THE MARSHALL ISLANDS (Majuro, Kwajalein, Bikini)
Independent since 1986 under a Compact of Free Association with the US. 70,000 people, 29 atolls and 5 isolated islands, of which 24 are inhabited, no spectacular sights, pristine beauty of tropical islands, great scuba diving and windsurfing. They can be grouped into two island chains about half-way between Hawaii and Australia.
The charm of the Marshall Islands lies not in a great number of attractions. This small country, home to less than 70,000 people and comprising 1,156 islands and islets, is, however, unique. Don’t expect any spectacular sights, but enjoy the pristine beauty of picture-perfect tropical islands, great scuba diving and windsurfing opportunities and the warm hospitality of the people.
Capital. Majuro
Currency. USD
Population. 53.1 thousand (2017)
Country Code +692
MARSHALL ISLANDS – Summary
Visa. Visa upon arrival – 30-day. You’ll need an entry permit to work, study or stay for more than 30 days. You’ll be fined and deported if you arrive without physical proof of a return ticket. $25 Email rmi_majuro@rmi-immigration.com
ATMs aren’t available at the airport. Carry cash with you. Departure tax $20, over 60 years exempt. Return/onward ticket
Money. USD +692
Flight. Majuro International Airport (MAJ).
Jan 8. United PNI-MAJ @13:40-19:20
Nauru Airlines. PNI – MAJ Thur
United Airlines island-hopper flight, UA155 East to West on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and UA154 West to East on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Honolulu—Majuro—Kwajalein—Kosrae—Pohnpei—Chuuk—Guam and vice versa. 14.5 hours. Leaves in the early morning and terminates in the evening, with a stop of about one hour on each island.
Accommodation.
Dave’s Condo on the Beach.
Marshall Islands Resort. US$100/night
Climate. Wet season from May to November; hot and humid; islands border typhoon belt.
MAJURO ATOLL
Day 1 Mon Jan 8
United Airlines UA155 PNI-MAJ UA155 @13:35-18:40. Pohnpei (PNI) > Korsae – 50 minutes > Kwajalein (KWA) – 55 minutes > Majuro (MAJ). Bring food as they serve none on these short legs. You can deplane at each stop (except KWA), but there may be nothing to eat. From the plane, Korsae had many rocky elevated bits, and Kwajalein was very small (basically just the airport) and full of small and large domes.
I was met by a driver for the condo. He took me to a larger supermarket to buy some food as Dave’s has no restaurants nearby. I bought milk, juice, 8 fresh buns, clam chowder soup and what I thought was sloppy joe in a can (but was only the sauce aaaarch!). So I had soup and toasted buns for dinner.
ON Dave’s Condo on the Beach. One large room with a bed, kitchen and three old leather couches. There was no table and only a covered picnic table under a thatch roof. Some staples would be nice – sugar, margarine or butter, coffee, and tea bags but the cupboards and fridge are bare.
It was a very windy day with occasional rain.
The house’s wall is part of an unattractive concrete block sea wall. There is no beach – water laps the base of the wall at high tide and exposes some rocks at low tide. There is no access to this.
Day 2 Tue Jan 9
Up early, I continued work on Hiking and Climbing the West Kootenay. Still very windy and unpleasant, it was a perfect day to spend inside.
The sun eventually came up and at 2:30, I decided I should go into town. I went out to the one road and hitchhiked. I was picked up fairly fast by a woman with her sister and baby who picked me up because she had never seen a hitchhiker before!! We had a lot of laughs talking about living here. It is a matrilineal society. It was a slow 11 km into town made slow by all the speed bumps. She let me off at the museum.
MAJURO
Alele Museum. In Uliga is this museum and Public Library. Although small with only two rooms, it has many photos, good storyboards and some nice artifacts of the nation’s culture on display – tattooing, 50 methods of fishing, lovely weaving much if it very delicate, jewelry, clothing, houses, and canoes. The stick charts, used by the indigenous people to help remember the complex wave patterns between the many atolls, were explained but no one these days knows how to interpret them – basically they could tell by how the boat leaned (side to side or front to back) to see waves and currents (represented by straight sticks) and swells (round sticks) met to form patterns. Combined with an intricate knowledge of stars and when they appeared on the horizon, allowed to go for thousands of miles without seeing land. Free
I ate at the Robert Reimer Hotel and did some shopping (bananas, a notebook and Stag chile for a whopping US$4.75).
