Читать книгу Wanderlust: A Solitary Island in the South Pacific - Nina Hoffmann - Страница 8

It all started when Nina and I left two years earlier for that trip through Tonga's neighboring island state of Fiji. We wanted to get out of the old world for a while, out of everyday life - a wish that many people have. Some fulfil this dream directly after graduating from high school, first go on journeys before "the seriousness of life" begins. With us this was not possible, although we already dreamed of paradise during our school days. As soon as she had her diploma in her hand, Nina threw herself into her studies and I started with the civil service and training.

Time passed, it was a good time, but at some point it was clear: if we didn't dream for a lifetime, but really wanted to see our paradise, then it was now or never. We did not suspect at all that this first adventure would become something that we understand today as our personal way of life.

First we moved to Fiji's northeast, to a small island with many hills, streams and seven villages. We found a place to stay in a bay on the edge of a settlement and tried to integrate ourselves into the village and South Sea culture. The islanders welcomed us warmly. And finally fate took its course, because one day we met Jonny.

Jonny was a tanned and cheerful mid-forties man from South Africa who came to Fiji to enjoy life - and he said: "There's this island, so you know, it's a real insider tip."

We listened curiously, and the more Jonny told us, the more fascinated we were. It was a desert island. The desert island, thirty nautical miles away from the next inhabited one. In the middle of the ocean, in the middle of nowhere. A small grain of sand on the nautical chart, not even noted on most charts. Unattainable to anyone who didn’t know it existed. It was about four hundred by one hundred meters big; around the wooded interior of the island there was a sandy beach as wide and long as the white in a fried egg.

The beauty of the island dazzled us, its unspoiled beauty took our breath away. Without talking about it, it was clear to both of us that this was exactly what we were looking for. The solitude. Even though neither of us is a misanthrope, but on the contrary love and need our friends - the thought of being only a couple for a while appealed to us. Would we get to know each other anew if we had nothing and no one else to distract us from each other? Would it strengthen our relationship?

When we first felt the warm white sand of the island under our feet, we felt like we were the only people in the world - the most beautiful place you could find. It seemed so surreal, so incredibly perfect. So that even today we almost can't believe we really were there. That it wasn't imagination. It was real.

This island looked as if a higher power had arranged each grain of sand separately, placing each coral in the turquoise lagoon individually. And we suddenly got the chance to live there for a short time. Permission to live there. Our entry into paradise. We couldn't help ourselves.

Jonny referred us to the owner's son, a New Zealander, and he was very happy about our interest. He never thought about renting the island and the beach house on it, he said, but that sounds good. "Can you deal with yourselves?" he asked. Could we? Of course we could!

In this island idyll there was no Western luxury as we know it. We had a compost toilet consisting of a plastic barrel and a wooden frame around it. But there was a completely different kind of luxury: we had time, infinite time. For all daily things in life and above all for each other. I think that was what planted the longing in us and allowed it to germinate, until it grew into this unconditional need that no longer made us happy at home.

It would have been obvious for us to go to that island again the second time, we had all the contacts, but there was a problem for which we simply could not find a solution: in principle, Fiji does not grant permission to import dogs from Europe. No special permit either. No argument. But it was clear to us that we would not leave our dog behind.

So we came to the kingdom of Tonga. Located right next to Fiji, the islands are even more remote than their neighbouring country, which has become more touristy in recent decades, according to the travel guide.

The nice gentleman from the quarantine station helped us right away with our special dog import request. And: In relation to inhabited islands there are disproportionately many uninhabited ones in Tonga. About 30 settled, 340 desert - hardly imaginable that we should not find anything there.

Weeks before the disastrous ferry trip to the island, I visit a backyard office belonging to the Ministry of Lands, Survey, Natural Resources and Environment. It's lunch break and smells like chicken-flavored instant noodles when I come in. The employees pour them into coffee cups and stir until the noodles are soft enough.

Richard, head of the Geographic Information System subdivision at the Ministry, interrupts the matter, which demands all his attention, rises from the desk chair and smiles as he approaches me to shake my hand. He wears Tonga business attire: a black wrap skirt, the obligatory pandanus mat tied around it, a black shirt and wide leather sandals. He seems warm and polite, but after listening to my request he will in all likelihood declare me crazy.

"How can I help?" he asks and looks at me expectantly through his angular glasses. Palangis are usually found in the Immigration Office one street down because of visa issues, a building that would collapse if there weren't so many passports piled up in it. Or they could make it into the Ministry of Lands antechamber to pay fees for leased land. But here, in the corrugated iron-covered annex behind the main building, no one ever comes.

"It's a little complicated," I say. "I can come back after lunch too."

"No, no, that's all right," Richard replied, rolling an office chair towards me and asking me to sit opposite him.

I take my seat gratefully and describe my concern to him. "My wife and I are looking for a suitable desert island for ourselves," I say. "I need an overview and good maps."

I'm surprised Richard doesn't react in astonishment. It only takes him two seconds to process what I want. "And what are you going to do there?" he asks.

"Whatever most Tongans do," I answer. "We like the simple life on the islands, want to grow our own garden and go fishing once in a while."

