Trespassers Anonymous

A few weeks ago, our friend Dieter got permission from an acquaintance of his to visit a beach on the southern tip of Yap, an area that many consider to have the best beaches around. Permission is an important thing here. Ninety-eight percent of Yap is privately owned, and in a country where people don’t have much in the way of material things, land rights are an important measure of wealth. With virtually no beaches open to the public, the best way to get access is to know someone whose village owns shorefront property. (As an aside, the remaining two percent is owned by the state government, and is primarily in and around Colonia (Non-citizens may not own land in the FSM, although they can sign long-term leases. Most, if not all, of the resort properties here are owned and operated by non-citizens with long-term leases). The Yap State Constitution acknowledges the power of eminent domain, but requires enabling legislation to be enacted before the power can be exercised. Given the complex interrelationships between land ownership and social status, it is perhaps unsurprising that the legislature has never taken up the call).

We were excited to check out one of the better beaches on the island – so excited, in fact, that we forgot to bring a camera with us, and are indebted to our friend Beth for sharing her shots of the trip with us. The group piled into cars and caravanned south. The pavement ended at the southern tip of the island, and we turned east into the jungle. It must have been comical to watch, three tiny Japanese cars – wheels the size of dinner plates – winding through the jungle on a narrow, bumpy double-track. For our part, we were too busy dodging coconuts and fallen palm fronds to notice anything not directly ahead of us.

After making it all the way to the beach with no visible harm to the car’s undercarriage, we parked and walked to a shelter a few feet from the water. Matt and the boys headed down the beach to do a little bit of exploring while the girls stayed behind to chat and snack on the cookies we had brought along. Dieter brought a machete along for coconut husking; unfortunately the coconuts on the ground were old and dry, and the young ones still on the tree were too high to harvest. Matt had the bright idea to try and knock the young coconuts down by throwing some of the old coconuts up at them. His efforts were unsuccessful, but at least the soreness in his arm only lasted a couple of days.

A short time later, the girls decided that they were going to try and walk out to Bird Island, a small outcrop in the lagoon several hundred yards from shore.

The lagoon is shallow enough to walk the whole way, but the bottom is covered in spots with

sea grass and sharp coral. About a hundred yards from shore, our friend Taylor suddenly bent down and scooped up a sea cucumber from the floor of the lagoon. As soon as she picked it up, however, it began squirting seawater all over her and various members of the group. KC briefly considered taking cover, but decided it wasn’t worth it once she remembered she was already waist deep in the ocean. In the end the poor sea cucumber was returned unharmed to the waters of the lagoon. The effluent, for its part, did prove its worth as a defense mechanism, at least against predators who are easily grossed out.

In the meantime, those of us who had stayed behind found out that we had come to the wrong place, and were in fact trespassing. The right location was several hundred yards down the beach, but by a stroke of luck the “trespassee” turned out to be the judge for whom KC is clerking. He had decided to come out to the beach for the afternoon with a few friends and invited us to stay. They had a big frozen skipjack tuna with them, which they tossed into the lagoon to thaw for a little while (the fact that the fish did not swim off after defrosting may suggest that investing in cryogenics is a waste of money). While the fish warmed up, they made tongs out of palm branches, and before we knew it there were tuna steaks sizzling on the fire. Feeling bad about the whole trespassing thing, we turned down their offers to share, but watching the process emboldened us to give the Yap Fishing Authority a try later in the week. We’ll write more about our experiences there in a future post.

Once the Bird Island expedition returned, our friend Minnie gathered a few resident hermit crabs for a race. The crabs proved unmotivated, and in any event they were somewhat directionally challenged, so Minnie and Taylor collaborated to build them a home. This was likewise unsuccessful. Hermit crabs are, as you might expect, not particularly social. And besides, carrying a home around on your back may reduce your incentive to move into prefabricated housing. The crabs abandoned the project quicker than you can say “credit default swap” (where had this motivation been during the race, we wonder?), and it soon fell into disrepair. Last we heard, Minnie and Taylor were muttering something about retention bonuses and demanding a bailout from the FSM government to help them recoup their investment.

A final note – we moved into the house yesterday, and we’ve been busy killing gigantic insects and painting the walls for the last 24 hours. We’ll post pictures of the new pad next week.