Cathedral of the Assumption. The main RC church has green wood roof beams, nice verandahs on the outside and small carved wood basreliefs for the Ways of the Cross.
I then got a cab back the 10 km to Dave’s place (Google Maps actually had it as the “Condominium on the Beach” even though there was no beach). The driver first quoted $10, I said $5 and he charged me %2.50 – interesting math. When he asked me what church I belonged to, we had a long discussion about God, He didn’t understand that I didn’t believe in God. I may have got him thinking when I suggested he keep his money and stop giving it to something that was not doing him any good or had nothing about helping him get to heaven. He simply did not understand.
ON Dave’s Condo on the non-beach. It turns out everyone knows where this is because Dave Paul is a minister in the government. Just say “Dave Paul’s place”.
Day 3 Wed Jan 10.
I had all day to kill but was able to stay at the condo well past normal check-out times. In the morning I hitchhiked in the other direction to the war memorial.
Marshall Islands War Memorial Park. A beachfront park located in Delap on Majuro Atoll. The park was part of the U.S. Headquarters Command Center for the Marshall Islands, which was responsible for administering the Marshall Islands following World War II. It was located next to the main U.S. airfield on the atoll until 1971 when a new airfield opened; it then became a collection point for World War II artifacts. The park includes weaponry and vehicles, such as Zeros and large ammunition pieces, from throughout the islands. In The Dark Side Series.
The cleaners for the condo arrived at 11, I told them I was staying till 6, but they left and never came back. I continued to work on the hiking book and actually finished all I needed to do online.
6 pm came and the condo driver didn’t appear so I went out to the road and hitchhiked getting a taxi for $1.50. Check-in was painless and the plane took off on time.
This is my final leg home and the end of a long, tiring 16-month trip. I was so excited to finally be in my cozy apartment.
Flight United Airlines UA154 MAJ-Honolulu (HNI) @19:55-o2:40 +1.
Tentative WHS
Likiep Village Historic District (24/10/2005)
Mili Atoll Nature Conservancy (and Nadrikdrik) (24/10/2005)
Northern Marshall Islands Atolls (24/10/2005)
ATOLLS
RATAK CHAIN
LIKIEP
Likiep Village Historic District Tentative WHS:(24/10/2005)
Debrum House. House Museums/Plantations
Catholic Church
Longar area on Arno, where young women were once taught the tips and tricks for a happy sexual life in so-called love schools.
Sex Lives of Cannibals – The Marshall Islands
The following is an excerpt from “Sex Lives of Cannibals”, a very funny book about a young American couple who moved to Kiribati for two years. The journey there is from the continental US to Hawaii, Johnston Atoll, Marshall Islands and finally Tarawa. They stopped overnight in Majuro, the main island of the Marshall Islands. Written in 1996, some ex-pats from the Marshalls criticized it as being no longer accurate. There are not as many cockroaches as he describes.
This is what he wrote:
Here in the Marshall Islands, after ever more hours spent hurtling across the Pacific, we arrived, exhausted and crabby, accustomed to movement, and not at all prepared, after all that flying, to find ourselves in a spookily familiar place, as though we were inside a forgotten episode of The Twilight Zone, the one where Dr. Strangelove descends upon the set of South Pacific. We were in Majuro, the capital atoll of the Marshall Islands, a grim island group deemed useful by the United States. It is, frankly, not so good to be found useful by a superpower, particularly one interested in exploring the nuances of the hydrogen bomb.
It was in the Marshall Islands where scientists finally discovered what, in fact, constitutes a coral atoll. A coral atoll is the crest of a dying volcano. Like many explanations, this one derives from Charles Darwin, building upon the work of previous naturalists. Coral only thrives until about 150 feet below the surface, but rather than assume that the coral is steadily rising atop an expanding underwater volcano, which was the belief at the time, Darwin theorized that coral replenishes itself by matching the rate of a sea volcano’s dissolution. As the land far below the surface steadily recedes into the depths, coral polyps grow from its slopes, seeking the sun, rising first to become a barrier reef, and then, as the volcano continues to disintegrate, slowly inching toward its base, an atoll is formed, the living crest balanced atop layers of dead coral and far below, the volcano itself.
