The Sinking Islands

6. Where's Larry?

I lounged on the beach until my clothes were dry and then I got back to walking.  It didn't take long for it to become apparent that Rarotonga wasn't that interesting.  Feet hurting, I hitched a ride from the next car to pass. Thom and Jeromiah worked at a local cook-out place.  Jeromiah let me take his seat at the front and he jumped in the back which was stacked with fresh sea-fish and crustaceans.  The smell made me feel sick.  They dropped me right on the door-step of my hostel, and, at a whim, I asked  them if they knew where I could find The Champion.  "Which Champion," said Jeromiah at the back, grinning.  "Big Larry Larsen," I replied.  They told me his house was in the back-ends of the town of Avarua, where I was right then.  They didn't know the number themselves, but "ask anyone around, they know," they said.  Then they drove away to work.

I checked into my hostel--generic, bunk-beds, low-thread count sheets, showers with concrete floors--there were three other people in my room from what I could tell with their luggage and clothes strewn about, but they themselves were somewhere else.  I threw a notebook and a few interview questions I had prepped into a day pack.  Walking around the township I asked the first lady I came across, and she didn't even know who Big Larry was.  Luckily (maybe not, maybe islanders all know each other), the next person gave me The Champ's street and pointed me toward the general direction.  The street itself wasn't hard to find and a friendly neighbour I found on the way walking with shopping bags took me to The Champ's front door. His house was a piece of crap. (Property in islands of any kind from what I've seen can be split into roughly two types.  There are those filled with concrete paths and features and palm trees and flowers, these being owned by the overseas-rich, who use the place as a getaway a few times a year.  The other kind are properties which are sparse, being mostly lawns of grass with maybe a few trees, and smack dab in the middle of it sits awkwardly a shitty house of some kind--imitation prefabs, concrete squallows, or palm-tree shacks. These cheaper houses tend to be owned by families whose ownership extends a thousand years into the past and who keep the property today more out of familial sentiment than a consideration of practicality.)  I knocked and no one answered, so I circled the place and I still couldn't find a sign of life. The house inside was a shambles and I was surprised it could belong to a married man. I reclined on The Champ's concrete steps and enjoyed the view of the mountains.  I had tried many times to organise a meeting with Big Larry in the weeks before, but it was difficult considering he didn't have a phone, let alone an e-mail address.

I called Rita. "John, my poor baby John. How's it hanging, cunt?" she answered, mocking my nationality. "Did you eat a good brekki, of fush and chup?."  I told her I had arrived at Rarotonga and that I was trying to find The Champ for an interview.  "Rarotonga?" she said, "The Champ's already at Mangaia.  He's been there for weeks."  Mangaia was one of the few islands I hadn't read much about; from what little I had seen there was nothing interesting about the place.  I asked Rita why Big Larry was on Mangaia.  "He's getting ready for the competition," she replied,  "the Apadwick.  At Mangaia."  As it turns out, the Commission for Sport Pearl Diving (read: Rita and her friends) had changed the location of the event at random a month before, and Rita had, despite us maintaining regular mail correspondence, completely neglected to inform me.  "Crap sorry...well...good luck," she said and hung up.

I sighed and made my way back into town. At the local travel agency I learned that although there were flights four times a week to Mangaia, the influx of islanders heading back home for the holidays meant that I couldn't get a seat until the following Monday, i.e. the day after the Apadwick would come to a close. I pleaded and the large island man in the Hawaiian shirt behind the counter said there was nothing I could do.  Unless I wanted to hang around and wait for last minute cancellations or, "or, you can hitch a ride on the freighter--" "Yes, yes, yes," I said immediately, mishearing the end of his sentence as Ferry.  I paid for the boat trip and a flight back. He wouldn't refund my tickets to the nicer island. As I made to return to the hostel, he yelled "Be there on the dot, cuz! They'll leave without you!"  I couldn't tell if he was joking or not.

It was getting dark so I ordered chicken curry and rice at an Indian place, it was good, and then I made my way back to my hostel.  On one of the ten-year old pay-per-use computers, I spent a few minutes reading about Mangaia.  As I'd found months earlier when I'd first read about the island, it still hadn't got much going for it.  All the tourists sites pointed to caving as the island's main attraction.  That seemed to me to be a very odd thing to fly to the South Pacific for.  However, I did notice this one interesting factoid on the island's Wikipedia page:

"[Mangaians] have a sex positive culture, where "casual sex with different partners, and frequent intercourse with multiple orgasms (as many as three climaxes nightly), are perceived as sexually normal""

That made me slightly happier.  I didn't see anything else of note, so I spent a few hours finding low-view count Youtube videos, to which I left ravingly positive nice comments. (that wasn't sarcasm.  It's fun.  You should try it some time).  After washing up, I went back to my room and one of my bunk buddies had returned.  She was Spanish and seemed nice but I wasn't in the mood to chat.  I threw myself into bed and pulled out my now useless tickets to and from Aitutaki.  I read them several times.