Island Hopping through Oceania - Kiribati's North Tarawa
As the plane arced across Tarawa’s shallow lagoon in the milky early morning light of the Central Pacific, the skinny green islands of North Tarawa appeared serene. A long, intermittently interrupted line of coconut palms and swirling sand banks bordered the glassy, smooth lagoon.
Getting to North Tarawa isn't always straightforward
We had planned to spend our first few nights in Kiribati in South Tarawa, the nation’s capital. Unfortunately, but not unusually in the Pacific, our flights had been changed at short notice, and finding last-minute accommodation on overcrowded South Tarawa was impossible. As such, we headed straight to North Tarawa to start our 12-day stay in Kiribati.
We touched down in the country at Bonriki International Airport. As we skidded along the tarmac, the palm trees silhouetted against the rising sun were reflected in the mirror-like lagoon. It was a magical arrival. The airport also seemed convenient for our destination, just south of Buota, the most southerly island in North Tarawa.
The swirling sands and azure waters of Tarawa's vast lagoon are spectacular from above
North Tawara comprises a chain of islets strung out in a northeasterly direction. Abaokoro, where our ‘motel’ was located, was halfway up the chain. Unfortunately for us, the boats heading there departed from Bairiki Islet at the opposite end of South Tarawa’s overcrowded string of causeway-linked islets from the airport.
Often barely wider than the road, South Tarawa is packed with over 60,000 people living cheek-by-jowl in a mix of concrete-block houses and open-sided thatched buias. The population density isn’t much less than that of London.
As a result, travelling the 23 kilometres from the airport to the wharf took us almost an hour, crawling in a near-constant stream of traffic. It was no hardship, however, and as we sat in the back of the pickup truck we had hitched a ride in, we watched this packed strip of an island slowly come to life.
Breeze-block shops opened their shutters as the owners stacked cheap Chinese merchandise on the curb. Schoolchildren in pristine uniforms trudged the dusty single road in groups. Late risers, visible from the road, still lying on mats in their buias, dozed in the heat, oppressive even at this early hour. And the shimmering lagoon was a backdrop to it all, azure and sparkling, a pristine canvas behind the bustle and filth of South Tarawa.
A canoe beached at low tide in Tarawa's glassy lagoon
At the Bairiki Wharf, the first group of people I approached, eating breakfast under a thatched shelter by the water, thought the ferry might be on its way. Or that it might go from Ambo, halfway back towards the airport.
The next person I asked spoke no English, but a nearby shopkeeper helpfully translated. It seemed suspicious that she happened to be the ferry ticket saleswoman. Even more so when she took $20 each for the tickets and ripped the side off a cardboard box to write our names on.
“Boat leaves at two. Be here at one”
So we left this random woman with our money and settled into the stifling outdoor cafe at the nearby Mary’s Motel. Constant vigilance was required to keep the stray cats away from any food. We dozed with our heads on the greasy tabletop until it was time to cart our bags the few hundred metres back through the oppressive heat to the wharf. We were dripping by the time we arrived.
It turned out the lady with the cardboard box wasn’t lying. After a short wait, leaning against an upturned boat, an older I-Kiribati lady approached us and formally told us, “This is my place; I stay here.”
‘Her place’, as far as we could tell, was an open-sided boat shed where ferry passengers wait, crouched on the floor or sitting on cardboard, while the boats are readied for departure. Regardless, she helpfully advised us to get on our boat to get a spot in the shade. She directed us to one of the three homemade-looking and garishly painted outrigger-style boats floating in the shallows.
These garishly painted outrigger canoes ferry people backwards and forwards between North and South Tarawa
Travelling by boat is the only way to reach North Tarawa
As we cruised slowly across the millpond-flat lagoon, travelling little faster than a mediocre swimmer, we were grateful to her for the advice. We happily dangled our legs over the shady side of the boat, as the passengers on the other side ripped lengths of cloth and tied them to the roof supports as a makeshift sun screen.
Travelling across Kiribati's lagoons in a locally made outrigger canoe is an essential experience
These locally made boats follow a simple design, with no seating or walls, just a hull for luggage storage, which the passengers sit or lie on top of for the journey. A smaller outrigger hull is attached to one side, and a plywood canopy covers the main hull for some protection from the weather and sun. They are based on the traditional outrigger sailing canoes that were once the only mode of transport between the country’s scattered atolls. Locals still refer to them as ‘canoes’, distinguishing them from much faster ‘boats’ made of steel.
