Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  For hours we saw nothing out the window except cloud and ocean. Then, as the plane descended, I spotted a fleck of green floating on the water like a strand of seaweed. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the pilot announced, “we are approaching Niue International Airport.” We touched down on a narrow strip cut into the jungly foliage and taxied to an open-air terminal the size of a golf clubhouse. If the airport’s name seemed grandiose, Niue’s immigration form was even odder; it asked what plane we’d arrived on. There was only one flight: ours. If you didn’t take it, you had to come by cargo ship.

  We stepped from the terminal into a blazing tropical afternoon. Several hundred people in brightly colored dresses and shirts stood holding umbrellas against the sun. Their copper-colored faces were wide and handsome, a shade darker and more Asiatic than those of Tahitians or Maori. A few people came up to greet arriving passengers, but most simply watched until everyone had disembarked, then wandered off.

  “Are you going to the hotel?” a young man asked us in English.

  “Hotel? Sure. That sounds great.” He tossed our bags in the back of a pickup. I asked him about the crowd. “It is plane day,” he said. “People want to see who is coming. There is not much else to do on Sunday, except church.”

  We drove through low, thick scrub and arrived at a modest building fringed with palms. At the reception desk, a woman handed us coconuts with straws and led us to a motel-style room. There was a TV, phone, and fridge. Outside lay a kidney-shaped swimming pool. I felt vaguely disappointed. Not Roger. “Told you we’d be drinking from coconuts,” he said, splashing a bit of rum into his. “Beats the hell out of Canberra.”

  “What now?”

  “We’ll wait for sunset,” Roger said. “We can watch the last of this day in the entire world—the end of yesterday. We’ve already seen the first of tomorrow. We’ll have seen the future and the past in one day. We’ll be time travelers.”

  I struggled to unravel this. The international dateline, like longitude and the transit of Venus, still bewildered me. Bells tolled in the distance. “Let’s go to church,” I said.

  Roger laughed. “Pray for me,” he said, slumping into a deck chair.

  I walked up the road to a small church marked “London Missionary Society.” Inside, fifty or so people sat in pews and chairs, wearing stiff straw hats and cooling themselves with leaf fans. Most of the children were barefoot. At an unadorned altar, the minister droned in a language unfamiliar to me, apart from the word “Amen.” It began to rain, a heavy tropical downpour; then the sun reemerged and the palm trees through the open window looked washed and electric green against the cobalt sky. I couldn’t see the nearby ocean, but the surf thundered so loudly that the minister had to raise his voice. Polynesian Christianity seemed incongruous this way: the austere creed of starched English missionaries, transplanted, like some moorland thistle, to the extravagant tropics.

  Returning to the hotel, I asked the woman at the desk where I might go for a swim in the ocean. She said swimming was forbidden on Sunday, and fishing, too. I told her I’d just visited the church. “Oh,” she said, smiling. “There’s another service this evening. Wednesdays, too.”

  Roger sat where I’d left him, working on his second coconut. “Lest you think I’ve been bone idle,” he said, “I’ve arranged for us to rent a car.” A few minutes later, an elderly New Zealander named Mary picked us up and drove to a lot strewn with old Japanese sedans. She handed me the keys to one, and said to return the car when we left the island.

  “Don’t you want money?” I asked. “A driver’s license?”

  She shrugged. “You can pay when you come back. It’s not as if you can run off anywhere.” As for the license, we were required to pick up a Niue permit at the police station, which was closed on Sundays. We could drive without a license until the station opened, she cheerfully explained.

  I asked Mary how she’d ended up in Niue. “My husband saw an ad in a New Zealand newspaper five years ago. ‘Own Your Own Business in Paradise.’” The car rental agency came with a yacht club, though there were no yachts on Niue. “I’d put it in the category of ‘sounded good at the time,’” she said.

  Mary gave us a map and warned against inland roads, which she described as rutted tracks strewn with rocks. That left little to explore, except for a coastal road circling the island. Niue was only seventeen miles long and eleven miles wide. “It’ll take you about two hours if you drive very, very slowly,” Mary said.

