The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  “The Queen of Tonga came here on December second,” he said.

  The Queen and King had spent Christmas at their house in Neiafu – the Queen was a native of Vava’u.

  “Did the Queen stay long?”

  “Two days,” Lini said.

  This surprised me. They pointed out the house in which she had stayed. It was a simple place, and it reminded me how Marie-Antoinette of France had dressed up as a shepherdess and danced with peasants.

  “What did you do for her?”

  “We danced. We sang.”

  “Did she enjoy herself?”

  ‘Yes. She went swimming.”

  The seventy-year-old monarch had swum 111 this little lagoon.

  “Did you see her?”

  “We swam with her!”

  “What did the Queen’s bathing-suit look like?” I asked.

  “She wore a Tongan cloth wrapped around her.”

  “The Queen of England would never swim with English people at the beach,” I said.

  “The Queen of Tonga is very kind.”

  I gave them the last of my silk scarves. They did not take much interest in them. One knotted hers around a small girl’s head.

  “I am called Russell Go-For-Broke because I always go for broke.”

  “But his name is Ofa.”

  “Shut up.” Seeing me launching my boat, he said, “Please come back. We will give you a present. Maybe a shell.”

  Lini said, “Bye for now.”

  Russell said, “Goodbye for now but not forever.” He repeated this, and then he said, “Are you going back to fight for freedom of Kuwait?”

  This they found hilarious, and with their laughter ringing in my ears I went back to my own island and cooked my dinner while it was still light. But more rain drove me inside and the whole black night was filled with dripping and blowing.

  The rain continued for the next two or three days, sometimes very heavy and just as often a light drizzle. Before the hard rain fell on me I could hear it beating noisily on the trees at the southeast of the island, traveling towards me like a monster in the forest; and then it was on my head and all over me.

  So far there was no sun. That was the down-side of this island life in Vava’u, and added to it were the mosquitoes, my damp clothes, the impossibility of walking anywhere on this jungly piece of land. On the plus side, the island was mine, the offshore coral was thick and full of fish, I had plenty of food, and radio reception was excellent. Sometimes the rain came down so hard that it drowned my radio. The other inhabitants of the islands were crabs, herons, and a tree full of hanging squeaking fruit bats.

  Mealtimes were irregular because of the rain, and this was irksome, because I always tried to keep to a schedule when I was alone, so that my day would seem sensible and structured. Now it’s time to tidy the camp site, I would say to myself. Now it’s time for tea. In two hours I will begin writing my notes.

  I hated paddling in the rain. It was not easy to cook in the rain. It was no fun to swim in the rain. As there was nowhere to go, I stayed inside the tent during the storms, listening to news of the Gulf War; and at night I lay there scribbling in my notebook, feeling damp and miserable under the dangling flashlight, hoping the next day would be sunny enough to dry all my wet gear.

  In that sort of mood, feeling lonely and clammy, I felt a sense of regret that my married life had ended – I missed dull predictable London, my little family, the ordinariness of my old routine. In that isolation, I saw that my life had been broken in half, and I wrote on a damp page, Travel is very hard alone, but hardest of all when there is no one waiting for you to come back.

  Usually, seeing a scrawled thought like that in black and white I closed my notebook and simply prayed for sunshine, and in the mornings, out of loneliness, I fed the bluey-gray ghost crabs chocolate cookies and pieces of cheese.

  When the sun finally came out after three days my mood lifted and I was energized by the light and heat. I harvested a few coconuts – knocked them down by poking them with the blade of my long paddle, and gouged a hole in them and drank the sweet water. In this good weather I dried my clothes and the rest of my gear, and stowed it, and planned a kayak trip to other uninhabited islands in the Vava’u group, and I made a circuit of Pau Island.

  Pau was uninhabited but it was not quiet. The bats made a racket, the birds whistled and squawked, the trees rattled and flapped, the fruit bats lolloped in their branches. The reef heron went kark! kark! The water lapped at the shore, and on the large exposed reef that lay between Pau and the next island, Fuamotu, there was a constant roar of breaking waves. I could see eight islands from where I sat slurping noodles or eating fish and pineapples; but not a single person was visible – no village, no boat.

  After that day of sun it rained in the night, lashing the tent. I had left a cooking pot out in my hurry to get into the tent. There were almost three inches of water in it in the morning, and it had been sitting under a tree.

  I usually woke early, at five or so, and listened to Gulf War news on Radio Australia or the BBC. The war euphoria of the first days had worn off and now it seemed as though it would go on for a long time.

  That was what Leonati had said in Neiafu: “They say the war will finish fast. But I think it will go on for a long time. They say they did a lot of damage in the first few days. I don’t think they did much damage.”

  My island was as far as it was possible to be from the Middle East, and yet the war was on everyone’s mind. And I heard on the radio that on the Pacific island of Kiribati (a corruption of its former name, Gilbert), prisoners had gone on strike, refusing to enter the exercise yard, for fear they would be hit by an Iraqi “scud” missile.