A shopping diary

We miss Wal-Mart. There, we said it, and we’re just as surprised at the feeling as everyone else. And so, in the spirit of capitalism, stimulus, and getting the world economy moving again, we thought that we would devote an entry to the Yapese shopping experience. For starters, can anyone explain this? It looks rectangular to us.

Nearly all of our shopping here has been for food, although with our house nearly ready for move-in we’ve started to collect household goods when we see them here or there. “Here or there” is really an accurate characterization, because shopping for anything in Yap can be quite a challenge.

The first difficulty is the food itself. Micronesia is a former U.S. Territory, but Yap is much closer to Japan and the Far East than it is to North America. The more invasive aspects of American culture are present, of course – it’s not too hard to find Coke or Doritos if you want some junk food – but there are also lots of items that would be harder to find in a grocery store in the U.S.

KC actually likes these Mung beans, which are apparently quite healthy. The giant tube of ground pork is less healthy, but rivals anything we’ve seen at Costco in terms of pure bulk.

When you’re on an island in the middle of the Pacific, it can be tough to find fresh food. Local produce is available in the grocery stores, although some of it remains a mystery to us. We think this giant vegetable on KC’s shoulder is a kind of squash, but we haven’t gotten up the courage to buy one yet.

The big brown thing is taro, a root crop and a staple throughout the Pacific. KC, always the adventurous eater, is starting to acquire a taste for it. Matt can’t get past the way it looks on a plate.

Fresh fish is also fairly easy to find. The Yap Fishing Authority has a commercial boat that brings in tuna, wahoo, and other large pelagic fish every couple of weeks. Unfortunately, the restaurants keep close tabs on the boat’s arrival and buy out the stock within a couple hours of its arrival. When we tried a couple of weeks ago, the only thing that they had left was a 30-pound tuna. We weren’t sure why this hadn’t been snapped up already, but we did know that there was no way that we had room for it in our freezer. Also, what the heck do you do with a 30-pound fish? Do you roast it on a spit? Build a firepit? Or do you make like Tom Hanks in “Castaway” and just dig right in? We’ll figure it out at some point, but in the meantime we’re certainly accepting advice from any seafood chefs who might be in our reading audience.

Canned meat, of course, is huge here. The back aisle of the grocery store directly underneath

our apartment looks like a well-stocked fallout shelter (take that, North Korea!); its vast and varied selection includes no fewer than six different types of canned mackerel.

The canned

meat selection takes up most of an aisle, and includes a prominent display of Spam. When the ship comes in, the more popular canned meats really fly off the shelf. We often find ourselves hanging out by the canned meat, unintentionally gawking at shoppers stacking their carts with ten, twenty, thirty cans of corned beef hash, or sardines, or Dave Barry’s perennial favorite, “Potted Meat Food Product.” Ok, we haven’t actually seen Potted Meat Food Product here, but we’re sure there’s a market for it if anyone wants to start up an export business.

The shopping experience is also different. It’s not unusual to see women shopping in native traditional dress (i.e., no shoes, no shirt, no big deal). Retail stock is dictated by what comes in on the boat; the island’s ongoing shortage of frozen french fries was alleviated just this week. We bought a five pound bag to celebrate, and we’re seriously considering investing in another. Our biggest concern is that any deterioration in Franco-Micronesian diplomatic relations could endanger the future supply of this precious commodity.

It’s important to pay close attention to price tags as well. Back in the U.S., Matt’s mom has been known to drive across town to save 50 cents on a gallon of milk. She’d have a field day here, where the already-high prices often vary from store to store by more than 100%:

A note on the house – it has passed inspection and is apparently ready to go, but the housing officer responsible for the transition didn’t come into work on Thursday or Friday. The secretary in Matt’s office did her best to persuade him not to play hooky, but to no avail. We hope to move in next week. We also think that we may be approaching the end of the long wait for our stuff – it is scheduled to arrive in Guam on March 30, and hopefully will be transferred to the boat headed to Yap on April 1. Ironically, we expect the care packages that we sent from Denver to arrive on the same boat. As we mentioned in an earlier posting, we mailed these packages parcel post from Denver, expecting them to arrive in about 11 days. As it turns out, however, parcel post to Yap is transported by surface and is delivered once a month. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that our packages will be on the April Fool’s Day boat, which is scheduled to arrive a full 60 days after we dropped our essentials in the mail. We’ve made do without them – in fact, we’ve tried to look at it as a baby step toward shedding our acquisitive tendencies – but, truth be told we’re getting tired of sharing a toothbrush, and it will be nice to have a stereo with better sound than our laptop speakers. Have a nice week!