Of course, it took some time to prove this theory, since one had to dig awfully deep to find the volcano below. Attempts were made, but it was not until 1952, more than a hundred years after Darwin first proposed his theory, when a drill bit was pushed 4,610 feet into Enewetak Atoll in Marshall Island and struck volcanic rock, that Darwin’s theory was proved correct. It was incidental, however, to the purpose of drilling; Enewetak was being canvassed as a sight for testing the hydrogen bomb and the drilling indicated that the atoll was suitable for obliteration. Shortly after dawn on November 1, 1952, a bomb called Mike was detonated, and an island, a home, and an ecosystem was blown up, irradiated, and poisoned, leading many to wonder what is the point of having Nevada.
This was hardly the only apocalyptic event in the Marshalls. I just happen to enjoy the weird symbiosis between discovering the nature of an atoll and blowing it up. Dozens of tests occurred in the 40s, 50s and 60s and one would think that nuking the Marshall Islands over and over again would be enough punishment to inflict on the country for one epoch, but the US Department of Defense thinks otherwise. Every year, the United States targets the Marshall Islands with its intercontinental ballistic missiles. These weapons are fired from California, using missiles randomly selected to ensure that if the green light for Armageddon is ever given, what follows will go smoothly. The ICBMs are aimed at Kwajalein Atoll, the catcher’s mitt, where research is also conducted on several missile defence systems, including for some years the Strategic Defense Initiative, and more recently, a humbler defence system, THAAD – Theatre High Altitude Defense) that requires missiles to be fired from two other atolls in the Marshalls. Access to two-thirds of Kwajalenin is restricted to American soldiers and those who supply them with their weaponry, which in addition to the four islands already poisoned by radiation – Bikini, Enewetak, Rongelap, and Utrik – results in five islands lost to the US defence industry. With the Bush (II) administration’s decision to discard the ABM Treaty even more testing will be conducted in the Marshall Island. For a country with a total area of less than 120 square miles, the loss of five islands is not insignificant. And so payments must be made.
The Marshall Islands had received $800 million of American “aid” over the previous 10 years, which amounted to $14,300 for every man, woman, and child in the country. The vast majority of the money was sent directly to the government of the Marshall Islands, which, of course, is the best possible way to instill corruption, inefficiency, and a dependency mentality in Third World governments everywhere. Not only did all this aid fail to significantly improve the health and welfare of the Marshallese, it introduced new afflictions. Hypertension, diabetes, and high blood pressure are now serious problems as a result of the local diet being supplanted by food imported from the United States. Alcoholism and suicide, particularly among the youth, have taken root in a society no longer held together by traditional bonds. And Majuro, an atoll not more than two hundred yards wide, is besieged by traffic jams, mountains of garbage, aimless youth fashionable in their East L.A. ghetto wear, and a population as a whole that has already moved beyond despair and settled into a glazed ennui. It is a miserable place where coconut palm trees have disappeared, replaced by concrete and tin.
And there are cockroaches. Enormous cockroaches. I began to wonder. What precisely had caused the cockroaches on Majuro to become so enormous? The trolled like sinister remnants of the Pleistocene era, when everything was bigger, meaner, and just generally more voracious ( or was that the Cambrian era?), and because I was fairly well informed about the activities of a certain superpower on these islands, I immediately began to think about radioactivity fallout and where, exactly, did it all go? Which way was the wind blowing in the 1940s, and the 1950s, and the 1960s, because there are some scary cockroaches on Majuro. In the back of a taxi, they scurried across our feet. They emerged from every nook and cranny in our hotel room. In a restaurant, they rushed across the table and asked, really, if we were going to eat that.
This did not please Sylvia. She’s good with spiders, indifferent to snakes, and unmoved by mice. But cockroaches? They are, in her word, eeuuwh,
Surely, we thought, there must be something else to see on Majuro besides the impressive roach population. We were staying at the Robert Reimer Hotel, a modest haven for consultants, and I mentioned to the stout woman more or less attending to us that we fancied a walk, and since this was our only day on Majuro could she recommend a destination. Somplace interesting, worth seeing, touristry is fine.
