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).