A special Yapese ceremony

Last week, just before Yap Day, we were the recipients of our biggest (and, as you’ll see, most embarrassing) surprise to date. It all started one afternoon when Matt was walking home from work, and a complete stranger stopped her car, got out, and asked: “Are you Mr. Grove?” Being an attorney (not to mention a soccer referee), Matt’s first instinct was to turn tail and flee the jurisdiction. His first thought was that perhaps he had red-carded this woman’s son during the previous college soccer season in the United States, and that he was about to hear about how bad a decision it was. We’ve had enough small-world experiences here that this actually wouldn’t have been all that surprising. His second thought – and this was the lawyer in him coming out – was that this was a process server, and that she had a paper in her hand, and “didn’t I see this in a movie once? Has Yap adopted something similar to Rule 4 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure?” What a nerd.

This mysterious stranger soon allayed Matt’s fears, however, by handing him a personalized invitation to the Village of Kaday for a cultural tour that coming Saturday. Kaday runs these tours a couple of times a week and, as you’ll see in the pictures below, it’s quite a fun and educational time. We spent the rest of the week speculating as to the source of the invitation. We finally came to the (incorrect) conclusion that perhaps the villagers invited us as a welcome to the island and a thank-you for coming to work for the government. This seemed plausible, and although it hadn’t happened to any of the other expats it was the only reasonable explanation that we could come up with after hours of fevered speculation on the topic. Yes, spending hours on this was probably overkill, but in our defense it is slow here at times.

Saturday finally arrived, and we headed out to Kaday at 3:30, convincing our little Suzuki to crest the hills on the way by sheer force of will. One of the villagers – our tour guide as it turned out – met us near the head of a stone path that led down into the village proper. She told us that we needed to wait on a tour group from one of the hotels, but that once we were in the village they were going to ask the two of us to try traditional dress. KC’s immediate thought: “I’m not going topless!” But, still trying to figure out exactly what was happening, we acquiesced to their devious plot.

Aside from a few lizards and a couple of taro patches, the walk down to the village was interesting but largely uneventful. Once in the village, we were greeted with flower leis and

headdresses; without any further explanation Matt was then whisked off to the men’s house. With a great deal of help, Matt donned a thu, the traditional outfit for Yapese men. You’d think that an outfit covering this little skin would be fairly simple to put on. But you would be wrong if you thought this. It took a good fifteen minutes to put on and tie two loincloths, a covering called a lavalava, and a decorative hibiscus leaf. Unfortunately, the villagers didn’t have the equipment to manufacture a tan or a washboard stomach, but here’s the end result:

Meanwhile, on the other side of the village, our guide was helping KC into a colorful grass skirt, also made of hibiscus, twisting a banana leaf for her to wear as a top, and smearing her upper body with turmeric to make her a little less pale (the instant-tan turmeric treatment apparently is for women only):

We emerged from opposite sides of the village, meeting behind the community house. On the way over Matt realized that his feet had been much better off in shoes, but he took comfort in the fact that he would have looked really dumb in running sneakers and a loincloth.

Along with a few gawking tourists, we had a seat and a coconut and watched the festivities. A young villager climbed up a betelnut tree (a slender palm tree about 20 feet high) and cut off betelnuts for everyone. Betelnuts are the local chew, a bit like chewing tobacco, and will be the subject of a later post. Coconut husking was next, followed by a traditional dance.

The dance was what everyone had come to see, and it did not disappoint. The Yapese have a number of traditional

dances. The series that we saw here is one of the more athletic and involves highly synch

ronized stick-banging and movement. As we were to find out later, it’s not as easy as

it looks.

The general tour came to a close with the stick dancing, but we were asked to stay around for a special ceremony. “Aha,” we thought, “this is where they thank us for coming to the island and then send us on our merry way. As long as the tourists leave this won’t be too embarrassing.”

As usual, we were wrong (and the tourists didn’t leave). Much to our surprise, we were about to have a miniature Yapese marriage ceremony, arranged from Portland, Oregon, by KC’s dad. In another of the many small-world moments we’ve had on this adventure, it turns out that KC’s dad’s administrative assistant is not only Yapese, but is from Kaday Village itself. Her sister, in fact, greeted us at the airport when we arrived last month.