Richard smiles at me and takes a breath. "Don't plant marijuana," he warns, and I don't know if he means that as a joke. He leads me to a table in the corner of the office where cards in DIN A1 format are spread out. Some show large islands in detail. Others show whole groups. Richard pulls down one of the cardboard rolls lying on a cupboard. He opens the lid and pulls out a card showing the entire Ha'apai island group. It is located in the middle of the kingdom and is particularly isolated and little developed. Just what we're looking for. The individual archipelagos are scattered so far that one might think that someone had dropped sugar sprinkles on the map and let them roll. The enormous expanse of the ocean is the dominant element. The pure land mass in the South Sea makes up one percent, the rest of the surface is water - it is as large as the surface of the moon.

Richard's map shows the distances from island to island - the map that we got before at the tourist office was useless for us. There are four islands which we have noticed and about which we would like to learn more. With days of internet research we tried to gain as many impressions as possible. Google Earth hardly works because of the bad internet connection in Tonga, but for some islands we find descriptions of sailors who anchored in front of them on their journeys through the archipelago. The contributions are sometimes several years old. In most cases it is difficult to obtain up-to-date information. With luck we come across photos that sailors put online after their trips and learn about fruits growing on the islands and animals living there.

On one of them, made very distinctive by smooth, big boulders on the beach, a Tongan hermit allegedly lives several months a year with his pigs. I found out about it at a beach bar in the evening.

"Is it still like that?" I ask Richard.

"As far as I know, yes," he says.

Unfortunately, this means that Little Bora-Bora, as sailors call the island, is out of the question. Nina and I, a “settler duo”, so to speak, don't want to disturb a hermit. The island would have had another advantage: it is more than ten meters high at one point - a good protection against a tsunami.

This is also the view of Richard, who shows me a map showing the development of a tsunami in September 2009 on the Niuas, the two northernmost islands of Tonga. The wave had cost the lives of dozens of people.

"The tsunami danger is considered to have increased in the next few years," says Richard. I flinch. It is clear that there are tsunamis and that they are dangerous, but I now hear immediately, for the first time, that the probability of being caught by one has increased.

"You have to make sure that you get all the official warnings, no matter how," Richard recommends and looks at me insistently. I nod; I'm certainly not taking the risk lightly.

Two more islands are eliminated; they are too small for us. You can hardly walk a circle on them, and after a few hours we would be at each other’s throats.

In the Ha'apai group, however, there is still a small chain of islands that could fit. An island in the very south is the largest, one and a half kilometers long and three hundred meters wide. Unfortunately, Richard can't give me any information about it. "I've never been there," he says. He also doesn't know the island a few miles further north. Nevertheless, it seems to me an option because it is described by sailors as a huge banana and papaya plantation that must have been planted decades ago.

The third uninhabited island in the alliance, further miles to the north, is one kilometer long and measures almost three hundred meters at its widest point. It rises out of the sea like the mighty back of a humpback whale that emerges to breathe. Nina found an aerial photograph of her on the Internet. It lies in the same lagoon as the former plantation island, and the turquoise water around the beaches can still be seen from a thousand meters above sea level. It has a remarkably wide sand peak in the northwest - a dreamlike place for evening campfires.

"I think a Palangi built a house on this island," Richard mentions casually.

My pulse is suddenly increasing. "Really true? A house? Does anyone live there?"

"I don't know."

A thought dawns on me. If no one lived on the island and the owners were to be contacted and if our project was just right for them - is that conceivable? With us, they'd have someone to look after the house, look after the land. And for Nina and me, that would be the quickest way to get to the desert island. There would be no further discussions with authorities or landowners. Because even if an island is officially owned by the government, there are noblemen in Tonga who have a right to it and with whom it would have to be clarified whether we could settle there for a year. With a white man's private property, so much would just go away.

In the meantime we are so busy organizing our island time that it would do us good to finally choose the place. In addition, a finished house would save us the time to organize the building of a hut, and to select, buy and transport the building material on a larger boat to the island.

Because we have always assumed that we will have to deal with these issues, we have already taken care of a lot in our first month in Tonga. We went to the DIY store and looked at wooden beams and laths, corrugated iron for the roof, rain tanks and their capacity, even special metal plates connecting the roof and wooden scaffolding to protect against cyclones.

"I can send one of my colleagues out to find out about the ownership of the island," Richard offers.

"Yes, please, please," I beg.

"All right. It'll take a while, though," he says. "Best you come back this afternoon."

Before I go, I order almost all of Tonga's maps in DIN A1 format: Tongatapu and its surrounding islands, the northern archipelago of Vava'u, Tonga at a glance, and the Ha'apai group. The maps are so detailed that I absolutely have to have them to study everything with Nina in peace. Richard is delighted, and I trade him down to 150 for ten Pa'anga, Tonga dollars. A Pa'anga is about forty cents.

"I've never given anybody a discount before," Richard says, grinning.

When I come back later in the day, he shows me the clean print of the ordered cards, and I nod contentedly. He rolls up the papers, puts them in card rolls and closes them with plastic lids.

