Wednesday December 5th was international volunteers day. All the volunteers on Kiribati- German, Japanese, Australian and New Zealand had the day off work to celebrate being international volunteers by... volunteering for the day. It had been arranged by Linda the local lady who looks after the Australian volunteers, and until Trevor arrived from NZ to become the Programme manager for VSA here in Kiribati, us kiwis too. We joined with the local community to do a beach clean up on the causeway at Taborio and also planted a few hundred mangrove shoots which when they grow should help to protect the islets from the sea. You dig a hole in the coral sand, not always an easy task, and plant three shoots in each hole, the theory being that at least one shouldn't be washed away. There are examples of such planting along different sections of the foreshore up and down the atoll and hopefully over time they will grow and help protect the islands. It was an early start (7am) due to ...

The Betio Fishing club hold a monthly fishing competition that has been running since 1979. Five or six boats head out early in the morning, fish all day and must be back for the official weigh in at 5pm at the Betio Lodge on Betio. This month I was invited to join the New Zealand boat along with our new VSA Kiribati and Tuvalu programme manager, Trevor. Trevor and I go back a few years. We first worked together at Aoraki polytech in Timaru in 2011 and though he moved onto Corrections and a couple of years ago up to Auckland we played each other at football regularly over the years in the local Timaru competition. So I was pleasantly surprised to see he had become our new programme manager- small world eh. Trevor arrived a couple of weeks back, while I was home on holiday, and is settling in to life out here in the middle of the Pacific. It was an early start on Saturday morning (3am alarm). I biked down to the NZ High Comm arriving at just before 4am and after having been cha...

Another couple of weeks down. Not much to report really. I’ve been biking to work most days but alas the coral dust, mud etc is destroying the gears on my bike so think I will cut back to a couple of days per week. The coral dust is like course sand paper and combined with the sea salt off the lagoon and reef destroys moving parts of bikes. Not a good combination! My neighbour John and I have continued to go out surfing with the local kids when the tide is right. We took the boys out surfing after work a couple of days last week but towards the end of the week the tides were still too low by the time it was getting dark so arranged for them to go out first thing Saturday at high tide. The boys were impatiently banging on the rusty corrugated fence by the lagoon about 8 am to get John up as they wanted to surf! I’m too far from the beach to hear them, ha! It was a bit windy and messy but we got the boards out and the kids were out for a good 2 ½ hours before the tide dropped too m...

One of the things I came out here to do while in the middle of the Pacific is surf. I bought a couple of boards over with me and get out on the reef outside my home when the conditions are right- which is not that often. There is a prevailing easterly wind that usually chops up the surf making it pretty messy and not very good, even early in the mornings. Also, we can only get out about an hour and a half or so either side of high tide or there isn’t enough water on the reef. But once in a while you get great conditions and a nice little 2 foot wave. It can close out pretty quickly, be a bit dumpy out the back and  and there is occasionally a larger wave comes through to keep you on your toes but it’s good fun. The best spot near us is the causeway between Bairiki and Betio where the channel they blasted in the reef to allow local boats though has made a nice little right hander. But you need a car to get there from where I live so it is usually easier to simply head out ...

If you’ve been out here in Kiribati a while and spend some time with the local expats/i-Matung, one peculiarities you will soon notice is that one of the main topics of conversation is…food!   That’s right, one of the main things we talk about is food, or more importantly what is available, where and for how much. Almost all the food here is imported. There is next to no land to grow anything on and even if there were the soils are coral sand, great for coconut palms but bugger all use for much else. The Taiwanese government has a small agricultural ttraining centre where they do grow/produce amazing variety of things and are teaching the locals how to grow more varieties of vegetables but this process has been extremely labour intensive- even getting the sand to a reasonable quality of soil using seaweed and other compostable materials was a major mission. And even though they are producing more varieties of vegetables- which are donated to local schools/charities- there are...

The Nippon Causeway is the main link between the heavily populated island of Betio (site of the Battle of Tarawa) and the other atolls in South Tarawa. It was built by the Japanese government in the late 1980s and prior to that boat was the only link between the main communities of Bairiki and Betio. The causeway is the only road linking Betio to the rest of South Tarawa and was badly damaged a combination of spring tides, strong winds and heavy rain following Cyclone Pam in March 2015. The causeway is not without controversy, some 3-4 kms long it is a vital connection for Tarawa but it only has one bridge. Traditionally each tide would have flushed the lagoon and this low lying gap between the atolls was one of the main points that the water flowed into and out of the lagoon with each tide but now the causeway blocks this from happening. The lagoon on South Tarawa is no longer flushed clean every day and so has become quite heavily polluted and is not safe to swim, at least for...

(Still struggling a bit out here at present but getting back into my weekly routine. Yesterday I decided to head down to Friendship Bridge at the far end of South Tarawa for a swim. I had biked there a week before heading back to NZ and was pretty knackered by the time I biked home. It is probably a 46-50km round trip which with the heat and my general lack of bike fitness meant it was going to be a bit of a challenge, at least it was first time I did it. Still it was another beautiful sunny day and I needed to get out and get active.   Friendship bridge is a metal bailey bridge built by the Americans that spans the causeway/lagoon that links North and South Tarawa. It is at the far eastern end of the island, two or three kilometres north of the airport. The channel is about 100 metres wide and the water is quite deep here. It is a natural passage for the tides that rise and fall each day, draining and filling the lagoon in an endless cycle that has been conducted for mil...