Читать книгу Wanderlust: A Solitary Island in the South Pacific - Nina Hoffmann - Страница 7

The journey to paradise leads through hell and unfortunately past lots of shipwrecks. It's early evening, darkness is already breaking over the harbour. In daylight we saw from here the banana trees and the tall palm trees along the coastal road. The turquoise blue sea made the surroundings together with the sunshine extra bright and only enjoyable with sunglasses.

Now, at this hour, the South Sea has disappeared. The sky is cloudy, even the stars and moon give no light.

Nuku'alofa is the name of the place where we are - by definition the capital city of Tonga, but capital village would a better decriptor.

Nuku'alofa deviates in some respects from what we had imagined of our South Sea idyll. After all, we are talking about the Garden of Eden on Earth, as this area with its thousands of islands between Hawaii, New Zealand and the Easter Islands in the southeast was described centuries ago.

In contrast, Nuku'alofa's appearance is sobering. The city was half burnt down after the death of the king in 2006. There was unrest, preceded by the demand for a democratic composition of Parliament. Shops were looted and set on fire. Today's centre, if you want to call it that, consists mainly of cement foundations - remains of the fire ruins. Although the city with its thirty thousand inhabitants is comparatively small, conditions are like in a big city: garbage is lying around everywhere, drugs are being traded and stolen. It also happens that a robber armed with a machete targets the bank.

At least outside the city there are beautiful villages, corners with countless mango trees and beaches to discover, and the South Sea becomes more what we expected to find.

Nuku'alofa’s harbour is a small scrap yard with a small mooring at the top of the pier. Only a few of the worn bollards are still in use. Many ships lie on the ground, bows protrude warningly out of the water.

"Is this such a good idea?" I hear Nina asking, shaken and looking over at the wrecks.

"I don't really know," I say.

The rental car is outside the port area and we walk the remaining meters. Uncomfortable in our flip-flops, because we constantly step into the next pothole. Sweat drips from our eyebrows, the air is humid and salty. Sunday is panting.

The only ship among the dozen on which the lacquer holds is the light blue painted Alo'ofa. "Love" is what that means. She looks run-down. The boat is at the end of the pier, about fifty people have gathered in a group and are standing in front of a barrier tape. A spotlight connected to a generator illuminates the gravel surface in front of the small ferry. Nina puts down her backpack, which is far too heavy for her petite figure, and I add the canisters of petrol.

I have a dull feeling in my stomach and am beginning to understand the challenge I will be facing today. When I look out at the dark sea, I see white crowns of foam on the waves everywhere.

I don't have a choice. A trip on this boat is the only way to get to the place that is to become our little dream world for the next year - somewhere in the middle of nowhere, in the deepest Polynesian loneliness.

It will be an island-hopping of the most strenuous kind, through the night, with several stops. I can't reach the desert island itself directly by ferry; I depend on a fisherman to take me there from the nearest inhabited island. For the few nautical miles I need as long as on a plane around the world.

Nina will wait with Sunday in Nuku'alofa and start shopping for the first months on our island until I come back from the exploration and find out what awaits us.

We get an overview of the hustle and bustle. People are stacking a lot of luggage, some have bags of taro roots with them, a woman a plastic Christmas tree with a chain of lights. Many of them already now, in the middle of November, are drawn to their families on the secluded islands. Far away from any shopping market they will spend the Christmas season there.

Sione, the man from the ferry, recognizes us. He calls our names over our heads and wave to us. We are the only Palangis in the crowd, as whites in the South Sea Kingdom are called by all, and easy to recognize.

"Adrian, are you ready to go?" he asks as we stand in front of him.

Am I?

"I think so."

In the first two months in Tonga we had tried in vain to reach the remote island areas that interested us the most. The sailors we met rejected our requests for a transfer from the outset. Fishing didn't go any better. We were close to despair. Sione helped us. When we met him, he was walking barefoot from a neighboring wreck over a mason's floorboard to the Alo'ofa, hopping over the gap between the ship and the pier to me, looking at me with his coconut brown eyes, and answering my question, which I had already yelled at him from a distance: "Yes, my friend”.

As it turned out, Sione is a true sea nomad. One who knows all the little islands in the middle of nowhere. He is 44 years old and spends his life exclusively on boats. On the Alo'ofa he works as a kind of administrator, he lives in the neighboring shipwreck.

It gets serious, I kiss Nina goodbye, from which she can hardly get away, and pat Sunday on the head.

"Everything's gonna be fine," I whisper into Nina's ear. She nods, but says nothing.

Sione points me over a narrow beam into the boat. Before I find myself a place and let Sione go back to his work, I ask him: "Is it getting very bad?"

He answers very untypically for most Tonga people who like to say what you want to hear: "It's getting rough." I had a hunch.