The ceremony was mercifully brief and undocumented (at least in terms of what we’re willing to post here). We were given gifts of baskets, miniature stone money, and a feast of local food that included two large and somewhat frightening mangrove crabs. They were dead and cooked, fortunately, but still intimidating enough that KC screamed when she opened the basket back at the apartment.

The rest of the feast was delicious, including plentiful reef fish, prawns, and local fruits and vegetables. Ok, so Matt didn’t eat all of the fish, but he heard it was delicious. Many thanks to KC’s dad for this wonderful experience!

Yap Day

The island came to a halt for the celebration of Yap Day on Sunday and Monday (and yes, Yap “Day” appears to be a misnomer). Yap Day is a cultural festival akin to a state fair, but with fewer bikers and giant turkey legs. Where there’s a fair, however, heat seems to follow, and refreshment is always welcome. We don’t have juice boxes here, but drinking fresh coconut water with a bendy straw is quite a treat.



Yap Day has lots of competitions, games, and traditional dancing. Many of the games are similar to what you’d find in the U.S., although with a distinct Yapese twist. Here’s our friend Rob, who made the mistake of volunteering for a game that he didn’t know anything about.

He felt bad once he realized he was going to have to pelt small Yapese boys with a hard ball made out of coconut husks, about the size and weight of a softball. It was similar to dodgeball, with the last boy standing declared the winner. The rest went home with nothing but bruises and a good story.


Other competitions included raft tying and spear throwing,



and there were plenty of other activities, including basket weaving, traditional dancing, and rides available in traditional outrigger canoes.


Our favorite activity was the canoe ride that we took courtesy of the Traditional Navigation Society, a group with whom we hope to volunteer down the road. Yapese sailors are famous for their daring and navigational skills. They ventured throughout this part of the world, quarrying stone money from Palau, fishing, and trading with islands throughout the western Pacific.


The traditional outrigger sailing canoes are really amazing. We had of course seen pictures in the past, but had never thought about how they worked. Lacking metal for nails and screws, traditional navigators lashed their vessels together with handmade ropes.


The outrigger is not, as Matt had always assumed, an aid in flotation, but is instead a counterweight (for the record, KC claims she knew that it was a counterweight all along). As such, it is always on the side opposite the sail. But because the outrigger is fixed on one side of the boat, this means that the sail and mast must be movable, to ensure that the sail can be in a position to catch the wind.

Outrigger sailing canoes thus lack an identifiable bow and stern. If the wind shifts or the boats needs to be taken in a new direction, the sail is moved from one end of the boat to the other, and the tiller likewise changes ends. As visible in this photo, the mast leans substantially to accommodate this shift. The sail supports its own weight in the front by resting on the end of the boat designated as the bow at that point in time. Although moving the sail is not an easy proposition (and likely puts the mast at risk in high
winds) it is an ingenious and effective setup for a number of reasons. For one, it eliminates the need for a daggerboard, which substantially reduces the depth of water needed for operation. This is important in Pacific lagoons – much of our brief sailing expedition was in water only 3 or 4 feet deep. The outrigger also makes the boat much more stable, although we still can’t imagine trying to sail one of these things in the open ocean.

The outrigger that we rode on recently made a trip to Palau and back – more than 250 miles of open ocean without the aid of engines or navigational equipment. We envision our involvement with the Traditional Navigation Society being in a slightly less adventurous role.

In other news, Matt had a conference with several government officials this week for work, and felt the need to break out his “dress” flip-flops for the occasion. The blue flops on the left are great for everyday wear, but just aren’t formal enough for big meetings. The more conservative flops on the right fit the bill nicely, and in any event went much better with the shorts that he chose for that day.











Matt also decided that it’s just too hot here for much hair, and went to the barber yesterday for a cut. Here’s the new look. Sunscreen on the scalp will be a necessity for the next couple of weeks.


Our house is supposedly going to be ready for move-in this coming week. We’ve taken a look around on a couple of occasions, and it looks quite nice inside. We’re looking forward to the move, partly because we’ll have the chance to set off a bug bomb before taking up occupancy, thus starting with a mostly insect-free household. We’ll be posting pictures of our move and the new house as soon as it comes available. In the meantime, we hope that everyone has a great week!