Stop Drifting, Start Rowing

by Roz Savage

  But at last Neptune decided to give me a break. Having had great fun at my expense ever since our tussle at the equator, it was as if the god of the sea now decided I’d been out on the ocean for long enough and could finally be permitted to land. Late in the day a useful southeasterly wind arrived, which lasted only three hours, but that was long enough for me to ride it all the way up the east side of the island of Maiana and line myself up nicely for Tarawa.

  I rowed late into the night until I could be sure I was well clear of Maiana. I tried to grab a quick nap in the cabin, but couldn’t relax enough to sleep. I kept opening one eye to squint at the GPS to make sure I wasn’t going to shipwreck on a coral reef. Eventually I realized that this was ridiculous—I wasn’t sleeping anyway, so I might as well get up and row to make sure I made it safely through this maritime obstacle course. It would be a real shame to get this far only to destroy my boat on a reef within sight of the finish line. So I resigned myself to a sleepless night, kitted up, and headed out onto the darkened deck.

  UNLIKE MY APPROACH INTO HAWAI’I, NO ORANGE streetlights revealed the presence of humanity. The land was indistinguishable from the ocean. I had to navigate by instruments only, unable to see Maiana in the darkness. As day broke the next morning, the dawn revealed the thin green line of the island only about a mile distant. In terms of the vast Pacific, that had been a close shave.

  When I got within nine miles of Tarawa, I started to wonder if I was going to make it. Without having slept the previous night, and after rowing 3,000 miles, I was sleep-deprived and bone-weary. The last few miles seemed to loom very large. I put some good rocking music on my iPod to help me through.

  Slowly, stroke by stroke, I covered the closing miles of my voyage. After each mile, I posted another tweet to report my progress to my online audience, as I’d done at the equator, and I had a bite of food. I kept looking over my shoulder to scan for the escort boat that would take me through the narrow gap in the reef. Nicole had been in Tarawa for nearly a week now and had been sorting out local logistics. She and I had been communicating daily by satellite phone since she arrived, finalizing the plans for my arrival. I had alerted the team when I reached the last ten miles to land, and I expected them any moment now.

  At last I spotted them, the escort boat skimming across the mirror of the ocean like a mirage. Like the boat that had come out to greet me in Hawai’i, this one, too, was yellow. It had a blue deck and red sun canopy. After so many days of seeing nothing but blue sea and blue sky, its bright primary colours made for a cheerful change.

  The boat pulled up alongside me. On board were Nicole and two other familiar faces: Hunter from Archinoetics, a Hawai’ian research and technology company that had provided technical and Web support since I first met them in Honolulu the year before, and Conrad, our cameraman. The boat owner, who stood at the helm, was introduced to me as Emile. Another unfamiliar figure was introduced as Rob, the New Zealand High Commissioner. I had imagined high commissioners would wear suits and ties, but this one had on a baseball cap and white rash guard that complemented his muscular physique. Although no longer a young man, he was evidently very fit, and I found out later that in his heyday he’d been a successful adventure racer, a particularly challenging form of athletic endeavour usually involving two or more endurance disciplines with some orienteering thrown in for good measure. Now he nonchalantly launched a sea kayak over the side of the boat and steered over to paddle alongside me.

  “G’day,” he said, as if greeting a bikini-clad transpacific rower was the kind of thing he did every day of the week.

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said, which sounded oddly formal, but was entirely true.

  IT WAS VERY HELPFUL HAVING ROB alongside during that last mile. As always, I was facing backwards, so it was useful to have a forward-facing kayaker to tell me what adjustments were needed to keep my boat on course.

  The drawback to having him there was that, rather unnecessarily, I felt the need to keep pace with him. I keep thinking I’ve overcome my competitiveness, but I keep proving myself wrong. My boat weighed 2,000 pounds, whereas his probably weighed no more than 20, but I still felt I needed to maintain some professional pride and look good for the last mile.

