“When the apocalypse happens, this place won’t even feel it,” Brian observed. We were wandering the equatorially-scorched, dusty streets of Tarawa, the capital island of Kiribati, a place we’d been told to “get in and get out as fast as you can.” No two cruisers are alike and we often love places that other sailors hate, but this was surreal: an atoll mere inches above sea level where the population is bursting over its sandy seams as the land literally disappears from underneath them, where the shoreline is shored up with trash and the public beach is the public toilet, where people are still living on and digging up the remains of thousands of missing Japanese soldiers and US Marines from WWII.
I don’t even have any photos of the place.
“You’ve got three species of feces here: dog, pig, and human,” a fellow American schooled us on our first night in town. We were sitting in the bar of the nicest hotel, pounding cold ones to wash away the strange flavors of a beef curry that hadn’t tasted quite like any cow I’d ever eaten. Continue reading “Three Species of Feces”
People who hate eating their vegetables would love traveling in equatorial Micronesia. Dry, sandy atolls where nothing edible thrives but coconut palms and pandanus are but idyllic paradises on which one can easily waste away of nutritional deficiency. The perennial heat and drought-like lack of rain mean you’ll be guaranteed plenty of sunny beach time, without having to put up with any of those obnoxious fruity umbrella drinks, due to the general lack of fruit.
CAPTAIN MORGAN OUT ISLAND 