The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  What was strictly Hawaiian about this? I kept asking myself whether I could have mistaken this place for another sunny paradise in the Caribbean, or the Mediterranean, or the coast of Africa. But no – the flowers and the fragrance were Hawaiian, the great rolling waves could only have been breaking and dumping on a Pacific reef, the high clouds, the coral, the vast dark landscape of lava, some of it gigantic a’a cinders and some of it the buckled pahoehoe that looks like a melted parking lot; the hospitality, the smiles, the sense of abundance – it was all Hawaiian in its very essence.

  The nagging reality of it was the price, $2,500 a day. I began seriously to wonder what the opposite of this might be. What would life be like if I were living as cheaply as possible in paradise? Indeed, how much fun would you have here in Hawaii on one-thousandth of that, say about $2.50 a day?

  I still have my Oceanic camping gear: tent, sleeping-bag, cooking kit, water bag and Swiss army knife. I had left my collapsible boat in Honolulu, but I had had the good fortune to meet one of Hawaii’s best-known kayakers, who had loaned me an inflatable kayak and a paddle. My idea was to check out of the luxury bungalow at Mauna Lani before my bungalow fever became incurable, and paddle down the coast – find a sheltered cove, go beach-combing and live on next to nothing.

  I averaged the cost of the noodles, couscous, fruit and vegetables I packed into the kayak and it came out to $2.18 a day. So I had thirty-two cents a day to play with, but that was purely theoretical – the nearest shops were in Kana, thirty miles away.

  My original plan had been to go to the north shore of the island and paddle from one coastal valley to the other – from Waipio to Waimanu, where the steep valley walls allow only helicopters or the sturdiest hikers to enter. But of course a kayaker could enter from the sea, paddling around the headlands. But the seas were bad – everyone warned me against them.

  Nainoa Thompson was one of the leaders, and the navigator, of the Hokulea expedition – helping to sail successfully a double-hulled canoe from Hawaii to Tahiti and New Zealand in 1986. He took me aside, and said, “I was out in that channel in a sea like this and the glass on the steering house was smashed by a wave – that thing is fifteen feet up, and it’s very strong. Don’t paddle there now.”

  Some other time, I thought. I was patient in Hawaii. I would be here a long time, I felt. There would be time for everything.

  Instead of staying at Waipio, I paddled about seven miles south of Orchid Bungalow and camped among the palms at the edge of Keawaiki Bay. An estate nearby comprised a dozen rambling stone buildings, and had been built in the 1920s by Francis I’i Brown, champion golfer, bon-vivant, millionaire and direct descendant of one of King Kamehameha’s advisers – in other words, in one of the smallest and most select classes in Hawaiian society, an alii, a nobleman. The family had once owned a very large slice of Oahu, including Pearl Harbor.

  One day at Keawaiki I pressed my nose against the window of one of these stone buildings and looked at the framed photographs on the near wall. One was a picture of Francis Brown standing with Babe Ruth, both of them in golfers’ duds, knickers and long socks and cloth caps. In another he posed with a young man still recognizable as Bob Hope. Stories were told in Honolulu and the Big Island of Brown’s eccentricities and friendships, and how this strange little seaside estate – accessible only by water – had been visited by celebrities. “Wild parties,” people said. In the center of one of Keawaiki’s brackish fishponds was a semi-ruined dwelling, which had been a little pavilion once upon a time, where Francis Brown – who had never married – kept the girl of his dreams, known as one of the most beautiful hula dancers of her time, named Winona Love.

  The buildings were empty and locked, and had the sunfaded moribund look of neglected houses by the sea.

  But I had no need of them. I cooked my dollar’s worth of dinner – couscous and lentils, fruit and tea – and sat at the edge of the cindery dune above the black lava beach under that same crescent moon that had bewitched me at Orchid Bungalow. I had had air-conditioning there and a pool; here I had a soft breeze and the sea, and for a bath a brackish pool that had been scooped out of the lava, fed by a spring. It is not hyperbole to say that I felt a greater sense of wealth, greater happiness and a more powerful sense of well-being camping here than I had had living in the luxury bungalow. It was the same sense of liberation I had felt on the desert islands of Vava’u and in my little camp at Tongariki, beneath the crumbled ahu, at the edge of Easter Island.