  It was seriously hard work. The heat was unrelenting, and I was, not to put too fine a point on it, knackered. I could feel my skin burning and my body getting depleted. That last mile seemed it would never end. Rob told me I was rowing against the tide, and that mile most definitely took a lot longer than any of the previous nine had done. I knew this for a fact, by looking at the time intervals between my final few tweets. I was reduced to counting oar strokes. Just ten more strokes. Then another ten. Then another ten. My eyes were fixed on the display screen of the GPS, willing the “Dist Next” number to reach zero.

  At last I crossed the finish line of latitude, level with the southern tip of Tarawa and about 400 yards from shore, and collapsed backwards off my rowing seat, shattered. I had not an ounce of energy left in me. I felt I would never be able to row another stroke as long as I lived. I lay there with my eyes closed, utterly spent.

  NICOLE KNEW WHAT THIS SITUATION demanded. Through the haze of exhaustion, my senses dimly registered some sounds of splashing and laughter. A few moments later a voice piped up just inches from my right ear.

  “Beer?”

  I opened my eyes to see Nicole’s head peeking over the side of the boat. It was joined by an arm, rising up like the torch-bearing arm of the Statue of Liberty. The arm was holding a can of Australian beer.

  “You absolute star,” I gasped.

  The beer was rather warm after its dip in the ocean, but I wasn’t in a mood to be picky. I cracked it open and necked several large gulps before remembering my manners and inviting Nicole on board. I directed her to the safety rope and oar arrangement that I had used so many times to clamber back into the cockpit after my brief ocean plunges, and she scrambled onto the deck. It was great to see her again, but at the same time a little strange and oddly crowded to have another person on the Brocade.

  By the end of the beer, I had recovered sufficiently to make it to shore. As I approached the town jetty, I was amazed to see about 500 people gathered along the harbour wall. This was an impressive turnout for a country of only 100,000 people, many of whom lived up to 2,000 miles away on distant islands and atolls.

  Following Rob’s directions, I paddled up to the boat ramp where islanders were waiting to greet me and take care of the Brocade. I stepped ashore, setting foot on dry land for the first time in 105 days. Or was it 104? The international date line had confused me. Either way, it had been a very long time since my feet had touched solid ground.

  This was now my third landfall after prolonged periods at sea, so I wasn’t surprised when the ground seemed to lurch beneath my feet. My brain had adapted to being on a constantly pitching boat, so now it was overcompensating when I stood on terra firma. I looked up at the crowd that had come to greet me and wondered if my first act upon arriving in Tarawa would be to topple over like a drunkard.

  Fortunately help was at hand. Two muscular, tattooed men approached, wearing traditional grass-mat skirts, with sashes, armbands, and coronet-shaped headdresses made out of the same material. They knelt in front of me, forming a cradle with their arms.

  Got to love local tradition, I thought, as I sank gratefully onto the proffered seat. From my position aloft, I had to bend to accept garlands of plumeria flowers that a woman placed around my neck and on my head.

  The tattooed men carried me to a plastic chair a few yards away on the boat ramp and then rejoined a group of a dozen or so men and women to perform a local dance of welcome. It resembled the haka that the All Blacks rugby team perform to intimidate the opposition before a match, although with less eye rolling and sticking out of tongues. I felt a bit like the Queen must do when being entertained on royal tour. A girl in traditional garb presented me with a young coconut, refrigerated and cool, its top lopped off so I cou
ld drink the refreshing, sweet coconut water inside. It was exactly what I needed. I could almost feel the electrolytes flowing back into me, restoring mind and body.

  A woman standing alongside me whispered, “You don’t have to drink it if you don’t like it.”

  But it was delicious and I couldn’t get enough. I gulped it down in very un-Queen-like manner, trying not to dribble too much down my chin.

  There followed a generous speech of welcome from a venerable gentleman, whom I understood to be a local dignitary, which was translated into English by a woman who introduced herself as Linda. Nicole had told me on the way in that Linda and her husband, John, comprised the main media presence on Kiribati and had also organized the troupe of dancers. Nicole had evidently explained my environmental mission, and their speech made me feel as if I were their last great hope for promoting awareness of their environmental plight. I felt uncomfortable and a little daunted by the faith they appeared to have in my ability to help. I would of course do my best, but I was not a major celebrity, able to elevate an issue to centre stage the way, say, Leonardo DiCaprio or Julia Roberts can. It made my heart ache to think of these people, in the back end of beyond as far as most of the world was concerned, living in fear for their homes and their future but lacking the economic and political clout to make their voices heard.

