(Kaua'i, USA)...I, like the vast majority of the members of the planet, am watching avidly the World Cup finals from Germany. Being English, mostly of my interest is in how England perform. (Not so well at the moment, with one game down, but it is early days, and the players complained of nerves and not being used to the heat, so I am not worrying yet; indeed, we won our first match, against Paraguay.) Paraguay is supposedly weird. Two pieces of writing I have read about that landlocked South American country. The first was one chapter in Pico Iyer's Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of The World, in which he writes of places that are for differing reasons "strange," such as Paraguay, North Korea, Argentina and Bhutan.
This chapter, like all the book, is based on his own experiences. The second book, John Gimlette's wonderful At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels through Paraguay, uses first-hand knowledge, too, but also a great deal of history, and it is an odd history. Despotic leaders, crazed dictators, wild Irish first ladies, incredibly badly thought out wars against huge and powerful foes, wild spending sprees, economic disasters, remote Mennonite settlers and hunted Nazis on the run, just to name a few of the settlers and problems that have decided to visit this unknown nation.
The stranger countries, at least to my thinking, in the World Cup include Togo, Angola and Switzerland (I watched this team play France today, and for some reason I find it odd that Swiss people play the game. I do not know why?). I would like Togo to do well, but I do not think they will. Its population is less than six million, and life expectancy is less than 60. I have probably mentioned before that I like countries and islands that are hard to get to. I imagine Togo is like that.
I do not for a moment think I am alone in this desire, and I am no longer ever surprised if I see a tourist/traveller in a place that supposedly no one is supposed to go to. (I will write in another post about Lampa in Peru, the one place where I did feel that I on behalf of Westerners was treading new steps .) Several months ago I was in the Hawaii'an Islands for work. The organisers of the trip offered the six or seven journalists in attendance a choice of island to visit after we had all been to O'ahu. This choice had to be selected before we flew to the islands. By chance, everyone chose Big Island. Except me. I chose Kaua'i. I chose it simply because it was the farthest away.
I did not even need to research all the island possibilities, this Aladdin's Cave of selections. It was just the farthest one away. When I landed, I picked up a car and drove west. It is not a large island. After 25 or so miles, I turned right and headed up the beautiful Waimea Canyon, which is just as staggering to see as is Arizona's Grand Canyon. Long, thin waterfalls cascade down red, green and yellow mountain sides; rain can be seen falling far from where you stand in the dry, and the road climbs and winds and occasionally leads to a lookout. Also beautiful is the spectacular Na Pali coastline to the north of the island.
The two-mile walk to the beach at Hanakapi'ai takes about two hours, the path narrow and steep. The currents here are treacherous (see the photo above, and the warning on the trail's official Web site (http://www.hawaii.gov/dlnr/dsp/NaPali/na_pali.htm); on my hike there I saw a man dive out of the thickets with a severed goat's head tied to his rucksack across a bow and arrow. People live out there, probably, seemingly, disillusioned middle-class white Americans. Back to the canyon, as I drove up the Koke'e Road, I noticed something in my mirror, a long, thin, grey island with a hill to one side. It lay out in the Pacific Ocean, across the Kaulakahi Channel from Kaua'i. All alone. This is Ni'ihau, one of the strangest places of all.
This is a private island, and we cannot go there, unless one is invited, which is less likely to happen than is Togo likely to win the World Cup. It is owned by the Robinson Family, which has interests in sugar cane. The two remaining Robinson brothers offer helicopter trips over the island, with perhaps a touchdown in a remote spot, well away from the one village, Pu'uwai, which sits on the island's west, therefore impossible to see from Kaua'i. At today's prices, a half-day excursion there costs $375; groups of four can hunt boar, wild sheep and some form of ibex for something in the region of $5,000. The 72 acres of island supposedly retain the only pure-bred Hawaii'ans on the planet, some 200 of them. Not really enough people quite yet to form a football team able to threaten Brazil, Germany, Italy or England.