  On the way back to the hotel we passed church traffic, the drivers smiling and waving at us as they went by. Savage Island was beginning to seem like a disarmingly safe and pleasant place. We watched the sunset from the hotel deck with the few other guests, mostly delegates from the New Zealand government. They explained that New Zealand had inherited Niue from the British empire a century ago: hence the English spoken by most islanders. While Niue had been self-governing since 1974, New Zealand still looked after the island’s external affairs and provided a great deal of financial aid. Also, thirteen thousand Niueans worked in New Zealand, almost ten times as many as still lived on the island.

  “There’s no real economy here,” one of the diplomats said. Some Niueans eked out a subsistence from fishing and farming, but 90 percent of employable adults worked for the heavily subsidized public sector. Islanders’ attempts at diversifying their economy had led down “some very crook paths,” he added. I pressed him for details. “Just drive around the island,” he said, diplomatically, “and keep your eyes open. You’ll see.”

  In the morning we paid two New Zealand dollars for our drivers’ licenses: stamp-sized slips of paper with “Niue” misspelled. The police station and its seven-cell jail stood in Alofi, the island’s main settlement, which was anchored at one end by the corrugated-roof headquarters of the London Missionary Society. A meeting was going on inside, but when we peered in the door, two men came out to chat. “Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ,” said a young pastor in a well-starched white shirt. He introduced himself as Matagi. The other man, Hafe, was his grandfather and also a minister. “May we help you?” he asked.

  I told him about our travels and asked if Cook’s brief visit to the island was remembered today. “Oh yes,” Matagi said. “Traditionally, our foes came from the sea. So anyone landing here was seen as an enemy. Cook’s men fired at our people, we retaliated with rocks and spears, and Cook ran away.” He said the musket fire reminded the Niueans of thunder, so they called the sailors palagi, or sky burst, and still used the term today when speaking of foreigners. (The same word appears, in different form, across Polynesia; some scholars believe it refers not to gunfire, but to the belief that the strange ships had “burst from the sky.”)

  “What about the red teeth?” I asked. Matagi looked at his shoes. His grandfather lit a Rothmans. “You must understand, we are not cannibals,” Hafe said. “People wanted to defend their property, that is all. We had a tradition: when enemies came we did a war dance like the Maori. Warriors painted their lips and teeth with the juice of the hulahula, the red banana, to frighten people off.”

  “Does anyone still call this Savage Island?”

  Hafe’s face reddened. “Cook called Tonga the Friendly Isles, probably because he had so many girls there. Tahiti he called the Society Islands, same reason. The Cook Islands were named after him. Nice names. But because we throw a few stones and spears, we’re savages.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “No one likes Cook much in Niue.” The two men returned inside.

  “Good one, mate,” Roger said. “You with your crass, bull-nosing American technique, exposing a raw nerve and then poking at it.”

  “But we learned something. Cook got scared off by red bananas!”

  “Too bad. I was looking forward to chewing betel nut. The rare vice I’ve never tried.”

  Roger headed off in search of cigarettes while I toured a cluster of buildings at the center of Alofi. The post office had a philatelic annex for collectors; Niue, like other tiny states,
trafficked profitably in stamps. A small grocery had a notice in the window that said: “For Sale $200, 1 Female Pig Half Niuean Half Palagi.” A few doors down I found an office displaying a Panamanian flag. Curious, I poked my head inside and was greeted by a lithe, sharply dressed woman who wouldn’t have looked out of place at a Manhattan law firm.

  “Are you interested in registering a company?” she asked. Caught off guard, I smiled noncommittally. She handed me a folder detailing Niue’s banking and corporate laws. Offshore firms weren’t required to pay tax or file financial statements and they enjoyed “complete business privacy and confidentiality.” It cost only $385 U.S. a year to register a company in Niue. “Much cheaper than in the Caymans or Bahamas,” the woman said. When I asked about the flag in the window, she said the office belonged to a Panamanian law firm, hired by the government to handle offshore licenses.

