It was dark when the plane finally touched down. The flight attendants rolled staircases up to the airplane doors, and I felt a little like a movie star as I stepped down, into Polynesia. The warm night air enveloped me in a familiar fragrance and humidity; palm trees were just visible against the sky.
There was a man in a Hawaiian shirt on a little stage near the baggage pick-up, singing and playing ukulele. I snapped a photograph and he winked and smiled at me. Many tourists were lavished with fresh leis, so the air was thick with the scent of flowers. However, since we were staying at a backpacker’s hostel, there were no leis for me. I looked on with undisguised envy.
Customs was a breeze. A kind Maori man made a preliminary search of our food, but none of it seemed to interest him; he was far more concerned about why we might have brought a sheepskin, of all things, to the tropics. He felt the wool for some time, clearly fascinated. We explained that it was a souvenir from New Zealand, but he was not quite convinced. He had apparently never seen anything like it, and shook his head before letting us pass.
Each of us carried an enormous backpack weighing 23 kilograms and a cloth bag containing 7 kilograms of food. John also carried two litres of vodka in a duty-free bag. The vodka had been a bargain: a single bottle was $30, but if you bought two, it cost $45. We went back and forth about the vodka for ages, but in the end, I left the decision up to John. Hence the two bottles.
We were chatty and wide-awake with excitement as we drove to the hostel, pointing out as much as we could of the scenery at night. Then, with a crunch of gravel, we finally arrived at what would be our home for the next three weeks – the last backpacker’s hostel that we’d stay at for a long time.
Backpackers International is a simple hostel, to say the least. There are shared toilets and showers, a shared kitchen, and perhaps fifty beds altogether. There is no lounge or television, but there is a large patio furnished with picnic tables, which serves as a common area and meeting place. The kitchen is simply outfitted, with several gas hotplates and two sinks, plus basic cookware. Most of the pots have lost their handles and lids, and resemble cauldrons more than anything. I was a little disappointed that there was no oven (roast vegetables being my staple food), but we’d have to make do.
Our double room is nothing more than a cube of whitewashed brick, with a white tile floor, a shelf, and a mosquito-net, overlooking the tangled plantation in the back (not to mention a pile of rotten boards and a disintegrating truck). The mattress is threadbare; it’s actually painful to lie on. But there were clean sheets when we arrived, and we dropped our heavy bags with relief.
After a quick, cool shower to rinse off the grime of traveling, I was brushing my teeth when I noticed that we’d be sharing the bathrooms with more than just other backpackers: a train of sugar ants paraded up and down the mirror; several geckos clung to the corners; there were cobwebs everywhere, and a large dead moth lay upside-down on the counter.
Ah, the tropics.
We stretched out in our white room and prepared to drop off to a relaxing sleep, lulled by the beat of the ocean and the hum of insects.
Alas, we were not so lucky.
* * *
It began with a sound like a screaming wind, far away in the mountains – a siren of some kind. The sound rose and seemed to relay closer, many voices rising together, one after another, like an echo, or as if something was travelling toward us at great speed.
It was only when the plantation roosters began to crow underneath our window that I fully realized what it was.
Chickens.
Hundreds of them.
The roosters engaged in a highly political competition all night. It was a game with their honor at stake. One voice was a challenge to all others; to be silent was to admit defeat. There could be no sleep for any of them: each had to stake out his territory, show his pride, and scream for victory. A moment of silence was a moment of opportunity. Sometimes the dogs would take up the call, and the night would become a relentless barnyard orchestra.
There could be no sleep for any of us. On the edge of drifting off, I’d be pulled back by another chorus, and one rooster in particular, who stood under our open-air window, crowing with all of his strength, would jerk me awake again and again.
The blasted chickens continued throughout the night, beyond the dawn, and then through the morning as well. At some point I drifted fitfully asleep, dreaming of trapping the birds and roasting them for dinner. Free range chicken at its finest – vegetarianism (and lack of an oven) be damned.
* * * *
At breakfast, we rubbed our eyes in a dissatisfied way, and helped ourselves to the sweet green bananas and the papayas that lay heaped on the kitchen table. Tomorrow we’d go to town for eggs and bread and other necessities, but today was a beach day.
I put on my bikini and a sundress and packed my day bag. The heat seemed to roll over me, dampening my hair, radiating from my armpits. Beads of sweat were already forming in the hollow between my breasts, and my clothing seemed uncomfortably close.