  There was more speculation than news – where were the eye-witnesses? – and so I always crawled out of the tent into a hazy dawn wondering what the world was coming to, and rather enjoying the idea that I was so far away, living the life of a beachcomber. The following days were warm, humid, cloudy with sunny periods and a light breeze.

  On these good days, in the dazzling light of sunny mornings, I saw many more islands than I had before – they stretched like stepping-stones into the southwest, and I saw that by island-hopping I could get to most of them. None of them were inhabited, all of them had pretty shapes – hump-backed with good-sized hills, some with cliffs, some with saddle ridges, all of them densely wooded with old-growth forest as well as coconut palms.

  It was a perfect area for paddling a kayak – perhaps the best in the Pacific. The islands were well defined and visible for some distance. The wind was strong in the afternoon but by setting out and returning early that was avoided or minimized. There was a surfy side and a safe side to each island – the lee shores usually had the beaches – all were secluded, all were lovely. There were no tourists, no signs at all, and no litter – no indication that human beings had ever set foot on these outer islands. It seemed to me that a person could spend weeks or months in Vava’u, making occasional trips to Neiafu, the town, to restock with provisions. It was a world apart, and solitude was available, because Tongans were not terribly interested in outsiders. Tongans did not take people to their bosoms as Melanesians did; Tongans did not pretend to be friendlier than they were.

  My only question regarded the currents: I wondered how strong they were between these outlying islands, and if I paddled eight or ten miles to one of those distant places on my chart, would I risk being swept into a strong current?

  I paddled back to Taunga to ask a fisherman. All the fishermen were out this lovely day, but I found Lini and she inquired among the women of Taunga. None of them had the slightest idea about the currents. This was not so surprising – women did not paddle or sail in Tonga.

  “The beach at the tip of your island is very beautiful,” I said.

  “Yes. We swim there.”

  “Do tourists visit you?”

  “Sometimes, in boats. A cruise ship came once. There were many people. They loved our village. They a
dmired our houses and the flowers we planted.”

  “What did the cruise ship look like?”

  “I don’t remember,” Lini said. “But they loved our beach.”

  “Where did the people come from – what country?”

  “I don’t know,” she said impatiently, as though it was a silly question.

  Just like a Tongan: she remembered only what the strangers had said about her village. She had taken no interest at all in the strangers.

  “There is no one swimming on the beach today,” I said.

  “It is so far to go” – it was about a ten-minute walk. She smiled and added, “A man from overseas told the King that he wanted to build a hotel on the beach. A very big hotel, so that tourists will come.”

  “What did the King say?”

  “He could not say anything to the man until he asked us.”

  “So the King asked the village about building a hotel?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did the village say?”

  “We don’t want it,” she said, and turned away.

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t want those people.”

  By those people she meant strangers.

  Tongan snobbery, offensiveness, incivility and rampant xenophobia had kept the great glorious archipelago of Vava’u one of the least spoiled places in the Pacific.

  That day and the next I paddled to the west, making a circuit of the deserted islands and keeping close track of the currents. The limestone cliffs of these places, pounded by the sea, were vertical and the texture of the stone like that of monastery walls in England – the same brown-gray color, the same venerable look, like Gothic ruins, as though if you excavated further you would find an abbey or a cloister or the bony relics of medieval saints.

  The white beaches on the lee shores were bright in the sun, and hot and beautiful and empty, with greeny-blue lagoons shining below them. On most of the islands there were coconut palms, and birds. These islands were so lovely that it was hard to be alone on them – it was not that I required company, but rather that I wished that someone else had been there to see them: I wanted another witness, someone to share them with. If the place had been miserable I would have coped – during the days of rain I had not been lonely. (“I can endure my own despair,/But not another’s hope.”) But the good weather had changed my attitude. I did not feel adventurous or lucky alone under sunny skies; I felt selfish, in all this splendor.

  Most people who sail the Pacific know Vava’u – Neiafu is the destination for many of the yachts, the Port of Refuge regarded as one of the best places to pass the hurricane months from November to April. And these yachts plied around some of the Vava’u islands. But it was a place with many reefs and shoals, and most of the islands were off limits except to a shallow-draft boat like mine.

  Paddling past Eua’iki Island I heard a great racket of birds, like a chorus of cockatoos, and went ashore. The area was rich in bird life – herons, and egrets, noddies and swallows and terns. But this bird screech was almost deafening.

  I beached my boat and climbed the cliff for a better look, and there, massed on the branches of one tall tree high on a bluff, were several hundred fruit bats, hanging and twittering and quarreling and negligently micturating in slashes and squirts. One broke loose, and looking precisely like Bruce Wayne in disguise, and twice as ugly, it flapped in a great circle and then returned to the tree and re-attached itself, hanging upside-down.

  The other bats, still hanging, flexed their membranous wings, looking like a black array of windblown and broken bumbershoots.

  On my desert island, Pau, I needed to make specific plans, or else I might lose my bearings and begin brooding. So I ate several meals every day. I had a morning and afternoon paddling objective. I always did the dishes and hung them on my tree. I carefully kept my gear dry. I allowed myself a certain amount of fresh water each day, even though I knew I could get more drinking water at Taunga. I had a nap after lunch and usually went snorkeling in my own lagoon. There were lots of plump pretty fish, but I had swapped my fish spear in the Solomons – and just as well: the islander could use the thing to feed himself.

