Tarawa Atoll

This was the view from just outside my office on Tarawa Atoll, looking down the reef. Someone actually lived in that thatched hut on the beach.  

The sand was soft and warm, the lagoon turquoise and inviting. Sadly, it is highly polluted with fecal contamination and unsafe to swim in.

Tarawa Causeway

The Japanese built causeway links the small islands that encircle the Tarawa atoll. Unfortunately they also trap the water inside the atoll, leading to high levels of pollution and contamination in the water and in the fish caught inside the atoll.

32nd Independence Day Kiribati

In 2011 I was working on Tarawa Atoll during the  Independence day celebrations.  This actually involves a whole week, when the entire country shuts down.   I was lucky to be invited to all of the functions for the week.

Proceedings start with the Independence Day Parade on the sports field. The best part of this was the march past of the schools, from senior to preschool, often in traditional costume. 

The Gilbertese people enjoy a good laugh, and the antics of the the children had the whole stadium rolling around in laughter. 

The participants stood in the sun for several hours, and those bare feet are walking on burning hot and razor sharp  coral sand. 

Tarawa Atoll

Approaching Tarawa Atoll from the air, you realize how narrow a strip of land it is.  There is nowhere you cannot hear the breaking of the Pacific on the coral.  The highest point is a few meters above sea level, the water table is fragile and polluted.  

50,000 people live on this atoll.

Until the late 1980s the population was around 20,00, but a wealthy cashed up Japan poured aid money into Tarawa, building hospitals, roads and schools. The result was the population doubled in just five years, as people moved from other atolls to reap the benefits on Tarawa. 

There is no room to support the large population. Betio, at the furthest end, has the highest density of single level dwellings in the world. People have squatted on every available piece of land, living packed side by side.  The nine hole gold course at the Lagoon Club is now a mass of hastily erected houses, little more than thatched roofs with matting sides. 

Land space isn't the only problem.  The increased population drained the natural resources. The water table dropped so low that polluted lagoon water seeped in. Now Tarawa has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world, due to polluted drinking water.  

Sanitation is similarly problematic. Most of the population bathe, urinate, defecate and fish in the lagoon. It now has one of the highest e-coli ratios in the world.  The Japanese built a causeway across the main entrance, and now the tidal flow no longer drains the lagoon. Trapped water remains for months, containing the pollution. 

If the drinking water doesn't get you, then the fish from the lagoon does.  

But the lagoon is multiple shades of brilliant turquoise, so colourful that you cant quite believe it. The ocean is deep blue, the sand is snow white, and the plants are vivid shades of green. On top of all that the air here is absolutely clean. There isn’t anther land mass for hundreds of miles, and even then it’s pretty small.  There is no air pollution, and it shows up clearly in the stunning colours in the photographs.

Fish economics....

Most of the islanders fish. Even if they have a daytime job, they will still wade into the lagoon with a net. 

The afternoon catch creates an interesting economic dilemma.  The wife selects the fish for dinner and offers the others for sale at the roadside. 

Three forces then come into play. 

1.  The wife wants to go home and cook the evening meal as soon as possible. 

2.  In the heat and without ice, the fish rapidly decompose and become uneatable.

3.  Potential buyers could easily wade into the lagoon and catch this fish themselves. 

The fish are quickly sold for a pittance, and the wife hurries off to cook the meal. 

Line and Phoenix Islands

The exotically named Line and Phoenix islands are two groups of remote islands that form part of Kiribati.

The Phoenix Islands are a group of eight uninhabited atolls and two submerged coral reefs, lying in the central Pacific Ocean east of the Gilbert Islands.  In  2008 the government of Kiribati declared the entire Phoenix group and surrounding waters a protected area, making it the world's largest marine protected area.

The Line Islands are a chain of eleven atolls and low coral islands in the central Pacific Ocean, south of the Hawaiian Islands, that stretches for 2,350 km in a northwest-southeast direction, making it one of the longest island chains of the world.  Only three  of the atolls are inhabited.

The Line and Phoenix Islands and administered from Tarawa Atol.

Lagoon Club memories

The Lagoon Club at Ambo on Kiribati Atol was once a colonial outpost, where expats drank beers after work, where weddings, birthdays and Christmas parties were held. 

In the years since independence it has subsided into a thatched roof maniaba, where a handful of members meet for drinks.

The sign remains, even though the phone is long gone. 

I was lucky to find an old photograph album of the club in its heyday, and copied it.  Here are some long forgotten memories. 

Here is the old upstairs bar. "It had CARPETS", one local told me in shock.....

In the downstairs bar, an expat dances with a local girl:

Facing the lagoon, you can see the two story structure.  The club had its own boats, a nine hole golf course and tennis courts. Now everything has gone. 