“You want to walk?” she said. She seemed aghast. She heaved in her flower-print dress. “There is nothing to see.” A cockroach scurried across the counter.
Eeuuwh.
We walked out and turned left, which we discovered was one of only two directional options on an atoll, but after some time wandering, we were forced to concede that she was, indeed, correct. There is nothing you would want to see on Majuro. There is a filthy fringe of beach that recedes into soppy mud before disappearing into a lifeless lagoon. On the ocean side of the atoll there is a gray and barren reef shelf stained with what from a distance look like large, whitish-brownish polyps that on closer inspection turn out to be used diapers, resting there under the high sun while awaiting an outgoing tide. On dry land, there are decrepit two-story apartment blocks and garish prefab houses. The road was one long traffic jam and alongside it were the fattest people I had ever seen, wan and listless, munching through family-sized packets of Cheetos. As we passed, nodding our greetings, they offered in return quiet contempt, and it was not long before I became sympathetic to the spleenish Marshallese. This ghetto/island has none of the romantic sense of dissolution found elsewhere in tropical urban areas succumbing to age and wear. Majuro wasn’t built to slowly, grandly crumble. It was built with the ambition of a strip mall, a place for America to traffic trifles to a people who in a generation exchanged three thousand years of history and culture for spangled rubbish and lite beer. New pickup trucks passed by. Every government minister had a chauffeur-driven Lexus. A store offered the latest in washing machines. A video shop displayed the most recent features from Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damme. Teenagers loitered in $100 sneakers and trendy baggy shorts. There was money in Majuro, but the overwhelming sense was one of immense poverty.
We were not happy. Pretty close to despair, actually. Tarawa was supposed to be similar, but poorer. It occurred to us that this might not be such a good idea after all, that moving to an atoll at the end of the world is really nothing more than an act of romantic delusion, and it was tempting to succumb to negativity, but we resisted, and instead yielded to a simmering anger, anger at the United States, for obliterating a nation, just for practice, and anger at the Marshallese for behaving like debased junkies, willing to do anything for another infusion of the all mighty dollar. This included removing the population of one island so that a Korean resort and casino could operate unhindered by the sight of poor, dark-skinned people who presumably would dampen the tourist’s gambling instinct, and allowing an American firm the use of an uninhabited island to store the radioactive waste generated by reactors in Japan and South Korea. For a country already so traumatized and polluted by radiation, encouraging the importation of more radioactive waste can only be called pathological.
But for us things did get more negative. In our room, which was not a bad room, I spent much of the night like a taunted monkey in a cage, lurching from wall to wall flinging my sandals at the insidious creatures, and when my tally reached five dead cockroaches, it thought it safe to attempt sleep. And then I felt it. It was scrambling up my back, a sharp pitter-patter with razor fur burning my skin. I knew that very soon I would have a cockroach in my ear. Instinct took over. I emitted a primal scream and bounced out of bed. Sylvia did likewise. She does not like to be woken up suddenly. I calmly explained the situation and she was thoughtful enough to summon with some urgency several higher-power characters in Christian theology. We found the cockroach lurking behind the headboard and so shoved the bed against the wall and there it remained, and it is probably still there today, emitting a soft green glow.
We were to be awoken at 5:30 am, courtesy of the wake-up call thoughtfully provided by the staff of the Robert Reimer Hotel, but their subservience to the American Way was not yet so complete a to follow through on the promise of a wake-up call, and so we arose at 6:10 am, ten minutes after the minibus that was to take us to the airport was scheduled to depart. This left us a trifled ill-tempered. We scrambled out of the hotel, bent double like hungry coolies underneath the weight of all our possessions, and boarded the lingering minibus, which contained a gaunt blond Australian man. “About blood well time,” he said in a voice that suggested his larynx was not what it should be. I acknowledged Sylvia’s look and resolved to quit smoking sometime very soon and then we both gave piercing dagger eyes. He was wearing shiny white shoes.
