Island Tour Two: Fanning Island

On Fanning we were greeted by a slightly larger Japanese pickup. The bed of the truck was fitted with plywood benches. A 2x4 made a backrest/handrail along the sides, and in each corner of the bed more 2x4s supported a thatched roof. The benches were covered in thin cushions with Hawaiian print fabric. It was our Agent who had arranged the tour, and we sat on the benches next to him, his wife and children, and a teenage neighbor.
The truck crawled along the unpaved road. We drove past houses made of everything: plywood, corrugated metal, palm wood, cinder blocks, small sticks laced together, thatch for both roofs and walls. (Thatch walls are more like window shades for rain. In good weather they are rolled up, and in bad weather they are unrolled to provide a sheild against rain.) Some of the houses are actually on stilts.
As we drove the Agent told stories. The son of a British father, his English is excellent. He described how a ship once gave him a ride to Honolulu. When he arrived he found that all the cars drove very fast (during our two hour island tour we left first gear for only a few minutes.) But he braved the traffic and took a carefully assembled shopping list to Walmart.
"The list was destroyed!" The agent exclaimed as he described buying everything in sight. He went on to admit that he got lost inside and did not find his way out for three hours. The Cook, Nate and I (the three Americans present) all shrugged. This had happened to all of us.
Finally we ran out of road. A bridge had washed out seven years earlier and was never replaced. (Fanning Island gets epic rains. It can pour for three weeks straight. The Agent once opened his front door and found tilapia swimming at his feet.)
We stopped the truck, and the Agent sent the neighbor to get coconuts. The boy selected a tree, one with a very vertical trunk, carefully wiped his bare feet on the bottom of the tree, and walked right up it. Like the rest of us walk down a side walk. He stomped down the coconuts and split them open with a machete.
Coconut water is always safe to drink, and according to the Agent, is so pure that it was used as IV fluid during World War II.
On the way back we stopped to watch a group of boys climbing coconut palms to "cut toddy." Coconuts are essential to Kiribati. They are responsible for the nation's main export Copra, which is dried coconut meat that can be pressed for oil. In addition there are the previously mentioned house-building and medical uses, and the edible meat and milk with which we are all familiar. Furthermore, there is the toddy, a sort of island beer made from coconut sap. The sap is procured by climbing a coconut palm and binding (with a rope generally made from coconut fibers) the tiny green berries that might have become coconuts. The end of this tightly-bound package is cut off, a leaf is attached to make a spot, and the sap leaks from the berries, through the spout, and into a jar, where it eventually becomes toddy. Toddy is delicious and is one of the reasons I had such enthusiasm for the coconut water on that particular afternoon.
The plant both creates and cures hangovers. You just have to know how to use it.