Sitting high in the water, these canoes are also ideal for travel within Kiribati’s shallow lagoons, where at high tide you can wade out hundreds of metres and still only be waist deep in water, and at low tide the sand stretches halfway to the horizon. Even so, the canoe could only get so close to the shore at Abaokoro. It was a ten-minute walk through the shallows to reach the village, where we were picked up relay-style and ferried to Ocean View Motel on the back of a motorcycle.
Wading ashore after being dropped off by outrigger canoe in North Tarawa
Ocean View Motel has simple overwater bungalows
Ocean View Motel is only a ten-minute ride south of Abaokoro. Still, it felt like a lifetime perched on the back of the motorcycle wearing a 20-kilogram backpack, holding another in my right hand and clinging to the seat for dear life, as we sped through potholes and swerved around fallen coconut palms on the single-track dirt road that runs the length of the island.
The motel itself is a rare two-story building overlooking a mangrove-studded lagoon inlet. A small thatched maneaba, the ubiquitous traditional meeting houses seen throughout Kiribati, covered a long table where meals were served. The perimeter of the coconut-palm shaded compound was ringed with evenly spaced simple buias.
Ocean View Motel occupies a stunning spot in North Tarawa
But it was across the road, on the lagoon proper, where the real attraction lay. Here, we rented one of the motel’s three overwater bungalows for the price of a simple restaurant meal in New Zealand. Linked to the land by a rickety walkway, partially held up by a tree, the bungalow was essentially a glorified shed on very shaky stilts.
The overwater bungalows at Ocean View Motel are very basic, but the location is unbeatable
But it still qualified as an overwater bungalow, and that’s what mattered. The adjacent thatched pagoda with 180-degree views across the lagoon up and down the palm-fringed coast was the icing on the cake, and where we whiled away the following days.
Kiribati has the most spectacular sunsets
The pagoda was also an unbeatable spot from which to watch Kiribati’s brilliant sunsets. On our first night, we watched four island dogs frolicking in the molten magma lagoon before the sun dipped behind the horizon and threw shafts of golden light into the inky sky like a giant open fan.
Sunsets in Kiribati are nothing short of spectacular
Once we had managed to procure a table and chairs, we ate our meals out there too – fish, pumpkin and breadfruit or rice for lunch and dinner, egg sandwiches for breakfast – as we monitored the ebb and flow of the tides, the local fishermen with their nets, the women collecting shellfish at low tide, and the shimmering stream of fish that treaded north as the tide came in and then returned south as the waters retreated, a near-constant river of glistening silver rippling past beneath our perch.
Enjoying a lunch of fish, pumpkin and breadfruit in Ocean View Motel's lagoon-side pagoda
Dancing with the locals on North Tarawa
On the final evening, Boata, the motel’s cook, asked if we would like them to do a dance performance for us. So, after dinner (fish, pumpkin and rice again – not much grows in the sandy soil here), we took our place in the semicircle of plastic chairs inside the large shore-side maneaba. We were the only guests, and as the staff filtered in to take their places and connected the boom box, they garlanded each of us with an elaborately woven and sweet-scented flower te bau headdress.
An impromptu event, the staff got up individually, each performing with bent knees and precisely winding serpentine arm and hand movements. We hadn’t realised when we agreed to the dance evening that we would also be expected to perform—first, paired with one of the female staff members each, and then individually. It appeared that this may have been the real reason behind the event. All the staff hooted with laughter as they filmed our dismal attempts at any form of rhythm.
Traditional dancing on our last night in North Tarawa
The following morning, we almost missed the early canoe departure for South Tarawa. We had to frantically wade out to the packed boat, reaching it drenched with sweat just as it began to pull away.
As the last ones to board, we roasted on the sunny side of the deck for the almost two-hour-long journey. Fortuitously, the canoe dropped us in Ambo this time, in the centre of South Tarawa’s long strip of land. This meant we only had a short walk to Dreamers Guesthouse, where we spent a night before our scheduled flight to Marakei Island the next day.
Locals from North Tarawa wade ashore on arrival in Ambo
This Leg
Days: 4
Flights: 1
Boats: 2
Islands: 2
Countries & Territories: 1
Total
Days: 56
Flights: 15
Boats: 22
Islands: 21
Countries & Territories: 8