  I was not only safe and very comfortable, but most of all nothing interruptive like a wall or a carpet or a pane of glass stood between me and this natural beauty. There was nothing to fear – in fact, I felt supported and protected by the palms and the dunes, and that encouraged me and raised my morale. At the bungalow I had only wanted to mooch around the pool – I had become fairly dopey and unambitious. But here, living outdoors, I was filled with a desire to get into the kayak and paddle beyond the bay.

  I paddled north into the next bay and around Weliweli Point, where waves were smashing onto the black heap of lava. I paddled a few more miles to Anaehoomalu Bay, where there were two luxury hotels and no one swimming in the sea, much less boating. I found a secluded beach at the south end of the bay, had lunch and headed back. The wind had picked up and the waves had heightened, but this inflatable kayak bobbed along, twisting and sliding.

  The humpback whale appeared early the following morning, just offshore, near enough for me to see the blast from his blow-hole. He surfaced and slapped his tail and turned, plowing the sea like a dithering submarine. I paddled out in his direction, and I saw him dive one last time: he did not breach again that day. So I turned south, where a lava flow a mile wide formed the coastline. Just beyond Ohiki Bay was Luahinewai, vividly illustrating the Hawaiian conundrum that most beauty spots on the islands are haunted with grisly memories – this particular area of outstanding natural beauty was associated with the slaughter of Chief Keoua and twenty-four of his retainers by King Kamehameha in 1790.

  My bay, Keawaiki, was particularly rich in fish, which were gold and emerald and silver, surgeon fish and parrot fish and the small, colorfully striped state fish (humuhumucnukunukuapua’a). They twinkled like jewels among the coral. Because of its protection and its steep beach I could dive in from the shore and go snorkeling and float on the fringes of the tide rip to the edge of the bay, weightless and warm. Here in my little camp exercise required more initiative than at Mauna Lani – no health club, no golf course – but because of that was more rewarding. I swam, I walked.

  One of the strangest trails I have ever hiked lay just inland from the palms, a hot narrow path through the lava flow, called the King’s Trail, and cut centuries ago by Hawaiians long before haoles like Cook ventured ashore. The path is a groove three feet deep, like a single wheel-track that runs for miles down the side of the island. Like the Inca Trail and Watling Street it is one of the great thoroughfares of the ancient world. I hacked at coconuts, I searched for petroglyphs – the rock carvings that are numerous on the Big Island.

  One day I went north to one of the most sacred places in Hawaii, and one of its oldest sites, the Mookini Luakini Heiau. Built on a high point overlooking the sea, the temple is a vast rectangle of cannonball-sized stones. It looks like a crumbled monastery, the Hawaiian version of Tintern Abbey, just as ghostly, with altars and fallen walls, and a nobility that is lent an even greater magnificence by the sight of the waves breaking on the point just beneath it. It was similar in its position and its shape to structures I had seen in Samoa and the Marquesas, but to think that these other ruins were thousands of miles away, across the dangerous moana, that made it even more fascinating. Wind and trees, the flattened grass and black rocky shore gave this part of the Big Island an uncanny resemblance to Easter Island – even to its colors and grassy odors.

  A ten-minute walk across the meadow was the birth site of King Kamehameha. A signboard nearby read in part, “His prowess as a warrior-statesman destine
d him to unite the Hawaiian Islands and bring peace and prosperity to his people … He was true to his own religious beliefs.” And there was a regal quotation from the controversial eighteenth-century king who was known as “The Lonely One”: E oni wale no oukou i ku’u pono ‘a’ole pau – “Endless is the good that I have given you to enjoy.”

  My days were sunny and pleasant. My nights were luminous with stars. I slept as I had on Kauai, pleasurably drugged with fatigue. In the morning I was woken by the mewing and screeching and the ratchet-like scrapings of birds in the palms above me. The exercise and the simple food and the frugality of this enterprise made me feel smugger than when I had been living like a millionaire, and in that gloating mood I slept like a log in my tent, at the edge of the lagoon.

