Around the World in 50 Years (35 page)

The only planes serving Kiribati were the Air Pacific flight that landed there on Tuesdays at three p.m.—i.e., the flight I took to get there—and left at four to return to Fiji, and the Monday flight on Our Airlines, which hopped via Nauru and the Solomon Islands to Brisbane in Oz. That was it. All those flights were fully booked for several weeks in advance. If I missed mine, I could be stranded on Tarawa for weeks, with no other way to get to where I needed to go—unless I were willing to risk hundreds of miles of ocean in an open boat. Aware of this situation, I had twice stopped in at the Our Airlines office in Bairiki—Kiribati's capital city—twice confirmed my reservation, and twice been told that all was in order.

On my last scheduled day on Tarawa, anxious to minimize any risk, I arrived at the airport three hours early for the four p.m. flight to Nauru and presented my ticket. After more than an hour of waiting, while officials mysteriously huddled over my passport, I was told that the computer flashed
DO NOT BOARD
when my name had been entered. They did not know why and were e-mailing their main office in Brisbane for an explanation. After a nerve-wracking delay that seemed interminable, Brisbane told them I lacked a visa for Australia and must not be allowed to board the plane, not even to fly as far as Nauru.

I explained that I did not intend to formally enter Australia, but was merely in transit through it to Dili in East Timor, and had planned to spend my time sleeping in the Brissie transit lounge, as I had done three years before, and had packed my foam camping mattress and blankets in my carry-on for that very purpose. The perplexed agent pulled out a dusty Australian Immigration Department rule book, and we went through it, page by page, while the other passengers prepared to board. Toward the end of the book, the small print informed us that even if a transit passenger was willing to be confined to the airport, if that passenger's layover in Australia exceeded seven hours, he needed a transit visa. My connecting flight from Brisbane was scheduled to depart
nine
hours after I arrived.

I freaked out and came about as close to fainting as I ever had. If I missed this flight, there was not another open one to Australia for weeks. Moreover, there was no room at the inn: Mary's Motel was full for the next two months because 36 U.S. military personnel were arriving on the next day's flight from Fiji with a new type of ground-penetrating radar, hoping to find the remains of several hundred U.S. servicemen who had died during the Tarawa landings but whose bodies had never been recovered. These graves-registration specialists had booked every room at Mary's, and the spillover had fully occupied the few other hotels and lodges on the island. I would have to sleep on the beach for a week, and longer if no seat opened up. I was SOL on all counts and close to panic mode.

My only hope of salvaging some of my itinerary was to get on the weekly Air Pacific plane back to Fiji the next afternoon and move onward from there, but I had no idea if any seats were available. I phoned Mary's, which sent their van back for me an hour later—Kiribati has no taxis—and we raced for the office of Air Pacific, about a third of the way down the island, where they told me that, yes, they had two open seats on the flight to Fiji the next day, the only available space for a month. I was saved!

But not! Because they also told me that Fijian regulations would not let them fly me to Fiji unless I held an ongoing ticket and companion visa. The only ongoing destination from Fiji that made any sense for my purposes was Australia, but I had no Aussie visa. It was now 4:28. We phoned the Australian High Commission (AHC) and they told us that it usually took three days for them to issue a visa. Figuring I might do better in person, I jumped into Mary's van and we raced another third of the way down the island to the AHC, arriving at 5:02, two minutes after closing time, but I looked so agitated and pathetic that they let me in. They gave me an application for a transit visa, told me to bring it in the next morning at eight a.m., and again cautioned me that it had to be approved in Australia, which rarely happened in less than three days. Since I had only six hours the next day in which to get the visa, and get the ticket, and get to the airport, the AHC suggested that I go on their Web site, where “those applications are processed more quickly.”

I rushed back to Mary's, which was able to give me my old room for one more night, cranked up their balky Internet, went on the designated Aussie government Web site—and found that they did not issue transit visas over the Web. And there was no mention of quick service.