We were expected to arrive at the airport two hours before our flight, which seemed inexplicable to me. It isn’t as if Majuro International Airport receives a lot of air traffic requiring complex organizational procedures to ensure that passengers and baggage arrive and depart as intended. It has one runway built upon a reef. It has one single-story dilapidated building that contains customs and immigration and a hole in the wall for baggage to be tossed through. The waiting area is the curb outside. Here, during the one hour and fifty-seven minutes that remained after we checked in for our flight on Air Marshall, we met a friendly Marshallese woman who commented on the amount of luggage we were lugging. We explained that we were moving to Tarawa.
“Tarawa is like Majuro was thirty years ago. There’s nothing there,” she said, betraying in her voice a distinct air of superiority as if any island not yet awash in the detritus of Americana must be very primitive indeed. Finally, on this journey, we felt something like elation, a sense of hope that on Tarawa we would find, if not an Edenic paradise, at least an island not yet so distant from the Fall – an optimism that was dampened only a little bit by the plane we would fly, a plane where the pilot rearranged the passengers because of weight and balance issues. That kind of plane.
KWAJALEIN ATOLL Kwajalein Island, home to the US Army Post Kwajalein (USAKA) since 1964. Several islands are off-limits to tourism (and even to locals) due to US military presence or the residue of nuclear testing. 3,900 km southwest of Honolulu, Hawaii. 16 km2). 1,000 mostly U.S. civilian personnel.
The US Navy has hosted a naval base on Kwajalein Island, the southernmost part of the atoll, since World War II. It was the final resting place of the German cruiser Prinz Eugen after it survived the Operation Crossroads nuclear test in 1946. In the late 1950s, the US Army took over the base as part of their Nike Zeus anti-ballistic missile efforts, and since then the atoll has been widely used for missile tests of all sorts. Today it is part of the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site, with various radars, tracking cameras, missile launchers and many support systems spread across many islands.
BIKINI ATOLL NUCLEAR TEST SITE WHS (also The Dark Side)
Part of the landscape are sunken ships sent to the bottom of the lagoon by the explosions and a huge crater formed by the 1954 Castle Bravo test.
The major reasons to visit Bikini Atoll are all tied to its history and culture. The atoll lies at the northern end of the Ralik Chain, which is a large chain of islands within the Marshall Islands. Most of the Marshall Islands were at one point controlled by Iroiji, or royal families. With a decentralized monarchic system, the various islands were able to communicate and trade with one another while maintaining relative peace. Archaeologists estimate that humans have inhabited the Ralik Chain for more than 3,000 years. This is impressive considering that the islands are notoriously hot, dry, and sparse.
In the 1820s, Bikini Atoll was discovered by a Baltic German explorer in service of the Russian Empire. He named it Eschscholtz Atoll after the naturalist (scientist) onboard his ship. Without interacting with the native population much, the Russians used the islands to produce copra (coconut oil). However, the atoll was soon abandoned as it was not nearly as fertile as the southern Marshall Islands.
The native people, after being visited by American missionaries in the mid-1800s, were converted to Christianity. Not much is known about the religion that existed before Western contact, except that it was probably animist and polytheistic. The Bikini Atoll natives are a traditionally matrilineal society.
The legacy of the protestant missions is still alive among the Bikini Atoll diaspora. They are known for being especially modest in how they dress. In the 1940s, a French designer launched a new, more revealing form of swimwear that he named after the atoll. This is ironic because most native residents are offended by the immodesty of the bikini.
Nuclear Testing On Bikini Atoll. In the 1940s, caught in a Cold War nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, The United States assumed control of Bikini Atoll and used the central lagoon to test, explore, and study nuclear bombs. Native residents were forcibly relocated to Rongerik Atoll. Rongerik was previously uninhabited because of inadequate food and water supplies on top of a deeply-held traditional belief that the island is haunted by the Demon Girls of Ujae. The Bikini Islanders were relocated several more times, which led to mass shock, despair, and a severe lack of food. Eventually, after years of living in make-shift refugee camps, the islanders were permanently settled on Kili Island, where they primarily reside to this day. Â Relocation to Bikini Atoll was attempted in 1970, but after ten years scientists realized that the island was too radioactive for human habitation. Its natives were irreversibly tainted by Western exports such as deracination, lechery, existential destruction, and consumerism. A measly trust fund was established to keep the displaced natives from starving on the barren islands on which they were placed.
