We Love You, Camp Suwarrow!

Leslie (see photos here):

     During my last Skype date with the parents back in Bora Bora, Dad mentioned that he’d looked up Suwarrow (accent on the a) on Google earth and didn’t see anything there. Why, he wondered, were we going to this tiny island with nothing on it? Truthfully, I didn’t really know why either, but Carl had read something online about the place and learned that this uninhabited (almost) Cook Islands National Park was a cruiser’s paradise, where you could learn how to climb coconut trees and catch coconut crab. It had also been made infamous by a kiwi named Tom Neale who had come here three times in the 1950-70’s, before it was a park, to live off the land, all by himself on his own private island.

     Over the last few days of the passage, I read Tom Neale’s account of his stay, An Island to Oneself, and became fascinated by the place, and by this strange guy, who’d already spent most of his adult life as an expat on Raratonga. He seemed so resourceful, spear fishing, building several types of cookers, baking uto (a stage in the life of a coconut I’d yet to taste), re-thatching the palm roof of his house, growing veggies in his garden, etc. He wasn’t a hermit, exactly. A lovable curmudgeon, perhaps? He was visited by a surprising number of sailors passing through, and clearly liked entertaining people, but once they left him he’d claim he was ‘too busy to be lonely’ and seemed to enjoy his solitude (well, if you don’t count his 2 cats, a duck and many chickens as companions). Before his first trip to Suwarow, he’d been inundated with invitations from Raratongan women to let them join him in his solitude, but he’d refused, stating that he ‘didn’t want to be trapped with some woman, like a convict on Devil’s island.’

     With the legend of Tom Neale fresh in the minds of Lisa, Carl and I (Andy and Don missed out on the book), and after a day and night of vigorous, uncomfy squalls, we eagerly arrive at Suwarrow. The first thing we notice is that the pier that Tom Neale had tried to repair (after months of work, his pier was blown to smithereens by the season’s first storm) is still pretty much in smithereens. No worries, the dinghy doesn’t need much to hold onto. Better than a nice pier are the 6 or so hammocks hanging between palm trees on the beach. So far, so good!

     Up a well-kept path, Tom’s house is still here, now with a tin roof and some add-ons from the 80s. It shelters one of the rangers, John, some storage, and a book swap library. Across from this is a newer, much more impressive lofted wooden house, where James, the head ranger, sits writing in his ledger beneath a collage of homemade flags from some very grateful boaters (the Henkel clan will enjoy knowing that one of the flags was from a boat named “Pyewacket,” the name of our late, great dog).

     It quickly became obvious what the gratitude is all about. James is a wonderful, and wonderfully knowledgeable, grandfatherly type of guy; big and elaborately tattooed with a formidable, grizzly gray beard and a crowning bun of long dreadlocks. What—he doesn’t sound like your average grandpa? Well, nor was this your average cruising destination. We quickly dubbed it, “Camp Suwarrow,” due to the unceasing variety of activities available to us “yauchties” (as James and John dubbed us). John took Carl out fishing that first afternoon and caught 4 grouper and 1 trumpetfish; the biggest grouper ended up in our curry pot that night, when we hosted an impromptu dinner for James and John on Aldebbie. It’s to Lisa’s credit that both of these fellows of ample appetites left full!

     In the morning we joined 2 other boats, Soggy Paws and Chesepeake, for snorkeling, and saw one majestic, black-velvet manta ray, and plenty of 3-6 foot black and white finned reef sharks. Oh yeah, Suwarrow is reef shark heaven. They don’t seem too fussed about humans, but even so, I tend to swim the other way with my eyes shooting daggers at them; they feel my danger rays and dart off!