I was getting desperate. I ran through a mental map of the flights that departed from Fiji. The only other countries in the right direction for me were New Zealand and the Solomon Islands, but both required visas. A handful of islands were serviced from Fiji, but none had any connections onward to anywhere I needed to go, and most of them also required visas. I could fly back to the States without a visa, but that was ridiculous.

I located a flight from Fiji to Seoul departing in two days. This sounded doable because I knew Americans did not need a visa for South Korea. But when I checked more closely, I found that the only circumstance in which I did not need a visa to land in South Korea was if I had an ongoing flight from there to another country within 60 days (which required yet another visa).

Bingo! I had a valid visa for China! So I purchased flights on the Internet going from Fiji to Seoul and Seoul to Beijing. All I had to do was print the confirmations and show them to the folks at Air Pacific, and I could fly with them to Fiji the next day and get back on at least part of the trail.

It was 9:30 p.m. and I was exhausted from stress. Since Mary's reception desk closed at 10:00 p.m., I asked the late-shift receptionist to print out my ticket so I could get to sleep and try to forget this dreadful day. She activated the printer, which took an agonizingly long time to spit out the page. And when it emerged it was blank. The printer was out of ink. And this receptionist had no clue where to find a replacement cartridge.

I dashed back to my room, grabbed my camera, and took two photos of the computer monitor showing my flight confirmations, but I doubted if any airport agent had been presented with such atypical evidence of a flight confirmation or was sufficiently flexible to accept it.

No, I had to get the confirmation printed. I dragooned an accommodating NGO guy who was staying at Mary's, and he agreed to walk me over to his agency to see if they had a working printer. We had walked about 15 minutes to the center of Bairiki and were near his office—when the lights went out. All over the island. The second power failure since I arrived. The situation had become redonkulous.

We lingered for more than an hour, but no power came on; I'd have to wait until morning and hope the hotel printer had ink by then.

I spent a nervous and fitful night, sure that something would go wrong, as Murphy's Law was ascendant. I was trapped on an undeveloped island with none of the amenities we take for granted in the States—working printers, fast Internet, reliable electric power, taxis, rapid transit, dependable airline agents.

At 8:30 a.m. I was at Mary's reception desk, which still had no ink cartridges. I called the agent at Air Pacific and she told me that my in-camera photo of my reservation to Seoul would not cut the mustard. I needed a printed copy of that ticket out of Fiji before Air Pacific would allow me to board their flight to Fiji. I raced to the office-supply store in town and, of course, they were out of the cartridge that fit Mary's printer. Then I ran to the only other outlet in town, where I found the right cartridge, and ran back to Mary's. It was now close to 11:00 a.m. We fired up the printer and it worked! Was Murphy finally giving me a break? I then went on Mary's computer to bring up the e-mailed confirms of my flights to Seoul and Beijing so I could print them. But Yahoo Mail was unreachable. I tried for an hour, but the computer couldn't connect. (I'd noted, when I first arrived at Mary's, that I could most easily—i.e., in less than 30 minutes—get onto Yahoo Mail at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., but rarely before because of insufficient capacity.)

I was frantic, and I'm sure my blood pressure was stratospheric. The receptionist told me that the Internet café in town had better connectivity, so I ran over there, but still could not connect with Yahoo Mail. It was now noon, the airport was almost an hour away, and the flight to Fiji closed for boarding at 3:00 p.m. I was close to a nervous breakdown.

As a Hail Mary pass, I phoned the Air Pacific agent, explained my plight, gave her the number of my Air Korea reservation, and asked her if she could track down my confirmation on her computer and print it out. She had never done anything like that before but agreed to try. In the hope—my only hope—that she would succeed, I rushed to get Mary's van to take me to her office and then to the airport. But good old Murphy was still doing double duty and had arranged that the van was being washed and cleaned—surely for the first time since Christmas—to pick up the arriving military personnel that afternoon.

