Photo of the Week: Power of Carving Ice (Antarctica)

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The scale and awesome power of the travel wonder of Antarctica is difficult to capture. Huge clumps of ice break off from this glacier dwarfing the zodiac load of travellers admiring this white wonderland. The zodiac maintains a safe distance (it is over 500 metres away) and seeks sanctuary behind a smaller berg as large waves from carving ice can easily up-turn a rubberised boat. Even in buoyancy vests, life expectancy in the near freezing water is only a few minutes.

Peter Rudiak-Gould Interview: Part Two

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This is part two of an interview with Peter Rudiak-Gould, an American student who lived for a year on a remote atoll of the remote Marshall Islands, publishing his first book titled Surviving Paradise describing his experience. Read part one of the interview first. All photos are courtesy of Peter and are printed with permission. Many more can be found on Peter's website.

Travel Wonders: Can you comment on some of the positive and negative changes that modern western (especially American) influence is having on these remote islanders' lives?

Peter Rudiak-Gould: The first thing to realize is that, while these people are quite remote and somewhat isolated, there has nonetheless been a huge amount of foreign influence for well over a century. Missionaries, whalers, German administrators and plantation owners, Japanese imperialists and schoolteachers, World War II, American soldiers, nuclear testing, aid money, and the Peace Corps – the list goes on and on. We Westerners have a tendency to think that every remote place is just now opening up to the outside world, and that the latest foreign influence—whether it’s tourism or climate change—will be the one to finally spoil the place. But, despite all of the outside forces over the years, something that is still recognizably “Marshallese culture” has survived all this time – so it may not be quite as fragile as we fear.
Some of the record of foreign influence has been good. Fighting between islands used to be rampant and is now unknown. (This is not evidence that colonialism is good, only that government is good.) Infant mortality is way down; Marshall Islanders traditionally celebrate a new child not at birth but at the first birthday, because half of infants didn’t survive until then. The people are now protected from droughts and typhoons by the Marshallese and American governments; these hazards used to kill people in large numbers. On the other hand, it’s harder nowadays for people to live off the land because of population growth, overfishing and overhunting, and the German replanting of their islands with a cash crop (coconuts) rather than subsistence crops. Once-rare diseases like obesity and diabetes are now common due to lack of exercise and reliance on the empty calories of imported rice and sugar. And there is the not-so-small matter of nuclear testing, which has caused (and continues to cause) a tremendous amount of suffering for people displaced and irradiated.
I’m not going to say whether I think these changes are balance positive or negative, but I do think that if we’re going to make that call, we had better take all of the changes into account, not just the ones that fit our ideology. Diehard believers in modernity would like us to forget the bad points, while diehard traditionalists would like us to forget the good points. Interestingly, that same schism of belief exists in the Marshall Islands itself: if you ask how life was before foreigners came, locals will say “Peaceful – much better than today” but if you ask how life was before missionaries came, they’ll say “Violent – much worse than today”. These are the same individuals talking about the same time period, but the answer is different because the question has been framed in two different ways. So, whether you’re a local or a foreigner, comparing the present to the past is not a straightforward matter.

TW: You reference that Marshallese has 33 words for "wave" and 11 for "coconut" (plus over 100 other related terms). The language appears to have developed independent of too many outside influences. What is there to learn from such "separated" languages and what fascinated you most about Marshallese?

Peter: Languages reveal something about what people have needed to name, the sorts of distinctions they’ve found it useful to make. It’s not surprising that Marshallese has so many words related to staple plants like coconut, breadfruit, and pandanus. To give you an idea of how important these species are, here are some of their uses. Coconut trees are used for food (several varieties of coconut meat), drink (coconut juice and coconut sap), alcohol (fermented coconut sap), fuel (coconut husks), bowls (made of coconut shells), cords for stringing fish, utensils, medicine, rope, shelter, baskets, handicrafts, and copra (dried coconut meat) as a cash crop. Coconuts are even used as pillows! Breadfruit trees are used for building materials and many varieties of fresh, cooked, and preserved food. Pandanus trees are used for fresh and preserved food, medicine, thatch, and handicrafts – and now their roots are used to clean snorkel masks. So it’s not that surprising (though I still find it charming) that Marshallese has amazingly specific words like lajden for “the smallest breadfruit or pandanus remaining on the tree at the end of the season” or ninikoko for “two or more persons sharing one coconut”.
The language is not entirely free of foreign influence. There are hundreds of words from English, like baam (bomb), pinjel (pencil), and jikuul (school). There some Japanese words, too: for instance, tenki for “flashlight” and jambo for “to walk around”. Older people will occasionally even say maak (like the German currency “mark”) for “money”, a reminder of German influence in these islands before World War I. So the colonial history of the islands is inscribed in the language.

