset, another way of thinking about the world that much more different than my experience than I thought it would be. The distance to here is much more than geographical.

I think a few would take to it right away, never want to leave. I don't think I ever fully adjusted, but I think I may have come to understand it a little. I suppose it is all I could have asked.

Fiji sent precisely zero athletes to the Winter Olympics in Torino. Skeleton, ice dancing, curling, the nordic combined: these pleasures are lost here. No, the eyes of the Fijian sporting world this weekend were fixed squarely on Los Angeles for Sevens Rugby, a butt-kicking hothouse and the national sport and obsession of Fiji. This year, this is their year, the hope goes, the year the Flying Fijians finally knock off the New Zealand All-Blacks as the big dog on the block. They swept the first two tournaments of the year and a win this weekend would put them out of reach. Everyone else would be playing for second.

Regular rugby involves 14 players on each team and a relatively long, hard-fought game. Sevens is a pressure-cooker variation, seven players to a side and two frantic, insane, seven-minute halves. Normal rugby is a bloody, muddy slog. Sevens is a high-stepping track meet with body slams. The tournament this weekend, the USA Sevens, is as accelerated as the game itself, a 16-team round robin and full elimination playoffs played in just two days, with barely enough time between matches for the players, or fans, to catch their breath.

The Fijian team is a sight--a troop of giant, barrel-chested sprinters who knock people flat like pro-wrestlers one second and fly the length of the field the next. Their Jordan, Gretzky, Pele and Pepsi pitch-man is player-coach Waisele Serevi, playing perhaps in his final season, the twilight days of a legend perhaps at long last leading his gang to the promised land.

The body's not even cold yet and his reincarnation has been crowned: William Ryder, a fleet hot dog who whips the Pacific-heavy crowd in LA into a stiff froth every time he touches the ball. With good reason, too--he crackles! Zero-to-sixty in a stutter-step. Yesterday, I saw him go the distance for a score, juking and feinting like a gazelle, moving as though he was in slow-motion one second and exploding into a blur the next, leaving a wake of tumbling Uruguayans with sprained ankles. And today, in the semifinals against New Zealand, he touched the ball twice and scored twice, including the game-winning try in overtime. When he hit fifth gear running down the sidelines, my jaw dropped and I had to stifle a little giggle. Holy shit.

So all was going well after the Fijians put the All-Blacks in their unfamiliar new place, but then they ran into a snag, a gang of stout limeys playing absolutely out of their minds. Jolly old England! Former colonial rulers! Tally-bloody-ho! Going into the second day, the English side has struggled a bit, ekeing out wins over France and Argentina. Then, in the semis, they played the South Africans, another one of the world's best, and just destroyed them, embarrassed them, denied them the ball and then shoved it back down their throats. As the match flew by, it was like watching the English side inflate with muscles, by the end they were raging, spitting, veined monsters with legs like tree trunks.

Fiji was still pretty confident going into the final, a righteously earned swagger, but nobody told the other blokes, who must have popped another screw, because they unloaded on Fiji's pride like a tank battalion. They opened a cut over captain Daunivucu's eye in the first minute, they made a Ryder-shaped hole in the ground every time he even sniffed the ball and they put Serevi first on his heels and then on his ass. Final score: 38-5.

School stopped so kids could yell at screens, I could hear a collective groan from outside my hotel room each time England scored or Ryder ate turf. The English took the wind out of this country today a little bit. However--there are silver linings in this sport--the Fijians, I think, are still in the driver's seat for the Sevens overall title this year, a title only New Zealand has ever won. But they have to get the swagger back. Next up is the Commonwealth Games and, I think the Fijians hope, a return date with their pasty nemesis.

Incidentally, losers in the tournament are fed into lower and lower brackets, but there is a prize at the end of even the losers' brackets. The winner of the lowest bracket, composed of the worst four teams in the tournament--the US, Mexico, Kenya and the West Indes--wins the shield, and so it goes like a place-setting, next bracket gets the bowl, then the plate and finally England's bitter-filled cup. The US team managed just one win in the tournament, over the exhausted, battered Mexicans (who lost their first-round matches by a combined 218-7, in just 42 total minutes), and then lost in the shield bracket final to an infectiously joyous Kenyan side.