  The relationship appeared cozy: the law firm shared space with the office of Niue’s attorney general. But if tax evasion was encouraged in Niue—at least for foreigners—other transgressions were not. A sign in the attorney general’s office listed fines for “Scandalous Conduct,” including “profane, indecent, or obscene language,” adultery, and “persons of the opposite sex who, without being married to each other, live together as husband and wife to the annoyance of the public.”

  The next office along the mall was also intriguing: Niue Telecom. I was greeted by a handsome young manager named Richard Hipa, who regaled me with fun facts: Niue had the world’s smallest phone company but the highest “penetration” on the globe, with almost every one of the island’s eight hundred households hooked up. Niue also had thousands of excess lines. It leased this surplus to Asia Pacific Telecom, which used the lines for the sort of 900 calls advertised in tabloid magazines and on late-night television. Niue Telecom was now the island’s largest generator of revenue.

  There was one hitch. Most of the 900 numbers switching through Niue Telecom’s tiny office were used for sex-chat services. If a caller misdialed, he often reached a Niuean instead of his intended partner at a foreign phone bank. “People here began getting heavy-breathing calls in the middle of the night from someone wanting to speak to Wanda,” Richard said. This didn’t go over well in Christian Niue. “I was labeled ‘Mr. Sex’ and had to go to meetings in every village to apologize and explain.”

  The scandal eventually blew over. Locals were mollified when they realized their government salaries were subsidized by the phone scheme. “It’s other people’s morals, not ours, that are being corrupted by these calls,” Richard said.

  Entrepreneurs on the island had also peddled Niue’s Internet domain, .nu, which appealed to adult-site purveyors in French-speaking countries, where nu means naked. The ISP for Niue was sin.net.nu, a double entendre, as “sin” was short for “Savage Island Network.” “It’s unique, it’s catchy,” Richard said. “We don’t have many assets, so why not use the few we’ve got?” He smiled. “Of course, not everyone here likes us using that name.”

  I found Roger smoking beside a clump of graves by the water. He listened patiently while I burbled about the sex lines and offshore licenses. Then he smiled and said, “Now let me tell you what I saw.” Meandering down the road, he’d noticed a sign saying BAR OPEN, and beside it a sign for Lord Liverpool University George Washington School of Medicine.

  “I’ve always wanted to visit a medical school with a bar attached,” Roger said. Inside, he found a Canadian in hospital scrubs, and learned that the bar belonged to a defunct hotel that had been turned into a medical school for foreign students. Except there were no foreign students, almost no medical equipment, and no staff apart from the Canadian and two other men. “It was fabulously silly,” Roger said. “If that’s a genuine medical school, then I’m Albert Schweitzer.”

  We climbed in the car and drove slowly along the coastal road. The dense growth on either side made it hard to see much apart from graves set at regular intervals, like mileage markers. Most of the graves were well-tended and extravagantly decorated with shell necklaces or other baubles. One stone had a walking stick perched beside it, another a motorcycle.

  Reaching the top of the island, we spotted several New Zealanders we recognized from our hotel. They were studying a monument to the first missionaries on the island, Niuean men named Toimata and Peniamina who had been taken aboard a missionary ship to Samoa, converted to Christianity, and returned to their native island in 1846. Toimata, the first ashore, “was greeted with a painful reception,” the monument said. “His body was seriously bruised from the beating.” Eventually, he persuaded islanders to allow Peniamina ashore “to teach the good news of the Kingdom of God.” The memorial’s praise of Toimata concluded: “Your courageous effort made Penis landing possible. Thank you. Thank you, Toimata, your name shall always be remembered.”

  As we puzzled over “Penis,” the New Zealanders’ guide, a Niuean named Misa, explained that Peniamina had been known as Peni for short. The inscription should therefore have read “Peni’s landing,” but someone had left out the apostrophe.

  I asked Misa about Cook and the red banana. “The hulahula? It is like a red Popsicle in what it does to your face when you eat it,” he said. “Very colorful, as if you’ve eaten a human being. Cook saw this, and the warriors’ fierce faces and long hair and beards, and assumed we were savages.” Misa said the traditional Niuean word for “savage” was the same as that for “cannibal,” making Cook’s name for the island particularly offensive.