TW: Have you met another non-Marshall Islander who speaks the language well?

Peter: I’ve met some people who have been in the country for decades—life-long missionaries, and a man who works with the displaced people of Bikini Atoll, to name a few—and their Marshallese makes mine sound like baby talk. In fact, no one would be terribly impressed with my level of Marshallese ability in, say, Spanish or French. The fact that it’s exotic makes even a workable grasp of the language seem impressive. Same with Marshallese people themselves; even at the beginning when I could only mumble a few stock phrases, locals were delighted. So, while the language is hard to learn in many ways, you get a lot of recognition for any amount that you master. I’m not exactly complaining about that.

TW: What is your favourite Marshall Island story that brings a bit of a laugh?

Peter: There are too many to choose from, so I’ll use this as an opportunity include a tidbit that I never managed to fit into the book. There are no phones on most of the outer islands, so the main means of communication is by radio. There is just one problem with this (um, other than the deluge of static, the confusion of two different sets of people trying to have simultaneous conversations on the same channel, not hearing what your conversation partner said because you were both talking at the same time, and not knowing how well your joke went over because you can only hear the other side when they’re pressing the button on their microphone)—so, yes, the one problem with these radios is that everyone in the Marshall Islands can hear what you’re saying. So, I submit the following word of advice for English teachers in the Marshall Islands: please do not teach your students Pig Latin. The outer island volunteers need it in order to send coded radio messages to each other about things such as: local dating disasters, embarrassing medical problems, etc. I have even heard of volunteers using Spanish, and Pig Spanish, for the same purpose.

TW: What would be your advice to a new person being assigned a year on a remote atoll in the Marshall Islands?

Peter: Don’t be too masochistic. Of course, you’re probably a bit of a masochist, like me, if you want to go there. But you don’t have to, say, leave your books or iPod at home in the name of going native, roughing it, or having a more real experience. (You might have no way to charge your iPod there, but that’s another matter.) To be honest, I didn’t really live up to this advice myself – I had the opportunity have a satellite phone but turned it down. I’m just saying that you don’t have to do that to yourself to have an authentic experience.
You will have expectations of the place, and that’s natural. But to the greatest extent possible, don’t let those expectations color how you perceive things once you get there. Let the place wash over you in all of its complexity. It won’t be the Lost World that some are hoping for; it won’t be Honolulu either. It will be itself. It will be proof of no ideology, confirmation of no simplistic worldview. If you manage to see it that way, you’re doing better than most.

Thank you Peter for your insightful thoughts on this remote island community. Peter shares his thoughts on climate change in the Marshall Islands in a further interview and his book Surviving Paradise is an excellent read.

Interview on the Marshall Islands: Peter Rudiak-Gould (author "Surviving Paradise")

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Peter Rudiak-Gould is an American student studying for an anthropology doctorate at Oxford University in climate change and its effect on the Marshall Islands. He lived for a year on a remote atoll of the remote Marshall Islands, publishing his first book titled Surviving Paradise describing his experience. In a two-part interview, Peter discussed his time on the island. All photos are courtesy of Peter. Many more can be found on Peter's website.

Travel Wonders: Ujae sounds like many people's idea of a paradise. What did you miss most about living in Ujae and what did you miss least?

Peter Rudiak-Gould:
Miss: Batheably warm water, every day of the year, twenty paces away.
Don’t miss: Knowing that that water is only going to get warmer, and closer, due to climate change.
Miss: The fact that the islanders are always happy to talk to you.
Don’t miss: The utter lack of anonymity that goes with this. (Ujae, like Cheers, is a place where everyone knows your name; but that’s a mixed blessing.)
Miss: The endless quantities of island lore that you can learn.
Don’t miss: Living in a world where you are laughably ignorant.
Miss: The privileges that come from being everyone’s guest.
Don’t miss: The fact that those are the only privileges you have – and therefore you are living entirely on someone else’s terms.
Miss: Impossibly star-filled skies.
Don’t miss: The isolation necessary for such skies.

TW: How long did it take till you really felt part of the local community rather than a novel and interesting outsider?

Peter: By the second half of my year on Ujae, people were sometimes calling me Marshallese. That indicates some level of acceptance, but of course they didn’t think of me as just another of the boys. And it certainly didn’t mean that I felt like a local. Fancying myself to be Marshallese might have felt cozy, but it would have been a denial of so many things that I am.
Probably the closest I came to feeling like a real member of the community was when someone even less familiar with the island showed up. This wasn’t too common on Ujae, but it did happen. When two Australian tourists, returning by plane from a diving adventure on Bikini Atoll, stepped onto Ujae for a few minutes before heading onwards, I could see how exotic this outer island was to them, how familiar to me, and for those few minutes I almost felt like a native. It was the same feeling when my parents arrived, something that I write about in my book.
I should also mention that if shouting my name whenever I approached within two hundred feet is any indication, then the younger children never got used to me at all.