"Is there any news about the island?" I ask.

"Unfortunately not much," says Richard. He could not find out any names or contact details, but only the cryptic fantasy name Far Away Limited, thought up for the island property.

I probe again to see if that's really, really everything. "No more entries?"

Richard shakes his head and so does his colleague. "Sorry," she says. "Tonga bureaucracy. There's nothing there."

Probably the files about this land sale have landed on one of the many fire piles of Tonga, of which every family has one behind the house, I think. Damn!

"Maybe there's an entry in TCC," says Richard, referring me to Tonga Communications Corporation. It's worth a try, and the headquarters are only a mile away.

The lady in the office of the telephone company searches for a quarter of an hour in her computer system and in various telephone directories for information with the result: no entry. I sit down at one of the computers in the TCC office and search the Internet.

Even after two hours, I didn't come across anything useful. Disappointed, I make my way home. Nina tries to cheer me up, like always in situations like this.

"At least now we know the island exists and there's a house on it. That's better than nothing," she says. "Just imagine if we manage it."

"But how can we find someone who knows?" I ask.

"We just talk to everyone we meet," says Nina. "Tonga's small."

So we spend the next week searching exclusively for people who might have a clue who owns the property with the mysterious name. We ask taxi drivers, market women, employees in internet cafés, fish sellers in the port, fishermen who supply their sellers. We try everything, but nobody seems to know anything, let alone have heard of this island.

Many Tongans only know the islands where there are villages, but none so far away from Tongatapu. So why should anyone know about an isolated island, situated in the middle of nowhere, around it only the wide ocean? Asking in the small hotel resorts seems to me to be worth a try. If a Palangi is building a house on a remote island, the others will notice!

We meet a grumpy German named Franz who is doing odd jobs in one of the remote resorts around Tongatapu. He is a lean guy around fifty, has been in Tonga for half an eternity and has been married to a Tongan woman for about as long. Just as I'm about to enter the resort, he passes me and we start talking.

I casually mention the island to which Nina and I are drawn and finally get the answer we want.

"I've heard of it," Franz says. "Unfortunately, I don't know who owns the house there either," he adds, half apologetically. He promises to listen to me and wants to make a phone call to someone who can be reached via the "landline", a landline phone. Some remote island villages actually have a connection, for which cables had to be laid in the sea.

One day later Nina and I bump with our rental car over gravel and dirt roads to visit our new acquaintance, who lives in the less developed south of the main island, the most beautiful area of Tongatapus. Taro fields extend around us; the large stems and leaves of the tuber plant grow meters high. The path leads us through an inconspicuous gate, behind which a well-kept property is hidden. Mongrel puppies greet us, Franz waves from the porch. Sunday barks like a maniac out of the trunk, he's not a fan of puppies.

We sit at a table under a ceiling fan. From the garden next door smoke rises from a traditional earth oven covered with palm leaves, and the smell of chicken and fish rises to our noses. A chicken sits in a cupboard on the house wall and lays an egg. Franz brings coffee. While he tells us about his wife and daughter, he casually puts a note in my hand. It has a first name and the name of a company. That's all Franz was able to find out, but we are getting closer to our goal. Nina laughs at me.

"I told you so," she whispers to me, and I squeeze her hand.

When we say goodbye, I ask Franz for the next shop, because this decisive step on the way to our island wants to be celebrated. A few field paths further on we find a small brick building with iron rods instead of window panes. Inside, a woman stands in front of a row of shelves with tins, toothpaste, milk powder and everything else that Tonga needs every day. I order some ice-cold cans of Coke, our favorite drink in the tropical heat, and we toast.

"I'm so happy," breathes Nina, while we stand leaning against our car and pour the cold sugary stuff into ourselves. I hold her against me.

"Yeah, me too."

Back in Nuku'alofa we search the internet for the full name of the island owner. He comes from Hawaii, Franz had been able to tell us that much, and on that day we sit for hours in front of the laptop to find out more. At some point we come across a mail address - "Adrian, I can't believe it!" - and send a short message in which we introduce ourselves and talk about our dream.

It is grotesque how important the Internet is in order to be able to break into a parallel universe in which technical bells and whistles no longer play a role for us.

Days go by, we wait impatiently and ask ourselves a thousand times the same anxious questions: what if it wasn't the right email address? What if the great unknown dislikes our idea? What if we have to start our search all over again?

But then, after we went to the internet café at least three times a day to check our mails, the answer comes. For a few minutes we stare spellbound at the subject line and do not dare to open the message.

"You do it," I finally say to Nina, and she clicks on the e-mail.

"I'm very interested," writes a man named Jamie. He and the co-owner would be happy if we could move to the island as soon as possible and keep an eye on it. The last time they spent their holidays there, the property was overgrown with wilderness, and they thought it would be great if next time it wasn't so and they could move into the house right away.

"Have a good time," he wishes, leaving us his paradise. Just like that. Without knowing us.

Nina and I exchange a look, then I snatch her to me and kiss her deeply.

"We made it," I whisper to her lips.