  Time passed – months. I was still in Hawaii, I had not left Oceania. I was paddling my collapsible boat, marveling at the way its canvas hull had faded in the punishing sun. Some days I paddled rented outriggers off Honolulu, and open hardshells off windward Oahu. The places I had paddled to write about I was still paddling for pleasure.

  There were more sea coasts I wanted to paddle – off Maui to the bombsite of Kahoolawe, and along the north coast of Molokai to Father Damien’s old leper settlement of Kalaupapa; and eventually – in good weather – from one island to another. Paddling had taken the place of writing. I thought about my book and then muttered, Oh never mind.

  Normally, at this point in the trip – in this chapter, say – the traveler is heading home. Or the traveler is already home, reflecting on the extraordinary trip, looking at slides, sorting notes, perhaps wishing the trip had not ended, or at least saying so. But that nostalgia can sound so insincere. You read it and think: No, you’re delighted to be home, dining out on your stories of megapode birds and muddy buttocks and what the King of Tonga told you!

  Isn’t one of the greatest rewards of travel the return home – the reassurance of family and old friends, familiar sights and homely comforts?

  I used to go back home and be welcomed, and find months of mail stacked on my desk and spilling to the floor, and after I opened it all, I would answer some and pay bills and burn the letters and envelopes. It could take half a day at the incinerator in the garden, as I stirred the ashes of all the mail I had received. And when I was done and caught up, the routine of home would reassert itself. I would begin writing, spending the day at my desk reliving my trip, and when the pubs opened at five-thirty I would buy an evening newspaper and sit reading it with my elbows on the bar, drinking a pint of stout, thinking: A month ago I was in a tent by a riverbank, swatting flies.

  Sitting there under the timbers of the cool musty pub, I would have a clear recollection of someone like Tony the beachcomber on the Aboriginal coast of north Queensland – Tony saying, I found some ’roo meat under a box once. Forgot I had it. Two years old, it was. I ate it. Wonderful in soups, y’know. And, feeling blessed, I would give thanks that I had returned, that I had a home, that I was safe, that I had been missed, that I was loved.

  A trip like that had a beginning and an end; it was an experience in parentheses, enclosed by my life. But this trip, paddling through Oceania, had turned into my life. Now I was in Hawaii, living in a valley full of Honolulu rainbows, writing about the Trobriands and the Solomons and Australia, writing about Tony the beachcomber. I thought of the solemn Aboriginal Gladys as her grandson searched her hair for nits. The Kaisiga children singing Weespa a frayer in the darkness. The old man on Savo holding a big old radio to his ear, listening for news of the Gulf War. Mimi in Moorea saying of her Marquesan child, “Some day she will be a Theroux.” There were good people in the waterworld of Oceania. I thought often of Easter Island, the haunting stone faces, the lonely wind, and because I had seen so little hunger in Oceania, I thought of the hunger of little Roberto, muttering his thanks in Rapa Nui, as he clawed the shell from the hardboiled egg I had not wanted, and wolfed it, his eyes bulging.

  I spent a great deal of time wandering the beaches of Hawaii. I kept paddling too. One morning, paddling off Kauai, I saw two humpback whales, and I slipped into the water and spent an hour or more with my ears submerged, listening to this happy couple sing and grunt. I was still going, like the man who steps out for a paper and never comes back. I was that man. I had vanished. And there was no reason to go back now. No one missed me. Half my life had been eclipsed.

  And then all of it was eclipsed. One morning in July, the Path of Totality lay over the Big Island. I woke at 5am and foraged around for my welder’s mask. It had a density factor of fourteen – the most opaque obtainable. I put it on and was in darkness. If I stared at the sun (so I was told) I would see the same darkness, and a dim wafer.

  The last total eclipse in Hawaii had been in 1850, and at the time the Hawaiians had felt that their chiefs had abandoned them, that the gods were angry, and that the sun – the great La which they worshipped – had lost its mana. The stars appeared in daytime, the temperature dropped, flower blossoms closed, birds stopped singing.

  People flocked to Hawaii to experience this total eclipse of 1991. There would not be another one like this for 142 years. Fifteen hundred Japanese crouched on the first fair-way of the Hyatt Waikoloa, clutching “sun peeps” which would prevent them from being blinded.