Shortly after Jacques Cousteau died in 1997, I remember hearing somewhere that he had staged, Steve Zissou-style, a lot of the behavior and confrontations that made his nature films about the oceans so famous. I don’t suppose it takes away from how interesting the films were or how much awareness they raised for marine conservation, but if they were staged, they seem to lose some intangible “wild” quality.

I was thinking about this on Saturday on the way to the Beqa Lagoon in southern Fiji to go diving. Once known for its colorful soft corals, the area has since been eclipsed in that respect by the Rainbow Reef off the smaller Fijian island of Taveuni. While there are still beautiful soft corals in Beqa, the area is now known as Fiji’s shark-feeding capital. A shark feeding. Feels a bit like tying a goat to a stake so you can watch a lion hunt. But then again, you stop worrying about whether your wildlife encounter is staged when a bull shark larger than you are swims toward you with a jagged, toothy grin.

Even though shark attacks are ridiculously overblown as a risk to human life, there is a pretty primal fear of sharks--the scudding torpedoes with teeth in the shark week promos. This particular shark-feeding operation appears pretty well run and has a strong conservation component to it. Each diver on one of these shark dives pays a $10 fee that goes to a local village. In return, the villagers treat the area of the feedings as a no-catch zone and patrol the waters to prevent illegal fishing. From what the divemaster tells me, it’s an all-around successful arrangement--the fishing has improved, the reef is more diverse, the villagers make a little money and other villages have approached him to try to set up similar arrangements. Also, the divemaster cycles the specific site of the feedings every few years.

After a 10-minute boat ride out into the lagoon, we tied off and descended a couple of lines to about 70 feet, where all the divers settled in behind another line, with a wall of rubble behind us. It felt like a viewing gallery in a zoo or aquarium, except for the obvious difference that there was nothing between us and the thousands of fish attracted by the two sacks of fish-sicles and thawing chum the divemaster got from a local fish processing plant. It was a while before the sharks arrived and they were mostly smallish (3-4 feet) gray reef sharks. The cloud of fish of all sizes surrounding the food would burst apart as the sharks thrashed through. By the second dive we did at the same location, the drifting scent of blood in the water had attracted a half-dozen larger bull sharks, which seemed to have chased away many of the smaller sharks and were given a wide berth by the other fish. The man-sized bulls came probably within 10 feet of me, ripping apart a hunk of frozen fish, as I lingered at the bottom of the descent line while most of the other divers had started back for the boat. While the sharks pay the divers little mind, the guides still carry pointed poles--you know, just in case.

While the scripted wildlife encounter is certainly different than seeing an animal under more natural circumstances, there are several side benefits to this particular form of interaction. In addition to the arrangement the divemaster made with the local villagers, the regularity of the shark feedings also gives scientists access to the elusive sharks, and this particular operation has helped scientists with tagging efforts so the fish can be tracked when they go out to sea. Also, encounters with sharks like this--bulls are among the handful of species recorded to have attacked humans--also hopefully show that the fear of sharks is largely unreasonable. Shark attacks seem to get so much attention that it gives the impression that they are a serious risk to beachgoers, divers and surfers. But very few people are killed by sharks each year. Between 1959 and 2003, of the millions of people who pour into the oceans every year, 22 people in the US were killed by sharks--about one every two years. Compare this with the 18 people killed each year by dogs, 41 each year from lightning strikes and 130 each year from crashes with deer. Globally in 2004, seven people were killed by sharks. Seven! Twenty times more people were killed by falling coconuts (a non-trivial risk here--when the wind blows I find myself looking up). So the hysteria that often surrounds shark attacks is an overreaction to sad, but incredibly rare, events, and may in some way hamper efforts to study and protect them.

Flight cancellations and delays being a normal part of Funafuti air service, last week I switched my flight to leave Tuvalu three days earlier than I had planned. I would have finished most of what I needed to in Tuvalu in the two weeks I would have, and in switching the flight I hoped to head off any travel difficulties by giving myself a margin of error. In travel to many islands across the South Pacific, such allowances are a necessity (as we saw with the whole Nauru fiasco).