  After the various formalities, including a completely unrehearsed speech in which I pledged to do all I could to help their cause, the crowds dispersed. I saw my boat safely into the custody of Emile, Hunter, and Conrad, who were going to take her to the Marine Training Centre (of which more later), and we departed. Nicole drove us in a rented car to the Hotel Otintaai where she and the rest of the team had already set up base camp.

  AS WE DROVE, I PEERED EAGERLY out of the window to see what kind of a place I had landed in. From some basic information that my mother had e-mailed to me, I knew that prior to 1979, the country now known as Kiribati was comprised of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, Phoenix Islands, and Line Islands. When the country was unified, it found itself straddling the international date line, an eventuality that the fine gentlemen of Greenwich could not have foreseen from the vantage point of 1851. In those far-off days when the sun was said never to set on the British Empire, my beloved little upstart of a country had fought off the claims of places as diverse as Philadelphia, Lisbon, Paris, Pisa, Mecca, Kyoto, and the Great Pyramid of Giza to claim Greenwich’s Royal Observatory as the global prime meridian, and that its opposite, which was on the backside of the Earth as far as the British were concerned, would be the temporal fault line where today leaps into tomorrow. It was as if this messy zipper in the fabric of human timekeeping was faintly repugnant to them, so they had positioned it as far away as they could, out of sight and out of mind.

  Even if they had foreseen the possibility, it probably wouldn’t have bothered them overmuch that a few unfortunate Melanesians would one day face the considerable inconvenience of having the Gilbert and Ellice Islands already in tomorrow, while the Phoenix and Line Islands were still in today. I can barely imagine how New York City, say, would function if it found itself thus divided. Would cab drivers charge double for having to drive all the way into tomorrow and back again? The effective working week would be only four days long, because one half of the city would still be enjoying Sunday brunch while the others were suffering the Monday blues; half would be relaxing into their Saturday, while the others were still saying “Thank God it’s Friday.” It’s unimaginable.

  Fortunately, in Oceania, the pace of life is less hectic. The only natural resource of Kiribati is phosphate, a polite word for guano, or bird shit, and even this solitary natural resource ran out in 1979, coincidentally (or not) the year that the United Kingdom granted them independence. Thanks to the boobies, I had just re-imported quite a quantity of bird shit, but not enough to revive the ailing industry. Now much of the population appears to spend the day lying in hammocks, so today, tomorrow, later, or never is about as specific as schedules need to be.

  The new nation of Kiribati tolerated the situation for fully 16 years before declaring in 1995 that it had had enough of being a nation divided, and that henceforth the Phoenix and Line Islands would join Gilbert Island time, being 12 hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time instead of 12 hours behind, and a substantial kink was created in the international date line to accommodate the unification.

  As we drove, Nicole told me that in the early 1990s, South Tarawa had one of the highest population densities in the world, similar to Hong Kong’s, but unlike the towering skyscrapers of that island, I didn’t see a single building more than two storeys high, and very few of those. Most of the houses were small huts, thatched with palm leaves or roofed with corrugated tin, crowding in on either side of the road. Some had cinder-block walls, while some had no walls at all, just a roof supported by wooden uprights above a platform on stilts. Once in a while a small store, little more than a kiosk, punctuated the line of densely packed huts, a homemade sign proclaiming its name. These were usually composed of the names of two family members put together, such as Taotin, Tokaraetina, or Mili. Village gathering halls, known as maneabas, were spacious constructions with high, pitched roofs dipping down so low that you would have to duck to enter, but once within, the thick thatch of the roof would provide welcome shade and respite from the sun. Inside, they were hives of both activity and inactivity. People sat in huddles, chatting or weaving mats, or lay on the floor sheltering from the heat of the day.

