Nauru phosphate.....

On Nauru, the last vestiges of a once thriving phosphate industry fall apart.  

Phosphate was discovered here by albert Ellis, who recognised a doorstop at the Pacific Islands Company office in Sydney as being pure phosphate.  By the late 1980s over 40 million tones of phosphate had been exported, and the island had been shaved.  The population were the richest people per capita in the world in the late 1970s, but by the mid 1990s the money had all gone, wasted and stolen by greed, corruption and foolish investments. 

Now the island looks like a lunar landscape, and is littered with old machinery and equipment.  This islanders hope for another miracle, but it wont happen. 

Rolex Yacht Master

Most of my traveling was done with a Rolex GMT Master, and latterly a Seiko divers watch. After the Pacific islands I bought a platinum Rolex Yacht Master. 

I hasten to add that is not my arm, and its not my photo.  I have much younger looking arms. 

And for comparison, a Rolex GMT Master.  They almost look old fashioned these days.....

And this is my old gold rolex:

although Rolex these days suffer slightly from the "Yuppy" tag, the advances made by Rolex made the wristwatch wearable. They really are the founders of modern watches:

1926: rolex Oyster, the worlds first waterproof watch.
1931: Worlds first self winding watch.
1945: Worlds first watch with a date display

Disparate lifestyles

These is a shocking disparity in lifestyles in Asia that takes some getting used to.   This is the lobby of the Ambara hotel, a medium sort of place - by no means high class.  But a pianist plays day and night in the lobby, doormen open the door for you, the floors are always polished,  the coffee is fresh and the staff all smile 

This is the scene right outside the hotel. Men sit around with nothing to do, there is no pavements, everything is dirty or does not work....

Landing craft, Kiribati

we think of landing craft as being tools of war, being used to deliver tanks onto beaches.  On the Pacific islands they are a lifeline. They can carry vehicles and containers, and run up sandy beaches to be hand unloaded by willing locals.  

This one sat beached for the whole time I was on kiribati, but had crew living on it, and just as I left they started loading containers onto it. 

I took a look around it one afternoon, and I wouldn't trust it to float due to rust. 

Fiji Defence Club

Stuck in Fiji due to cyclone Daphne, I joined the Fiji Defence Club.  

This is an old colonial relic (in the nicest sense). A club established in 1915, originally for members of the defence forces, it still retains strong links to the military (a smart move in a country under a military dictatorship).  The club is still in the same location, a colonial wooden palatial building of huon pine.  Inside it is steeped in the history of Fiji:

 The bar boasts the longest bar top in the Pacific:

The club made me especially welcome,  and I intend keeping up my membership.   Cheers guys....

See more of the club and its members here: http://www.defenceclub.com.fj/index2.html

Karva ceremony

On a secluded beach on Efate Island,  dancers performed and then invited me to drink mud-like kava that left my lips numb and me unable to speak. 

Le Barons and the Stamford Arms, Jakarta

Mew with the Stamford Arms bar staff, 2004.

Same bar (now called Le Barons)  eight years later.  Still fun bar staff.......

Phang Nga Bay Marine National Park

Somewhere off the coast of Thailand lies a group of rocky outcrops in the Andaman Sea.  These are now part of the Phang Nga Bay Marine National Park, and are popular with tourists and as backdrops to films, including several James Bond movies. 

Fema Lodge sunset

On Kiribati I lived at the Fema Lodge.  Every night the sun would set in spectacular fashion on the lagoon, right outside the front entrance. 

The thatched hut has many uses. People waited for the rickety rustbucket buses under its shelter, and women sold fish out of it in the afternoons. At night some men would sleep under its protection. 

Denarau Island sunset

I had just got back from months of living on a remote island, and had to stop in transit in Fiji for a few days.  I booked into the Raddison on Denarau Island to enjoy a little luxury after months of cold showers and VB beer.   

After checking in I walked down to the beach bar and saw the sunset, sitting in a beach chair drinking Fiji Gold. 

The Royal Palace, Tonga

Built of kauri pine in 1864,  the Royal Palace is the official residence of the King of Tonga.  

In 2011 I was a guest at the Kings birthday parade held alongside the Palace. 

Stamford Arms Jakarta

My favorite barmaid in the old Stamford Arms bar in the Ambara Hotel, Jakarta.  Always happy and cheerful, she made the bar bounce along.

This would have been about 2004 -05. In a strange coincidence I believe that she later married a guy from EDS Australia that I vaguely knew from my days working there. 

Erakor Island

Formerly a mission station, Erakor Island sits in the entrance to a lagoon on Efate Island, Vanuatu.  The waters are crystal clear, as warm as bathwater and teeming with fish. 

I had a beer on this Island, Christmas Eve 2008.

Tanah Lot

Tanah Lot is a rock formation on the West Coast of Bali.  Tanah Lot literally mean "land in the sea" in the Balinese language, and the island is the home of a famous temple.