I ran to the van and grabbed a sponge and soaped and hosed like mad to get us on the road. By 1:50 we were in the airline office and received good news: The agent had been able to find and print my Air Korea confirmations from Fiji. All I had to do was pay her for the Air Pacific ticket to Fiji and I could be on my way. I gave her my AmEx card, which required her to contact her head office in Australia for approval, which took a half hour. And we did not get approval! Barclays bank, which serviced my AmEx account, declined the charge—despite explicit instructions I had given them before I left New York that I would be using the card in Asia. (I later learned that Barclays had lost those instructions, and since this charge was coming in at 5:00 a.m. EST, when fraudsters try to slip by, the banks assumed someone had stolen my card, and therefore had put a block on it.)

It was now 2:20, leaving no time to send my Visa Card info to Australia for approval.

I offered to pay for the ticket in cash, but they would not take U.S. dollars—nobody does in Kiribati—so I got back in Mary's van—whose driver was beginning to lose patience with me despite the two fashionable New York T-shirts I had generously given him—and we raced to the ANZ bank—where the guard issued me a printed number indicating my position in the queue.

Twelve numbers were ahead of mine, all, it seemed, with lengthy business to transact. And all the tellers but one were out to lunch. (Murphy works in unpredictable ways, but was covering all the bases.) I located the woman who held the next number to be called, bargained with her, gave her five dollars to exchange her number with mine, and shot to the head of the queue.

By the time I got back to the Air Pacific office with the 764 Australian dollars, it was 3:00 p.m. By the time we got the airport it was 3:20 and the departure gate had closed.

But
the workers recognized me—the bearded American who had almost fainted the day before when he was denied boarding—and were sympathetic. They let me in and vocally cheered me on as they rushed me through the item-by-item big-bag inspection (no X-ray machines in this outpost), the luggage weigh in, the ticket check, the departure tax payment, the immigration exit stamp, and the search of my carry-on bag. I raced aboard the plane three minutes and 30 seconds before it took off for Fiji. And collapsed.

I arrived in Beijing two days later, a sleep-deprived nervous wreck, five days off schedule, $6,000 poorer, 7,000 miles off course, and with no possible way to visit Nauru or East Timor on this trip. But at least I was no longer trapped on Tarawa. Big Al was back in the game.

 

CHAPTER 22

To the Land of the Great Leader

In keeping with their secretive nature, the North Koreans refused to provide any hint whether I'd be granted a visa. They'd required me to travel halfway around the world to Beijing, surrender my passport, and not learn until the day before my tour was scheduled to fly to Pyongyang whether I'd be permitted to go. I was concerned about the ban they'd imposed on writers and journalists, and worried that some of the 250 magazine articles I'd written might come to their attention, although the most politically sensitive and inflammatory had fortunately been written under a pen name.

The circumstances were not auspicious for a visit or a visa. During the week I waited in Beijing, North Korea made daily threats to protest the continuing exercises by the South Korean Navy close to the disputed zone between the countries. The North captured an ROK fishing boat that supposedly entered that zone and the North fired more than a hundred artillery shells near the disputed Northern Limit Line.

My buddy Dennis Doran, his son Andrew, and my friend Svitlana, who were joining me for the visit to North Korea, had flown in to Beijing from the U.S. the day before, bringing the supplies that were too heavy for me to lug around the Pacific. Our foursome walked over to the North Korean Embassy at 2:00 p.m., as instructed. It was straight out of a spy novel, a full-block complex of sinister-looking, small-windowed, sturdy buildings, their roofs bristling with large antennae and communications equipment, mostly hidden behind a high concrete wall topped by broken glass and barbed wire. The main entrance was guarded by a squad of unsmiling, heavily armed soldiers who refused to let us enter. Every other embassy gives applicants their visas in its consular section, but not the North Koreans. No foreigners were allowed inside the walls. The guards directed us to the street corner at the end of the block-long concrete barrier.

At the appointed time, a gaunt man in a threadbare suit emerged from the complex, looked about furtively, collected several hundred dollars cash from each of us, and returned our passports
with visas
and strict instructions to be at the airport early the following morning. We had made the cut! We had achieved what less than a thousand American civilians had in the 57 years since the cessation of open warfare on the Korean peninsula. We were on our way to the Hermit Kingdom, to the Land of the Great Leader.