The Alo'ofa is in reality only a former fishing boat with a covered outer surface. There's no room inside for passengers. I sit down on a narrow wooden bench on the side from where I can look forward to where most of the passengers are. They lie down on the ship's floor and use their luggage as pillows. A man, dressed in black and with a woven mat of dried pandanus leaves curved around his waist, stands in front of the passengers and begins to speak in Tongan.

"That's the priest," says one of the boatmen. "He prays for a safe passage."

We lay down, I see Nina standing at the pier, in the warm rain veil of the night, and we wave to each other one last time.

Now, so soon after the departure, everything seems very unreal. With wise foresight, Nina gave me a few tablets against seasickness before starting the ferry trip, particularly high doses, of which we took a whole series of packs from Germany. With a sip of water I flush down the first pill.

"What's that?" asks a boy watching me.

"It helps against seasickness," I answer.

"Can I have one too?"

"Sure," I say and give him a travel gum instead of a pill. They're pretty good, too, especially prophylactic for boys.

The Alo'ofa chugs past the first small islands that lie a few kilometers before Tonga's main island Tongatapu and whose contours, although we are now so close to them, I hardly notice anymore in the black of the night. From here our boat goes out into the open sea.

Without a phase of acclimatisation, the passage begins, which everyone in the ship could do without. Meter-high waves, which I can imagine more than I can see, pile up in front of us. I'm busy concentrating on a point outside the boat. But I don't know which one to take, there aren't many to choose from, so I look back towards Tongatapu, where a light burns in a sparsely equipped South Sea lighthouse - a lamp on a metal pole.

Minutes later this light has also disappeared, and I search in vain for hold on the horizon. There's only darkness left. The Alo'ofa swings up and down, sometimes a gush of water splashes from the bow to the side corridor. The plastic tarpaulin over the railing, which Sione lowered after an hour of driving, and even my raincoat don't offer any protection from the waves after a while. I'm cold, I'm wet all the way down to my underpants. Annoyed, I turn to my side, my eyes stubbornly turned to the oil barrels standing at the back of the ship. So only my back gets the water and the hood of my jacket and it no longer runs over my face and chin in the collar.

The tablet makes me sleepy; I forget my fear and would like to give in to the desire for sleep. But I have a very bad seat, squeezed between two fat men. The chewing gum boy lies at my feet and has pulled a blanket over his face, only his eyes look out.

"Tastes all right," he says. "I think it helps."

The tablet works for quite a while on me, and I hope to survive the trip relatively well. But suddenly, I feel sick. I reach for the railing, stagger back to the oil barrels. Opposite is the so-called toilet. I push the wooden plate to the side, which is meant to be a door, and fall into it full of gratitude for having reached the bowl.

As I notice only now, I've been sitting in front of the side window of the toilet the whole time, which is why the whole hell ride over the smell of urine rises to my nose. After this first session I decide to go to the railing, which in the long run is more humane than the toilet cabin, where salt water mixes with all sorts of things on the floor.

When I returned to my crushed position, I noticed that other passengers were also using the railing to get rid of unnecessary stomach contents. They fold the plastic tarpaulin up a gap and stretch their heads through in wind and waves.

"How are you?" the boy asks anxiously.

"It's okay," I lie.

The rain becomes even stronger at night, the waves become even higher, and after each ridge a steep descent begins. I wonder if the luggage stowed in the lower bow space is not too heavy to bring the Alo'ofa safely to the next spot of land.

Whenever people run to the railing and back again or the next wave sloshes in, I startle awake. The wet clothes on my skin are uncomfortable and will not dry any more tonight.

Actually, I'm not supposed to take the second tablet until eight hours after taking the first one. But I decide to chance it two hours early, it's just after midnight. I somehow dig the bottle of water out of the backpack, for which I have to wake the sleeping boy using it as a pillow, and throw in the next tablet.

"Can I have some more gum?"

I pass it to him wordlessly. Being seasick is like dying.

Although I have given myself the answer time and again, I ask myself: is it really the right thing to do? Was it wise to leave the apartment and give up jobs? For what? For a crazy dream? An idea that perhaps cannot be realized in the way we imagine? What's in it for us? I have no answers, I'm in a boat and my head is spinning.

There is a time on that night when I stopped longing for the end of the journey. I've lost all sense of time. If someone told me we'd been on the road for days and I didn't have a watch on the phone display, I'd believe it.

The Alo'ofa floats in the waves like a message in a bottle that never arrives anywhere. I don't feel like we're moving ahead either. Meanwhile I wouldn't care myself if I slid half asleep from the bench to the ground and from there under the railing into the depth. The main thing is to close your eyes without everything spinning in your head. Finally, the second pill overpowers me.