One of the most popular tourist spots in Bali, Tanah Lot is famous for its spectacular sunsets and for the poisonous sea snakes that live in holes around its base.

Tongan dancers

On Tonga, girls in the traditional tapas tops and grass skirts wait to perform traditional dances. 

The tapas is a cloth like material made from the bark of mulberry trees.  

Before dancing the girls will smear oil onto their arms and shoulders, and money is attached by the audience in appreciation of the dancing.  I found it rather like tipping a lap dancer, however it is expected and I was goaded into doing it by Tongan friends.  

Gilbert Islands

Thirty years after independence, some traces of the colonial past still remain.   On independence day 2011 I found an old Gilbert Islands sign still on a government building.

The Gilbert Islands were named after Captain Thomas Gilbert,  who visited the islands in 1788 on his way back from delivering convicts to Australia. 

He wrote in his diary "Being now abreast of this island, the extremity ending in a beautiful clump of trees, I hauled up to look at the bay. It appeared to be safe and commodious, sheltered by a long reef running parallel with the island, with two large inlets into the bay. The reef is about 3/4 of a mile from the beach, and has several small islands which appear like flower pot"

Kiekie girl on tonga

On Tonga a pretty girl wearing a kiekie and carrying a fan walks to church. 

The kiekie is worn around the waist of woman dressing up to go out. It can be made of all most anything, but most commonly from the pandanus tree and can be best described as a belt with stands that hang down below the knee. They are purely decorative and at some events like going out to for a dance can be very colourful.

Betio bullet hole

On Betio, from a bullet hole in one massive armoured gun, you can see the next one in the line of defences.

Nauru driftwood

On Nauru,  massive pieces of driftwood that probably drifted thousands of miles across the Pacific wash up on the beach. 

Bangkok temple

Temples are everywhere in Bangkok.  This one is just behind a food court near Silom.

Manila Bay sunset

Late afternoon on Manila Bay, and a sailing boat slides past. I was at the San Miguel park, just behind the Mall of Asia, the third largest shopping mall in the world....

the Coral Princess

Part of a wing off the "Coral Princess".   a USArmy B25, she took off from Makin Airfield  at 8:15am on June 29th 1944, piloted by 1st Lt Karl James. 

Around lunchtime she was hit by a Japanese 127mm anti aircraft shell and exploded over Nauru.  The crew all died in the crash.  Bits of the aircraft still litter the middle of the island.   

Someone had put the crews details in a small memorial book and left it at the crash site:

Pilot  1st Lt. Karl R. James, 

Co-Pilot  Alexander Cheropovich 

Navigator  John Keeling 

Radio  Frank Kapla, 

Engineer  Harry Stockton 

Gunner  Benedict Jasper

Bangkok 2008

Bangkok 2008 - a very different Bangkok to the one I first visited many years ago.  Hardly any motorbikes, no bicycles, no tuktuks but a LOT of cars,  5 lane roads, overhead railways and pedestrian walkways.

A sign of a growing affluent middle class.....

Jalan Pelatan, Jakarta

2004, in a bar on a boulevard of broken dreams called Japan Pelatan in Jakarta.  I think it was about 2am, and I was thinking of going home.....

And just for reference, here is the bar in daytime:

And here it is at night, complete with "ayams" - chickens, meaning bar girls.....

Ambo Lagoon Club, Kiribati

Once a two story palatial colonial expatriates club with  tennis courts and a golf course, the Ambo  Lagoon Club is now a thatched roofed maniaba where locals drink.  Strangely, it still has reciprocal membership rights with some of the worlds best clubs.   I guess no one has checked it out recently.

The bar staff sleep under the counter. Day or night, you just bang on it and they wake up and serve you. 

Once it hosted wedding receptions, Christmas parties, Melbourne cup days. Now a handful of men drink VB in its shade.

Tepuka Island

Across the Tuvalu Atoll from Funafuti lies a small uninhabited island called Tepuka.   This was my first ever uninhabited "desert island".  Just palm trees and coconuts.

The remnants of the volcano that formed the atoll thousands of years ago can still be seen rising above the sand.  In the distance a deceptively fierce surf can be seen breaking on the coral reef.

Kuta Go Go dancer

Just up the road from where 200 died in the 2002 bombings, a go-go dancer in Kuta, Bali tries to encourage drinkers to go into the bar.

Manila Skyline

Manila is notorious for its pollution, which hangs across the city in a broad bluish tinge.  Metro Manila  is huge, encompassing 16 cities and containing around 28 million people.

This is the view from Mandaluyong looking south towards Makarti.  The struggling MRT railway line can be seen in the lower right corner. Always packed, I avoided it whenever possible.

Manila 2011

In late 2010 I found myself living and working in the Mandaluyong suburb of Manila, for the Asian Development Bank.