     That evening, we brought boatmade oatmeal chocolate chip cookies to the beach “sundowner”—which is, of course, a party at sundown. Other yauchties brought chips, veggies, dips, and crackers, and it was nice to chat with new friends (or see old ones again, in the case of the Czechs on “Sayonara” who came to our bbq in the Marquesas). James, with his tongue rum-loosened, let loose on Tom Neale, revealing that there was actually a village of 60 people on Suwarrow while he was living here, and he’d gotten help from the natives to set himself up; not so self-sufficient, eh Tom? In an afterword to An Island to Oneself, we’d already learned that Tom had a wife and 2 kids on Raratonga (not mentioned at all in his memoir), but James also informed us that he’d left a family in Tahiti as well, prior to moving to Raratonga. The plot thickens! I’m curious to read more on this interesting and controversial character.

     Curated by James’ entertaining morning radio net, the next day’s activities included clam digging for Carl, “shop class” for Don and Andy (working on our defunct dinghy engine with Simon from “Sharkita” and various other curious menfolk), and an “uto fritters” cooking class courtesy of James for Lisa, Don, and I. First, James showed us how to identify the correct stage of coconut: the downed ones sprouting 3 leaves, no more, no less. Then he demonstrated husking the coconut, a job done in less than a minute on a crowbar stuck in the ground. Next, he cracked open the nut with the back of a machete (ah, much safer!), and pulled out the dense, spongy bulb known as uto, which is what happens when the meat and the milk condense in an old coconut on its way to becoming a new coconut tree. We all got a taste of the sweet, nutrient rich bulb; spongy isn’t quite the texture—it’s more like that green block of foam that florists use, only whiteish and sugary-coconuty. According to Tom Neale, if you ate too much of it raw, you’d get an awful stomachache, so we only tried a bit. After James had grated all of the uto into a large bowl, he added water (about 1:1 cups), stirred it up into a thick batter, and showed us how much oil he’d use later that afternoon. We’d have to wait until the potluck that evening to taste the results of this recipe.        

     Meanwhile, Raleigh had been having a culinary adventure of his own while stuck on the boat (no love for foreign animals in a protected park—there was a menace of a cat dropped off by past yauchties who had scared off all the nesting birds from the main island.) Ral had gotten into the flour, eaten his flea soap, kept down the hydrogen peroxide meant to make him throw up said flea soap, and devoured half a loaf of bread that Andy had so proudly made that afternoon. The likely toxic Mexican flea soap particularly caused a scare when suddenly Ral couldn’t use his hind legs. Fortunately, Andy got in touch with his vet brother via his Ham dad, and after the prescribed treatment of antihistamines and activated charcoal, was back in action—or inaction, in this case!

     Following the boisterous and mildly frightening shark feeding show at sundown, the potluck commenced (in a similar style of frenzy), and proved to be a lot of fun—and food. We brought dal and garlic flatbread, and enjoyed James’ uto fritters (like a donut crossed with a potato pancake), John’s fish and clam poisson cru, Sharkita’s veggie lasagna, and various other people’s cous cous salad, grilled fish, and more tasty dishes I ate but can’t recall right now.

     Camp activities for the remainder of our week included a reef walk to where the terns nested, a movie night courtesy of Aldeberan’s digital projector, and an impromptu sushi sundowner thanks to some Japanese guys who’d just arrived and were heading out the next day. We even had “arts and crafts” on our last day in Suwarrow; we made the first Aldebaran flag ever, to accompany the others hanging in the rangers station. We humbly think ours is the best! Oh and PS, we did not learn to climb palm trees, and catching coconut crabs is currently forbidden due to the diminished population, but I still think we had more than our fair share of fun and adventure here!

     Our departure from Suwarrow was probably the hardest goodbye so far of this whole trip, which is funny, considering that this amazing stop was never on our original itinerary. My (or somebody’s) next post will be on another place that wasn’t on our list either—Niue: the second smallest country next to the Vatican (which strikes me as merely nominal. Did it secede from Italy? So many things to Google one day!). Going where the wind takes you, both figuratively and literally, is a rare and special lesson that the Aldebaran crew has been lucky enough to learn these last few months. I’d encourage you readers to do the same, wherever you are in the world. Hallmark moment, go!