  I asked Misa where we could find a hulahula. “Not many people grow it anymore,” he replied, before driving off with the others.

  Back at the hotel, we joined other guests for an evening of food and entertainment hosted by the villagers of Hakupu, the second-largest settlement on the island. The fête began with a tour by a schoolteacher named Tiva. At the village green, she showed us a wooden drum, thumped with a log to summon villagers for public occasions. Until recently, it had also been used to announce the arrival of mail. Now, letters were delivered to boxes before each house. Television was another new service, though programming was limited to evening hours and a small menu of news and taped shows from New Zealand and the United States.

  The homes themselves were mostly low-slung concrete “hurricane houses,” built after a 1959 cyclone; before, many houses were traditional structures of limestone and thatch. Most of the hurricane houses now stood empty. Their occupants had left for New Zealand, Tiva said, where Niueans usually found blue-collar jobs. Since the opening of the island’s airport in 1977, the population had fallen by two-thirds, forcing sports teams to fold and schools to consolidate.

  “We hope that some of you will enjoy your stay so much that you’ll want to settle here and raise a family,” Tiva concluded. In its attempts to repopulate, Niue had begun taking refugees from Tuvalu, an atoll cluster to the north that was threatened by rising sea levels.

  Tiva led us to Hakupu’s closed schoolhouse, which now served as a community hall. Inside, we found large women laying out our dinner, which they’d steamed on hot rocks in an underground oven, called an umu. The meal was vast, even by Polynesian standards. At the center of the buffet sat a suckling pig, its sharp teeth exposed in a posthumous snarl. Around the pig lay dozens of dishes mummified in foil and banana leaf. Tiva unwrapped each in turn and identified the contents: coconut crab, tapioca-root bread, a shellfish called cat’s eye, bird’s-nest fern, yams, whole wahoo, raw fish, and taro cooked every which way (with coconut, spinach, banana, butter, pawpaw). “Usually we have pigeon, too, and bat,” Tiva said. “I’m so sorry, not tonight. I hope there’s enough for everyone.”

  Roger reached for a piece of taro and had just taken a bite when the women joined hands and began saying grace. “Oh God,” he muttered, compounding his sin. The moment the prayer ended, our hosts dug in with their hands, eating much of the food while still in line. We followed their example as best we could.

  “It’s impossible to eat this with any decorum,
” Roger said, paws filled with fish. I tried to sample every dish, but quickly lost track of which was which. At the end of the table lay several types of banana. I asked Tiva if any of them was a hulahula. She blushed and shook her head. “Oh no, we wouldn’t serve that. Anyway, you don’t find it anymore.”

  The women pushed aside the tables and began strumming guitars and ukuleles. Young girls in coconut-leaf skirts swayed their hips, making feathery motions with their upraised fingers. It was Tahiti without the bump and grind, or the glazed-eyed boredom of professional dancers. The women and kids were obviously enjoying themselves, and so were we. “Now,” Tiva said, when the music ended, “who needs more food?”

  After the show, the women showed us baskets they’d woven from coconut and pandanus leaves, intricate and boldly colored, the most beautiful craftwork I’d seen in the Pacific. The children formed a circle so we could shake their hands before leaving. For one evening, at least, I felt as though we’d glimpsed a bit of Polynesia not yet ravaged by mass tourism.

  Even Roger let go of his customary cynicism. “It’s wonderfully innocent here—none of the deep corruption of Tahiti,” he said, as we drove back to the hotel, past kids playing soccer in the twilight. We stopped to watch girls hunting coconut crabs with flashlights. They deftly grabbed the skittering, bluish-black crustaceans behind the creatures’ heads and tossed them into burlap bags. Then they offered several crabs to us. Roger waved his hand as if warding off demons. “If I eat one more of those I’ll grow claws.”

  I woke the next morning from a disturbing dream in which I’d killed Beaglehole with a cannonball. My stomach was churning, and so was Roger’s. “I feel like I’ve smoked bad dope,” he said. “The food here doesn’t just make you fat, it makes you mad.”