TW: How did you adapt to the small village mentality where everyone knows everyone else's business?

Peter: Four hundred and fifty people may not sound like much, but when they’re crammed into such a small island, it feels pretty populated. In one part of the village, the houses extend well into the interior of the island; it’s like a little metropolis, by local standards. In the face of that, you get creative in your efforts to preserve your privacy. One refuge is your own thoughts; no one can read your mind (although they come pretty close in this culture – it’s spooky). Another is the jungle—and there is some of it, even on a tiny island with 450 people—which is deserted most of the time. Another is the ocean side of the island, which is the polar opposite of the heavily peopled lagoon shore. A local man once built a house there – he told me it was his “vacation home”, which feels apt even though it was a five-minute walk from the village. So, you do find ways to get away.

TW: What is your proudest effort or most significant change you personally made to education in Ujae?

Peter: Education in the Marshall Islands leaves a lot to be desired, and Ujae has one of the very lowest ranked schools in the country, in terms of average scores on the high school entrance exam. This was a school where the 8th graders couldn’t point to their country on a map, and a 14-year-old asked me how to spell “I”. But this didn’t make my teaching efforts heroic. It was more like the opposite, because the current conditions were so bad that even a mediocre teacher could make huge improvements (which was good, because I was such a teacher). Some of the children could carry on simple English conversations, sort of, by the end of the year – which pleased me very much. And two of my 8th graders passed the high school entrance exam, something that hadn’t happened in five years on that island.


Please read Part Two of the interview.

Photo of the Week - Incan 12 Sided Stone (Cusco, Peru)

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The photo of the week shows an exceptional example of the simply, extraordinary mortarless masonry skills of the Incas. The twelve-sided Hatunrumiyoc stone is part of an Incan palace and later the Archbishop's Palace and is a short walk up a small street off the main square of world heritage-listed Cusco. As claimed, I couldn't get the blade of my pocket-knife into any gap around the perfect stonework. The stone is fairly easy to find as souvenir sellers tend to cluster opposite the stone.

Drinks Around the World: Coca Tea (Peru)

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Particularly popular in the highlands and Andes mountains of the travel wonder of Peru, coca tea provokes some controversy and reaction. Simply made by adding hot (but not boiling) water to a handful of coca leaves, the drink has the grassy botanical taste of many herbal teas with the slight bitterness of traditional green tea.

To listen to a local, the tea takes on the medicinal qualities of Tiger Balm soothing and salving any number of complaints and ailments. Many claim that it eases the headaches, improves sleep and reduces the other side effects of altitude sickness. Hardly robust scientific proof, but I drank it both crossing the high pass (4,800 metres) to Colca Canyon (while watched by a pet condor) and walking the Inca Trail, without any effects of altitude.

Similarly to mint tea in Morocco, it is a drink of welcome. I was offered a small cup at two different modest hotels and it is available both as bags of leaves and in tea bags (under the Inka brand, for one) in the various markets. According to other travellers, the US and European customs allow the tea bags to be bought into the country (Australia won't accept it on agricultural protection grounds).

In the villages of Peru and around Cusco, many of the local population chew coca leaves (similar to chewing tobacco, I guess), munching heartily on a wad of leaves. Several porters walking the Inca Trail indulged, spitting the exhausted leaves out before ingesting another handful from their pockets.

The cultivation of the leaves is controversial as the pharmacologically active ingredient in the leaves is (less than 0.2% in each leaf) used in the manufacture of cocaine. At best, consumed in a herbal tea, coca leaves are an extremely mild stimulant.

The selling of coca leaves is strongly debated across Peru with its strong historic, cultural and ceremonial heritage in contrast to the modern human toll that the drug cocaine has inflicted. The stigma associated with coca leaves has caused some issues when dealing with foreign powers, though Coca-Cola is reputed to continue to use coca leaves in their world famous drink.

In the vein of trying local products, I can recommend trying coca tea in a small Peruvian cafe. While the grassy taste is hardly exciting, it is a relaxing, warming and social drink polular throughout the Andes and it may even provide relief from the heights of this mountainous country.

Photo Source: dachalan

Previous Drinks Around the World include Mint Tea from Morocco, a French Vin Chaud, Bloody Caesar from Canada, a Pisco Sour from South America, Singapore Sling, Belgium's Chimay Beer, Scotland's smoky Talisker Scotch Whisky and the Czech Republic's Becherovka.