Quite surprisingly, while it is impossible to stay on Bikini Atoll, it is possible to visit for a day. The journey is a long and tenuous one, but the excitement of exploring underwater radioactive shipwrecks is enticing enough to draw tourists every year. From the United States, the best and only way to get there is by first flying to the largest and southernmost settlement in the Marshall Islands, Kwajalein Atoll.
United Airlines runs three flights a week between Honolulu to Kwajalein. A return flight from Honolulu to Kwajelein costs anywhere between $1,500-$2,500, Seven hours. A round trip or onward flight is needed to enter Kwajalein Airport (KWA), which is a U.S. military airport.
There is only one hotel there called the Ebeye Hotel, which has 18 rooms. It is notoriously difficult to reserve a room at the Ebeye Hotel. PO Box 5640, Ebeye, Kwajalein, Marshall Islands – 692-235-5230 / hotelebeye@yahoo.com.
Shipwreck scuba diving on Bikini Atoll costs over $5,000.
Get there. Fly to Kwajalein (KWA), Marshall Islands ( via a quick stop in Majuro MAJ). United is the only airline to Kwajalein. A one-hour flight to Kwajalein. You will be on the same plane, and will not have to recheck baggage in Majuro. Arrive in Kwajalein in the afternoon. When you clear the US Army-run customs in Kwajalein, there is a complementary US Army shuttle service to transport you a short distance away to the ferry terminal on Kwajalein Island. The US Army ferry will take you to Ebeye Island, a 10-minute ride away. From there you will transfer to the dive vessel Indies Surveyor.
If arriving via Guam on Friday will spend Saturday morning diving on the Prinz Eugen at Kwajalein Atoll.
Boat to Bikini Atoll. During the trip over to Bikini Atoll 400 kilometres (215 nautical miles), 120 kilometres (65 nautical miles) in the sheltered waters in the lee of Kwajalein Atoll and 280 kilometres (150 nautical miles) of open seas from the northerly point of Kwajalein Atoll to Bikini Atoll. The open seas leg is around 18 hours and the sheltered leg is 7 hours. The entire trip takes about 25–30 hours depending on sea conditions and current.
Bikini Atoll opened to divers in June of 1996 to provide an economic base for a possible future resettlement of Bikini Atoll. In 2011 the Bikini Atoll Local Government signed an agreement with Indies Trader Marine Adventures that would permit them to operate their liveaboard vessel, the Windward, on Bikini. It should be understood that the islanders themselves made the decision to open the atoll for tourism. When you go to Bikini you don’t just go diving, fishing, and sunbathing, you get a history lesson. Over the course of the visit historical documentary films are shown, complete briefings about each of the ships and their respective histories are given, and you get a tour of the island and the atoll. Diving there has been operated by the Indies Trader, and it is a two-week liveaboard. The atoll’s airstrip in no longer operational (as is the case with most of the equipment there). The Indies Trader is not a luxury boat by any means, a single room sleeps 10. Air and Oxygen (97%) are clean and equipment is well maintained. The crew is great and the food is plentiful and amazing.
While it is technical diving (the minimum requirement is an extended range with advanced nitrox – 100% O2), you don’t have to be super technical. You should have a few hundred dives if you want to enjoy. You have to be able to handle yourself well narc’ed at 55m on air. You can ship in He if you want to dive Trimix, but this is not a requisite. Get to Kwajalein a day early to do a couple of dives on the Prinz Eugen.
Depart Kwajelein – 6:19PM MON / WED / FRI. UA 155 – One-hour flight to Majuro. Upon leaving Kwajelein, $20 departure fee in cash / USD.
Bokak Atoll is an uninhabited coral atoll in the Ratak Chain. Due to its relative isolation from the main islands in the group, Bokak’s flora and fauna have been able to exist in a pristine condition. It is located 685 km (426 mi) north of Majuro Atoll and 280 km (170 mi) northeast of Bikar Atoll, the closest atoll, making it the most northerly and most isolated atoll of the country. Wake Island is 348 mi (560 km) north-northwest. The land area is 3.2 km2 (1.2 sq mi), and the lagoon measures 78 km2 (30 sq mi). It consists of 36 islets. The total area is 129 km2 (50 sq mi) (including reef flat).