But in some ways I have taken the easy way out by restricting my travel to places with (in theory, at least) regular air service. If one wants to get even farther off the beaten path, and we’re pretty far already, the necessary margin of error for travel grows from days to months. For example, if I had wanted to travel to some of Tuvalu’s outer islands, or to other places in Vanuatu or the Solomon Islands, I would be relying on transport ships or tiny island hoppers that arrive so unpredictably that the minimum stay is at least a few weeks and in many cases travelers should be prepared to stay several months.

There is another mindset required to travel the Pacific Islands properly, one that I do not have and am only now really coming to understand. I’m going to expound on it a bit more later.

At any rate, despite a downpour that had lasted the better part of two days, the plane arrived on Funafuti this past Monday and, much to my surprise, took off again less than an hour later with me aboard. It was the 10th flight I have boarded on this trip and while it was not the smallest plane (that title goes to the 16-seat puddle-jumper I took between Port Vila and Santo, where I could tap the pilot on the shoulder without taking off my seatbelt), it was easily the most harrowing flight. The plane bucked and dipped hard as we approached Fiji, so much so that I got a little white-knuckled and several of the other passengers “assumed the position,” with their head down between their knees.

So I am in Suva, Fiji, again, for 10 days this time, for some follow-up reporting and to prepare the seminar on environmental journalism at the University of the South Pacific. By leaving Tuvalu early, I missed two things. Because of the weather the few days before I left, I never got to dive in the lagoon with the country’s one certified diver, Semese Alefaio. Alefaio was the conservation officer for Tuvalu’s marine protected area, now works for a local NGO and bears a rather striking resemblance to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon star Chow Yun Fat. I also missed, by just a few hours, another wedding, although this one was a bit different than the one I mentioned below. It was a Swiss couple, five months into a year-long round-the-world trip. They had planned for quite some time to get married in Tuvalu--to have an interesting story to tell their grandchildren, I suppose. They had invited everyone staying and working at the guest house (around 20 people) and were scheduled to start the ceremony about two hours after my plane left. They were, of course, getting married right next to the runway.


p.s. Correction: In the entry below about the Tuvaluan wedding, I said that the open-air meeting space is called a maneapa. That is true, but that word is actually more of a Kiribati term--Kiribati (pronounced kiri-bas) is another low-lying island nation hundreds of kilometers north. Kiribati and Tuvalu were once grouped together as a British colony known as the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. While there are some cultural similarities, they are independent countries and distinct peoples--Kiribati is considered part of the Micronesian region while Tuvalu is more Polynesian. Here, the more appropriate local word for the meeting hall is a falekaupule (fah-leh-kow-pu-leh).

Because the airport runway is the only notable open space on Funafuti, it doubles as a playground. On any given evening, there will be at least three games, usually soccer and rugby, scattered across the runway. The games may pull in as many as 50 people, so the fields, which they mark off with small orange cones, span both the runway and the small grassy areas on either side. The other night, while these raucous games were going on, there was also a session of ano, Tuvalu’s traditional ball game. It’s like a variation on volleyball played with two balls, each about six inches in diameter and made of braided and woven leaves.

To play, two teams face each other, about 20 feet apart, in six or seven rows of three or four people each. At the front of each team is a server (called an alovaka) and a catcher (called a tino pukepuke) with his back to the other team. The server tosses the ball up and smacks it over at the other side. The receiving team then knocks the ball in the air forward, trying to get it all the way back to their own catcher without letting it touch the ground. If they drop it before it gets to the catcher, the other team scores a point.

There are two basic strategies employed by the server—he either knocks the ball high in the air, toward the back of the other team, forcing them to hit it several times to get it back to the catcher, or he hits it low and hard at the other team’s front line, who then must react quickly to knock the ball up for the catcher. Each team serves at the same time, so two balls are usually in play and the game can get quite hectic.

It doesn’t exactly have the rigid rules of volleyball—in ano you can actually catch the ball and toss it back up, as long as you do it quickly. Most people in the back lines do this. But there seems to be some pride, especially in the front line players, on knocking the thing back up with a little style—off an elbow or with a fluid spin.


While I only saw male alovaka and tino pukepuke, both men and women play the game, and it seems as though teenagers and younger children have little interest in it. I think the teams playing here were semi-organized, perhaps by the outer island they come from. But the whole match was quite friendly, with a lot of laughing on both sides.

Of course the game has to stop when a plane needs to take off.