  The astronomer Edward Krupp said, “Eclipses are the most awe-inspiring event on earth. No one should go through life without witnessing one.”

  It was also a marketing opportunity. The hotels were serving a special omelette called an “egg-clipse.” There were eclipse towels and mugs, eclipse mugs and jewelry, T-shirts saying Eclipsomania! and Totally Umbra! and I was there! A young man named Miles Okirmura of Honolulu sold specially sealed commemorative cans of tinned darkness. The Honolulu Advertiser pointed out that “the darkness had been canned before the eclipse.”

  Walking groggily to the roof of my hotel in the early morning darkness I bumped into a man with a flashlight, who was unmistakably Portuguese.

  “It’s cloudy,” he said, sounding vindictive.

  Louis Schwartzberg, time-lapse photographer, had been on the roof since four, assembling two 35mm cameras. He had brought fourteen large crates of equipment.

  “I usually bring thirty,” he said. “But I’m alone.”

  We ate grapes. Louis looked anxiously at the cloudy skies over Mauna Kea.

  “You’re not going to need that,” he said, indicating my welder’s mask.

  “What time will sunrise be?”

  “It happened twenty minutes ago,” he said.

  A cloudless day had been forecast. Most days were cloudless here. This freaky haze was connected with the volcanic ash from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. Louis fell silent. I walked to the edge of the roof and saw people assembling on the driving range half a mile away.

  “What can we do?”

  Louis said, “Pray.” I thought he was going to scream; his jaw tensed. Screaming is uncool. Louis (from Los Angeles) said, “I accept the clouds. I won’t get a good shot. I accept that. At least the eclipse brought all these nice people together.”

  I hurried to the driving range where little family groups squatted on the grass, peering at the bright clouds, aiming cameras. Bryan Brewer, a tall pale man from Seattle wearing an Eclipsomania T-shirt, paced the grass. He was the author of a book about eclipses, called Totality. He had seen his first eclipse in 1979 and was hooked. He traveled the world, observing eclipses. This, he had predicted, would be one of the greatest. I greeted him, I asked him how he was.

  “Nervous,” he said.

  It was as though he was personally taking the blame for this act of God.

  “We won’t see this cloud cover for another hundred and forty-two years,” a photographer said.

  No one laughed, though I found this very funny.

  A woman named Charlene had come to Hawaii to give lectures on cosmic consciousness and solar vibrations linked to the eclipse – mana in fact, emanating from the shadow of the sun. Charlen
e had long hair and a gown-like dress, and she had attached herself to a group of chatty photographers. She had a sense of urgency, and she walked among the group of men and women saying, “Listen guys,” or “I’ve got an idea, guys.”

  The sky was filled with pearly gray clouds and on the ground the gloom was palpable.

  “Guys, there’s an answer,” Charlene said. “When the Dalai Lama escaped from Tibet he needed cloud cover. He and his followers linked their arms together and chanted ‘Om’ over and over.”

  Having nothing to lose we tried this, and the clouds seemed to thicken. Wasn’t that what happened in Tibet? No one said so, but nearly everyone had spent thousands of dollars to come here. Besides the Japanese there were French and Germans, there were people from Brazil, from California, from Canada.

  A photographer said, “Mike’s in Baja. That’s on the Path of Totality. There are never any clouds in Baja –”

  Another photographer said, “We should go back to the hotel and watch this on CNN.”

  On the roof, Louis Schwartzberg was saying, “I accept this.”

  “So what happened to the eclipse?” a man asked Bryan Brewer.

  “I don’t know,” Mr Brewer said, guiltily. “I’m still hoping.”

  “Did you see the sign in Kona?” a woman asked. “The eclipse has been canceled due to unforeseen difficulties.”

  “The eclipse has been eclipsed.”

  Tedious early morning jollity had begun.

  Someone said breathlessly, “The cloud’s moving.”

  People were willing the clouds to shift. And some of the clouds were shifting – sludgy layers of them jostled, allowing sunlight to burst from their seams. It was ten minutes to seven.

  Hopefully I put on my welder’s mask and was in total darkness. I took it off and saw that clouds were passing across the sun, raveling like great hanks or skeins of wool.