The aquatic fauna but of low diversity, possibly due to the atoll’s isolation – no marine turtles, giant clams are very abundant, smaller bivalves were present, but few mollusks. The reef fish are primarily emperor breams, parrotfish, and red snappers, moray eel and grey reef sharks.
The Dominion of Melchizedek, an unrecognized micronation, claims sovereignty over Bokak, based on a 45-year lease allegedly granted by the Iroji Lablab. The rights conveyed to DOM cannot be greater than the traditional leader possessed themself. As such they are still subject to the Government of the Marshall Islands and are not independent.
Currently, historic remains include an abandoned camp/homestead, several wrecked ships and the remnant of the former World War Two Japanese communication outpost.
RALIK ATOLL. The western island chain consists of: Enewetak Atoll, Ujelang Atoll, Bikini Atoll, Rongdrik Atoll, Rongelap Atoll, Ailinginae Atoll, Wotho Atoll, Ujae Atoll, Lae Atoll, Kwajalein Atoll, Lib Island, Namu Atoll, Jabat Island, Ailinglaplap Atoll, Jaluit Atoll, Kili Island, Namdrik Atoll and Ebon Atoll
Enewetak Atoll is a large coral atoll of 40 islands. 664 people (2011). The land area totals less than 5.85 square kilometres, is no higher than 5 meters (16.4 ft) and surrounds a deep central lagoon, 80 kilometres (50 mi) in circumference. It is the second-westernmost atoll of the Ralik Chain and is 305 kilometres (190 mi) west of Bikini Atoll.
It was held by the Japanese from 1914 until its capture by the United States in February 1944, during World War II. Nuclear testing by the US totalling more than 30 megatons of TNT took place during the Cold War; in 1977–1980, a concrete dome (the Runit Dome) was built on Runit Island to deposit radioactive soil and debris.
The Runit Dome is deteriorating and could be breached by a typhoon, though the sediments in the lagoon are even more radioactive than those which are contained in Enewetak Atoll formed atop a seamount now about 1,400 metres (4,600 ft) below sea level made of basalt, and its depth is due to a general subsidence of the entire region and not because of erosion.
Enewetak has a mean elevation above sea level of 3 metres (9.8 ft).
Ebon Atoll is a coral atoll of 22 islands, 5.75 sq km, and encloses a deep lagoon with an area of 104 sq km. A winding passage, the Ebon Channel, leads to the lagoon from the southwest edge of the atoll. The southernmost land mass of the Marshall Islands.
Ebon Atoll was a center for commercial whaling in the 19th century. The schooner Glencoe had been taken and its crew massacred by Marshallese at Ebon in 1851 – one of three vessels attacked in the Marshall Islands in 1851 and 1852. There were several motives, and by some accounts, the ship’s crew had been abducting island women for sale to plantation owners (slavery) at other destinations.
On 30 January 2014, castaway José Salvador Alvarenga, a Salvadorian national who had been working in Mexico as a fisherman, was found by locals from Ebon after he had pulled his boat ashore on Enienaitok Islet after a 14-month drifting voyage of 10,800 kilometres (6,700 miles) across the Pacific.
Ujelang Atoll is a coral atoll of 30 islands, 1.86 sq km, and it encloses a lagoon of 185.94 square kilometres (71.79 sq mi). Westernmost island in the Marshall Islands, approximately 217 kilometres (135 mi) southeast of Enewetak, and approximately 600 km west of the main Ralik Chain. In 1989 Ujelang became permanently uninhabited. Ujelang Atoll is currently owned by the Enewetak Council and is now very rarely visited.
HISTORY
After almost four decades under US administration as the easternmost part of the UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, the Marshall Islands attained independence in 1986 under a Compact of Free Association. Compensation claims continue as a result of US nuclear testing on some of the atolls between 1947 and 1962. The Marshall Islands have been home to the US Army Post Kwajalein (USAKA) since 1964. Several islands are off-limits to tourism (and even to locals) due to US military presence or the residue of nuclear testing.