It looks like local girls were hired as bar staff:

Upstairs they had a glass walled darts room  and a reading area:

Whilst downstairs locals and expats dance away:

As a local band played:

This is the Lagoon Club today:

The "tables" are where once stood a floodlit tennis court......

Midtown barmaids

Kiribati has a couple of nightclubs, the Midtown and the Gateway. 

Midtown is a cavernous building with deafening music and no lights, Gateway resembles a Cambodian prison on a good day.  Both are renowned for the fights, which even the security team can't control. 

Here are the barmaids in Midtown. 

Learning to fish

On Biariki a father teaches his daughter how to fish with a net. The lagoons are teeming with fish, attracted by the warm shallow waters. Dragging a net across any part of the lagoon will result in success. 

Kiribati dancers

On Kiribati a group of traditional dancers had just finished performing their unique, jerky dance that mimics local birds. 

I walked across and took my photo with them. 

Bonriki international airport terminal

Bonriki international airport terminal, Kiribati (Gilbert Isles). This is both the arrivals and departures lounge.  i didn't find a business or club class lounge, so I assume it doesn't exist. 

Air flights are the only real contact with the outside world, and crowds would gather to meet the weekly planes from Fiji.  It becomes a form of entertainment,  to see who will arrive on the next plane. 

Betio. The walk to the shop

From my Diary:

Betio. The walk to the shop.

Sometimes you just forget where you are. You become acclimatised to the heat and immune to the Island lifestyle.  You notice the tradition dancing, but in the same manner that you would notice a show or movie.

And after that immunity and acclimatisation you just carry on living within the restrictions and limitations. You have become an islander.

And then suddenly you realise that you are a long way from anywhere on a small atoll, and you see it differently. 

I walked out of the office to go to a shop. 

The sentence brings incorrect visions into your mind. The office is a long grubby hut, left over by the British in 78.  It has ceiling fans and curtains to try to keep the intense heat at bay. 

The shop is a wooden shack in which a woman lives and works. You don’t enter her home, but stand at a small glassless window and tell her what you want. She rummages around and hands the goods to you through the opening.  

Behind me is the Kiribati port. A row of old corrugated iron sheds and hanger like structures, falling down from rust and decay.  Workers scurry around unloading goods. This isn’t a port as most of the world would know it. There is no deep water facility. Ships anchor offshore, and unload onto small lighters, that bring the goods into the port. There they are unpacked on the dockside and manually loaded onto small trucks, or repacked for further shipping to more remote islands. 

The image is one from a 1930s movie in the Pacific. Nothing has changed.  Bare-chested natives sweat as they lift bags of rice onto their shoulder and carry them from a waterside lighter to a roadside truck. Children fish on the dockside, young female clerks giggle and flirt with the labourers as they walk past, the girls counting each sack of rice. 

A single 1930s crane lifts containers off the small boats and drops them on the dockside, where they are unpacked. 

The traffic on the road between the shop and the port is sparse. A few vans and trucks. No cars drive past.  Women walk by, bare brown feet on rock hard coral and scorching hot tarmac.  They are immune. 

This is Betio, the port and industrial centre of Kiribati.  

Down the road there is a cigarette factory full of young girls. Opposite there are hundreds of small houses. All identical, single story, all painted green or blue, with removable panels for windows.  These were left by the British.  Factory built prefabricated housing.  

Occasionally you find a street of larger houses, two or three times the size. These were for the British workers who ran the port, the power station, the water system, the phone company. 

Time has stood still since 1978, and in reality time has stood still since the immediate post war years. 

Those black and white movies I saw as a child, featuring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in “The Road to Somewhere”, are staggeringly real and in technicolour. 

It wont last for ever. Already there is a container truck that picks up the containers and delivers them complete to the door.  There are plans for a deep water extension to the port, so the supply ships can come in and unload directly. 

Batio will change. But until them it is an old movie.  I can almost see Bob and Bing walking through the docks. 

The old woman hands me my goods and laughs when I call her darling.  She has only ever known this atoll, this life.  I pause and wonder if she ever thinks about my life.

I turn around and watch the sweating dockers in the mid morning heat.  Between the iron sheds I can see the Pacific, and further away I can see a freighter unloading more containers. 

A van drives by, and pips its horn.  Someone I know, on an atoll where everyone knows everyone. 

And suddenly you feel you know where you are. 

Kiribati children

On Kiribati, with no television, no internet, and most importantly no air-conditioning, the local children amuse themselves each night in the lagoon. 

These at least had clothes on.  Although missionaries arrived over a hundred years before, and adults were modest in dress, children frequently ran around naked until quite an advanced age.  Even worse they were obsessed with having photographs taken, and would run towards any camera.  It would be impossible to explain to them the situation in the West regarding taking photographs of naked children. Sometimes it was easier to take the photographs, and then delete them later.

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. 

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. 

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"

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.

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.

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.

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.