  I had a taste of what it was to be a beachcomber on a happy empty island. It was mostly pure idleness, with the invented urgencies of having to carry out various duties. And then one came to believe in these fictions, and so the day was filled. It meant being alone and self-sufficient. It meant I got plenty of sleep and perhaps a bit too much sun and more mosquito bites than I had ever known. It meant keeping close track of my food and eating coconuts whenever possible. Most of all, because I had very little fresh water for washing, it meant a perpetual state of being sticky and salty.

  One day I returned to my camp to see a rental sailboat, a thirty-five-footer from the Moorings outfit in Neiafu, anchored in the channel between my island and Ngau. That stretch was a sandbar at low tide. Did this yachtsman know that in an hour or so he would be aground?

  I paddled over and saw four adults on deck, two couples – American, from their greeting.

  “You’re in very shallow water,” I said. And I wondered whether my warning was also stimulated by the feeling that I did not want to wake up the next morning and see this boat wilfully trespassing on my lagoon.

  “We were just leaving,” the man at the wheel said. “This is a lovely spot. You American?”

  “Yes. From Cape Cod.”

  “We spend summers in Osterville.”

  “Small world.”

  The two married couples had rented this sailboat a week ago, and were cruising in the Vava’u group. They took vacations every year in interesting places – hiking in Alaska one year, biking somewhere else another. They seemed happy and fulfilled people – their homes were in Georgia – and I was touched by their close friendship.

  They asked me to come aboard, but I still had an errand to run. I didn’t, but I was self-conscious about being unshaven and grubby and they looked so shipshape in their trim craft.

  We talked awhile about Tonga and Tongan traits.

  One of the women said, “We walk down the street and no one sees us. The Tongans don’t look. Everywhere else, people look.”

  “You worried about being alone?” one of the men said, when I told him I was camping on a desert island.

  “I’m happy.”

  We exchanged names, and it seemed that my name had reached their households. More than that, one couple had known one of my older brothers at Harvard.

  “He was having woman trouble,” the woman said. And then she began to describe him in intimate detail.

  She tried hard but it was not he. It never was. Whenever someone who was not a member of my family described my brother, no matter how well they knew him – or whether they were praising or blaming – I never recognized this person in their descriptions as Mycroft. They always had him wrong. Does anyone know your family better than you?

  “What’s he doing these days?”

  “He lives alone with a cat named Rat on the Cape, rearing turkeys,” I said. “Now and then he exhibits them. And he dedicates books to his cat.”

  The sun was setting by the time I paddled back and got my boat into a safe place under the trees. I was wary of being seen – my tent was behind bushes, my boat was hidden; and taking such care to hide myself I remembered Tony the beachcomber on the coast of north Queensland in his secluded camp, refusing to make any sort of path, so as not to arouse what he called “officialdom.” This beachcombing experience was making me similarly furtive.

  Each evening I had to write my notes and eat my dinner before night fell, or else I would stumble around in the darkness. And that was when the mosquitoes emerged. It would have been an unbearable island without mosquito repellent or netting on my tent; there were masses of them, morning and evening, breeding fast in the rain-swollen pools.

  I sat on a log of driftwood writing notes while two gray herons stood in the shallows waiting for the tide to ebb so that they could more
easily fish. All along the beach crabs dug holes, bringing up clawfuls of sand. As the tide went down the reef a mile out was exposed and the waves grew louder, sounding like the traffic roar on a highway.

  Because of the mosquitoes and the night rain, I spent nearly all the hours of darkness in my tent, writing, drinking green tea, or lying in the dark listening to the night-marish news. You worried about being alone? the yachtie had asked. No, I felt perfectly safe.

  And I loved the stars – big beaming planets and small single pinpricks, fat blinking stars and masses of little peepers but also glittering clouds of them – the whole dome of the sky a storm of light over my island.

  One day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen on the sand, said Robinson Crusoe.

  I had an identical experience, except that it was dusk – the tide had ebbed all afternoon, I looked up from my meal and saw footprints everywhere. They led down the beach and into the woods; up to the cliffs, along the shore, across the dunes, all around the camp, desperate little solitary tracks.

  There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of footprints, suggesting vast wandering mobs of idle strangers, and what frightened me – what eventually impelled me to break camp soon afterward and head for the nearest inhabited island, where I was assured of a welcome – and what sent a chill through me, was the thought that every single footprint, every urgent little trail, was mine.

  So, with this hint of rock fever, I left my little island, and for the first time on my travels there was no one to say goodbye to. I left this secret place silently – this small mute island in the mist, the haunt of pissing bats and watchful herons. I simply slipped away and made off across the reef, going clockwise among the islands, past Euakafa to the big island of Kapa. I saw a wide reef being lashed by waves on the channel so I stuck close to the shore.

  Three miles along I saw a stone jetty and a man struggling with a net while another steadied a dinghy.

  The net was underwater, and it seemed to be very heavy. The man was having no success in lifting it.