The beach was a short walk down a sunny boulevard. The lush volcanic mountains loomed behind us, craggy and jagged against the sky.
The mountains in Rarotonga are, honestly, spectacular. They rise to 650 meters in crumpled ridges toward the center of the island, at some points rising like mossy crocodiles’ teeth, and at others, crumbling into rock faces. White birds fly in the distant heights. John and I will certainly climb them while we’re here.
We passed a decrepit cemetery, overgrown with weeds; and I was pleased to recognize many of the same trees that we saw in Tonga: papaya, coconut, mango, banana, and breadfruit, as well as hibiscus flowers and many others.
Straight ahead we could see the ocean: a shining, luminescent turquoise. Far away, the waves rolled into the reef, the whiteness of the crash so bright that it dazzled my eyes.
The sand was almost as bright in the sunlight. We chose a spot, spread out a towel, and stripped down, abandoning self-consciousness and charging for the water.
Against our hot skin, the water seemed shockingly cold at first. However, once we’d dipped a few times, we realized that it was actually the temperature of a comfortable swimming pool. In fact, I believed instantly that swimming pools everywhere were designed to replicate this: crystal clear, calming blue, and pleasantly cool, with webs of light reflecting through the water. We waded in the soft sand before the reef began, and our bodies were very buoyant. We swam easily in lazy laps up and down the beach, played and laughed, and eventually, I lay on my back and floated with my ears in the water and my eyes closed, my senses filled with the memory of refracted sunlight, bouncing off the baby blue waves.
When I felt cool enough, I walked out of the water and lay on the towel, the beads of saltwater standing on my skin. I opened my book, a nice, fat fantasy novel: the first book in a popular series with devoted fans. So far, a wizard had shown up to let the protagonist know that, far from being a farm boy, he was actually the heir to a kingdom, and the prophesized one who would rid the world of a dark sorcerer. The wizard disappears mysteriously and the protagonist and his brother take off just in time to escape from creatures of darkness.
I read a little more, but after a few paragraphs I realized that I would never finish it. The writing was terrible, clumsy and forced, full of clichés and unnecessary adverbs. I didn’t feel too bad about giving up, though. After reading the number of trashy fantasy novels that I have, I could probably guess the plot, anyway.
It felt wonderful to be back in the sunlight. Since I was a child I’ve loved sunbathing, especially after swimming. The water tickles as it dries on my skin, and the sun warms me up like I’m a lizard on a hot rock.
Soon I felt sleepy, and I shook myself awake, wisely slapping another coat of sunscreen on every exposed surface, so I wouldn’t become one of those sun-blistered tourists on my first day.
When the day began to cool, we wandered back to the hostel to make pasta. John remembered to put one of the vodka bottles in the fridge so it would be cold when we wanted a drink. We made friends with some of the other backpackers, a vast majority of whom were from England.
It turned out that some of the girls were just finishing their practicum and were working at the hospital. After a month, they’d go back to England to study in residence. They all seemed too young to be doctors, but I concluded that they must just be very clever. Later I did the math and realized that a person could be a doctor in residence at 25. I was just getting old.
The other travelers were from Europe or England, and most were on a round-the-world trip. All of them acted very wise and pretentious, claiming to have discovered themselves and everything that matters in life while traveling, and lamenting the fact that their friends back home lived sheltered lives with narrow worldviews. They bragged about yachting, scuba diving, Egypt and the Galapagos. Many of them had been to India and Thailand and had had spiritual awakenings. Others had seen poverty in South America. Still others were island hopping from Tahiti to New Caledonia, and had experienced their epiphanies because of the simplicity of island life.
Privately, I assumed that, like all the backpackers I’d met, these teenagers were from privileged backgrounds, almost never spoke to locals, and were just as likely to get wasted as anything else. They believed that world travel had opened their eyes, and maybe it had, but they were still just tourists, speeding through eight or ten countries in a matter of months. Then they’d head home, to their lives and jobs and families, just like I would. Still, they patronized their peers and even their parents, whether they had been to university or had settled down to work, calling these people small-minded. It seemed preposterous to me, although I can’t quite articulate why.
Lying in bed that night, I wished for earplugs. The cockerels seemed to taunt me as I tossed.
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