  This was a country where life was lived out of doors, with the citizens returning to their homes only to sleep. People (predominantly men) lounged in hammocks, while children, pigs, and dogs ran around or ferreted in piles of rubbish. Women carried groceries or used brooms to sweep piles of rubbish off their land onto that of their neighbours. There was rubbish everywhere, much of it plastic. We drove past the city dump, discernible as a higher concentration of plastic more or less restrained from blowing into the sea by a chain-link fence. With no point of land more than a few feet above sea level, there was nowhere on Tarawa for a landfill site, so there was no choice but to leave everything sitting on top of the ground.

  We drove past a small inlet, dotted with the tall trunks of dead palm trees. “That’s apparently evidence of the rising ocean,” Nicole said. “Those trees used to be on land; now they’re in the lagoon.”

  She had quickly become accustomed to the local way of driving. In some countries they drive on the left, in others on the right. In some Mediterranean countries they drive in the shade. In Kiribati, they drive around the potholes. I would soon become used to the erratic behaviour of the battered, rusty vehicles that plied the town’s few roads, but initially it was rather alarming.

  EVENTUALLY, SAFELY, WE ARRIVED AT the Hotel Otintaai. To fully convey the impact of this arrival, I should explain that when I set out on an ocean voyage, I hold a clear vision in my mind of my destination. I picture the joy of landfall, the first hot shower, the first glass of wine, the first proper meal. I think of the rediscovery of simple pleasures—turning on a tap, taking a walk, appreciating the shape and colour of a tree or flower. Each day, I focus on what I need to do to get myself a bit closer to there. I just take it one day, or one rowing shift, or one oar stroke at a time. And eventually I get there.

  Now, at last, I was on the verge of realizing my vision. For months I had been picturing the comfortable, clean hotel with its crisp linen sheets, white fluffy towels, and delicious food.

  The Otintaai would comprehensively fail to deliver any of these things.

  It was a desperately plain two-storey building. The main hotel in Tarawa, it was wholly owned by the government, a rather surprising arrangement to my mind. To say that in my first, startled assessment I thought it resembled a low-security prison, with its high chain link fence and concrete façade, would be slightly harsh, but only very slightly.

  Nicole parked the car in the dusty, unpaved car park. The room with twin beds that she and I were to share ha
d no hot water, so I used Hunter’s bathroom. The shower was hot, and the water pressure was respectable, both significantly redeeming features. After nothing but a bucket and sponge for the last three and a half months, and now that I had given up on the white-fluffy-towels scenario, I was not a fussy customer.

  That evening around sunset, we assembled on the beach in front of the hotel restaurant. We pulled up some plastic chairs around a plastic table and examined the menu while we drank sundowners. The alcoholic repertoire of the hotel was limited to expensive imported beer and wine, but the team had taken the precaution of buying maximum allowances of liquor in the duty-free shops on their way out. One way and another, we managed to make a party of it.

  The menu was not too exciting, but considering the limited range of food products available to the chef, the number of options was actually quite impressive. His powers of creativity would have been hard pushed to do much better. Fish ten different ways, and any vegetable you wanted so long as it was cabbage or frozen mixed veg. Chicken, beef, and pork were also available, but fish seemed likely to be the best bet. I would have given anything for a huge fresh salad, but on an island with no soil, only sand, this was unlikely. A trip to the main supermarket the next day yielded little to excite the palate—row upon row of cans, jars, packets, tubes, and boxes. Think 7-Eleven convenience store and you more or less have it. A gourmet’s paradise this was not. I later found out that diabetes is rampant on the island, a result of eating large quantities of white rice and other over-refined foods.

  THE FOLLOWING NIGHT WE HAD THE BEST meal of our entire stay, at the home of David and Tessie Lambourne, the power couple of Kiribati. David, an amiable Australian, was the Solicitor General. His elegant I-Kiribati wife, Tessie, was the Foreign Secretary. I had met David for the first time that morning. He had taken Team Roz under his wing during the week before I arrived, offering them the use of his office, which had the fastest Internet in town. This was not saying much. It was the speed of a very slow dial-up connection, and many Web pages (such as Facebook) simply refused to load. Conrad had been up all night editing the video of my arrival, from six hours down to six minutes, in order to get it over to the Associated Press. It would take him all day to complete the upload.