THE NORWEGIAN ROBINSON CRUSOE
I never had a dream to leave the cold Norwegian winter and settle
down on a tropical island, but that is what I did. It all started with
with a rest from sports and job in advertising. But when I returned from
the needed holiday-trip to Micronesia I found I missed the warm smiles
and blue ocean. One and a half year later I sailed back.
When
Coco Loco was wrecked in the Salomon islands I took a short trip to Norway
to publish a book and say hello to family and friends. After a few shivering
months in long underwear I was heading south again, by plane this time.
I visited friend in Kiribati, and then headed for the neighbouring country
of Tuvalu to say hello to my friend Iakopo. I met Iakopo, he was
now stationed on the outer island of Nukulaelae as a radio-operator, but
I also met Emma Toematagi....!
Well, the sworn batchelor proposed after knowing Emma "Last Wind"
for a week, without knowing that she was the daughter of the old chief
and without even giving her a kiss on the cheek! Pure Pacific magic
if you ask me!
One month of wedding celebrations, with the bridge-groom in grass-skirt
and flower-garland, and then we decided to settle down on the uninhabited
coral-island of Motuloa where we had spoken to each other for the first
time. Three kilometers across the lagoon from the small village with 350
people, one days sailing by ship from the nearest airport, in the worlds
fourth smallest country. 900 people on 9 atolls with a total land-area
of 26 square-kilometer!
Live on an uninhabited coral-island??
The first problem was of course to build a house where we could
live, but finally Emma's family helped us building a large main- house,
a cook-house, an out-house and a small guest-house. Who needs tiles and
carpets on the floor when coral-pebble covered with woven mats is much
more comfortable and looks prettier?
Food on an uninhabited island? Well, some of my most pleasant memories
are the strolls we took on the reef at low-tide. Sea-shells and delicious
crabs - in an hour's time we had enough food for our dinner. And a moray-eel,
hunted down with my machete, to use as bait on our shark-line. Have you
ever tried reef-shark marinated in homegrown sweet basil and then fried
on open fire?
Something
cold to drink? My friends in Norway will refuse to believe me if I tell
them that I did not long for an ice-cold beer for all those years on our
island, but it's true!
So just don't believe that you need all those things that the commercials
tries hard to tell you that you cannot live without. I have lived without
Coke, Levis, McDonalds, aftershave and fancy shoes for many years -and
I would love to do it again!
What you do when there are no newspapers to read and
no TV to watch ?
Well, when you have pigs, chicken, ducks, a cat, a dog, land
to clear, coconuts and firewood to collect, fish to catch and a garden
to attend to - you have no time to think about next episode of X-Files
or Manchester United's last home-match. And you don't want to. To live
a simple island-life is enough, and you would not want to change it for
anything in the world!
Why
did we leave our paradise?
All the islands of the independent nation of Tuvalu are coral-islands:
atolls barely peeping out of the water. Yes, the top of our concrete water
tank is in fact one of the highest solid points in the country, less than
three meters above the sea-level - at low tide!
The laws of physics tells you that you will not have hurricanes in the
equatorial belt. Somebody should to wake up old Einstein and Newton; We
had three hurricanes in a row about Christmas-time our fifth year on the
island. Something had changed - and you will realize what this really
means when you are sitting in a house that has lost the top of the roof
and is swaying from side to side, and you hear enormous waves thundering
against the reef less than two hundred meters away!
"The
climate-change forced us away!"
We were lucky. We survived, and so did all the inhabitants
of Tuvalu, even if the country was declared a catastrophe-area and hundred
of people lost their homes when the waves rolled across the islands.
"I have seen that the weather has changed, we have never had strong
winds like this before. I have heard that the sea-level will rise, and
can believe that next hurricane might bring even larger waves. We will
have to climb to the top of the coconut-threes and then we will drown.
It does not matter too much to me, I am old now, but the children
should live!", my mother-in-law Fakalei said, after we had cleared
all the debris around our house and watched all the fallen banana-plants
and breadfruit-trees.
We had a four year old daughter. We left.
Want to know more about the reasons why we had to
leave? Click here!
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