Manila is one of my all time favorite cities. big and exciting, and in some ways slightly dangerous, it has a charm of its own.

Betio Dancer

On Betio Island, was having a beer in the Captains Bar  with a guy from the World Bank and we were playing pool. Two young girls in jeans an T shirts hovered near the table, waiting for our game to end.

We invited them to play doubles with us, and bought them a drink. Later they said they had to get changed, and came back as traditional dancers. Later we took them to Midtown nightclub.

Vanuatu 2008

In 2008 I found myself in Vanuatu, a small island nation in the Pacific.  Just as I walked out of the Office Pub at sunset a large yacht was making its way into Vila Bay.

Vanuatu was known as the New Hebrides until independence in 1980.  New Hebrides was held as a jointly owned colonial possession by both France and the UK, who duplicated everything to replicate both nations. There were both French and British prisons, courts etc. which must have been confusing for the locals.

Vanuatu is now developing itself as a tourist destination.

Bangla Road 2009

Phuket, once a tin mining island backwater, became a trendy holiday resort in the late 1970s.  By the 1990s the main areas like Patong were sleaze traps for tourists, with transvestites and prostitutes vying for trade in a thousand hole-in-the-wall bars.

But every night the sun still sets on the Andaman Sea in spectacular style.  As it slips below the horizon the sky bursts into mother natures light show.   Hookers and pimps, drug dealers and drunks, stop and admire in unison, before going back to their world.

Balinese dancers

In a Seminyak restaurant, Balinese dancers perform for the diners.

Although part of Indonesia, the Balinese are Hindu, and are culturally very different from Javanese.

Bali is often called the Land of the Gods, and until 30 years ago was an agricultural economy.  In recent years this has been surpassed by tourism, although agriculture is still the number one employer.

Dubai sunset

In early 2012 I found myself back in Dubai, for the first time in thirty years.

Much had changed. I could barely find my way around the city.  but the sunsets were still blood red.

This photo sums up Dubai as I know it.  The sunset, the modern high-rise and the cranes of construction, and yet on the Creek the wooden ferries still ply their trade and on the shore workmen still build traditional wooded Dhows.

I often wonder what would have become of me if I had stayed on in Dubai.

Kiribati posting

In early 2011 I found myself working on Kiribati as a consultant of behalf of the Asian Development Bank.

Kiribati, know to me in my schooldays as the Gilbert Islands, was a British colonial possession until June 1979.  Remnants of that colonial period still abound,  from old signs to red postal boxes.

The chain of islands and atolls sits almost on the meeting point of the equator and the international date line, almost half way between Australian and Hawaii, and a long way from anywhere.  The people are friendly and cheerful, with a very laid back lifestyle.

Relatively untouched by the outside world until recently, there are now DVD shops, mobile phones and internet connections.   I was glad that I was able to see it before the nation becomes just another part of a homogeneous world.

Kiribati girl

In a scene that typifies all that is wrong in the Pacific, a  barefoot young woman forages for food on the reef at Bairiki.

Her child wears the disposable diapers that cannot be disposed of on the atoll,  she carries a plastic shopping bag advertising an imported mild substitute, and a cardboard box that once contained imported produce from China.

I followed her, and the hard sharp coral hurt my feet through my shoes. She seemed immune to it.

I took her photo, but her look of shame and destitution made me instantly embarrassed, and I deleted it. As she walked on, I took an anonymous shot from behind.....

Nauru girl at sunset

Early evening and the sun sets off the volcanic outcrop that is Nauru. A young girl makes her way back ashore after cooling off in the ocean, carefully avoiding the razor sharp rocks.

Betio Tank

Betio island, part of Tarawa, in the kiribati chain of islands, was one of the most fought over pieces of the Pacific in World War 2.  

Beached in shallow water just close to the shore lies a small US Army tank, still where it became stuck in soft sand on the morning of November 20th 1943. Some 4500 Japanese and 1500 US Marines and Soldiers died in two days,over an island smaller than a city block.  The relics still litter the shores. 

Tuvalu fishermen at sunset.

It was early evening on Tuvalu, the remote and distant atoll that was once known as the Ellice Islands.  One of the smallest nations in the World, with just 10,000 inhabitants on nine reef islands and atolls,  Tuvalu is almost unknown.  There is just one flight a week from Fiji.

I walked behind the government offices where I was working, to see the sunset.  A group of local men were fishing on a small jetty.  Fishing is a hobby, a social gathering and an industry in the Pacific.  The men were huddled together, as the massive fireball descended into the lagoon.

About Me

for a man who hates traveling, I do a lot of it.

Born in the UK, I was in  Dubai in the late 70s, France in the 80s, and I was living in Australia by 1986.  

A former Engineer,  I found a niche in Business Intelligence, and worked across Asia,  I now work in aid development, and for the last two years I have been working for the Asian Development Bank.