Climate. Wet season from May to November; hot and humid; islands border typhoon belt.
Landscape. The Marshall Islands consist of two island chains of 30 atolls and 1,152 islands, of low coral limestone and sand. Bikini and Enewetak are former US nuclear test sites; Kwajalein, the famous World War II battleground, is now used as a US missile test range.
GET IN
By plane. Flights are available between Honolulu and the Marshall Islands and to Fiji via Kiribati and Tuvalu. United Airlines stops in Majuro and Kwajalein on its island-hopper service between Guam and Honolulu.
Approximate flight times: from New York to Majuro is 14 hours; from Tokyo, it is 11; from Guam, it is eight hours to Majuro and five hours from Honolulu.
International airports: Majuro International Airport (MAJ). There are taxis and hotel transport from the airport to the town.
GET AROUND
By plane. Air travel between the islands is provided by Air Marshall Islands. However, the company is fraught with financial and technical problems, and one or both of the two planes in the fleet are often grounded for days, weeks or months at a time.
By boat. Transportation by ship is also available. Field trip ships travel throughout the islands, typically to pick up copra and deliver supplies; they usually provide passenger service as well.
To give a sense of scale, the journey from Majuro to Jaluit is approximately 40 minutes by plane and 24 hours by boat.
On Majuro There is a plethora of taxis available on the main road that travels the length of Majuro Atoll, and anywhere in the Majuro city area will cost no more than seventy-five cents. To get to Laura, on the other end of the island, there is a bus that leaves about once an hour from Robert Reimers Hotel.
Talk. Most Marshallese speak Marshallese and English. One important word in Marshallese is “yokwe” which is similar to the Hawaiian “aloha” and means “hello”, “goodbye” and “love”.
EAT
Many types of different fruits are available in different seasons. Some farms produce vegetables or raise pigs. Most, if not all, the produce are breadfruit, pandanus, coconut, corn, tomato, sweet potato, cassava, papaya, pumpkin, “nin” (noni), lime, pigs and chicken. In addition to these, some stands sell fruit and traditional food along the road from Ajeltake to Laura.
The Marshall Islands was once known as the world’s “fishiest” place, meaning that there was an overabundance of species of fish that dwell in Marshallese waters. However, there is great uncertainty as to whether this is still true due to concerns over overfishing and destruction of natural habitats by ships’ anchors, harmful chemicals & climate change.
Several restaurants serve international food. The Marshall Islands Resort’s (MIR) Enra Restaurant, Yummy BBQ, Jitak Take-Out, DAR Restaurant, and Robert Reimers Enterprises’ (RRE) Tide Table are among the most well-known.
Non-Marshallese-owned restaurants include Monica’s (Chinese), La Bojie’s (Filipino), China Restaurant (Chinese), Special Restaurant (Chinese), Won Hai Shen (Chinese), The Stone House (Japanese), Jay’s Restaurant (Indian), Island Star Restaurant (Chinese), Eastern Restaurant, and Aliang Restaurant (Chinese).
STAY SAFE
Be aware of storm surges or high tides. Flooding is common due to rising sea levels.
Health. Tap water is not drinkable. It’s recommended to use bottled water even for brushing your teeth.
Connect. Mobile phone service is available from the National Telecommunications Authority. Visitors with a foreign SIM card may receive an SMS offering a local number for use with their foreign SIM card. You just need to top up the account to activate the service. Follow the instructions in the SMS. It may take a few attempts to make it work.
NTA offers internet through a chain of wifi hotspots. There are 3 ways to connect:
Buy a card which will give a time-limited connection – $5 for 50 minutes.
Buy a fixed amount of data online. the service will be offered when connecting to one of the NTA-UniFi hotspots. $10 give 100MB. Credit cards or PayPal are accepted.
Register for a month’s access at the NTA office. This costs $35 per month, plus $5 setup charge. The MAC address of your device will be programmed into the NTA system, giving access to just that device. It might take a few attempts to get this to work.
Internet speeds can be quite good, but the system is not wholly reliable.
Post is provided by the United States Postal Service.
