Butaritari is a jewel of a place with warm friendly people. We arrived as the school year was ending and there were graduation celebrations on every day - even for those in pre-school! These little guys behaved beautifuuly all morning and only became uncontrollable after a very late lunch and with their gowns gone.





Our friends Rod and Brenda on State of Mind had arranged to sit in on a graduation ceremony at a primary school in Ukiangang and we joined them. We were surprised to see shades of French Polynesia in the girls dancing.



Kiribati is a genuinely quirky country and they love nothing more than to have a good chuckle and to shake-their-bootie. When the boys in the video below got up to dance the whole Manaeba fell about in peels of laughter.

video coming

The hospitality in Butaritari is enormous and we could have spent every night at someone's birthday or celebration. This birthday celebration was for the town clerk's son. Its quite formal. None of the wild running around of western birthdays. The cake was made by Tim the policeman.




The people of Butaritari have a reputation in Kiribati for being lazy and they certainly are not the most industrious people we have come across. Then, they don't need much. The sea is full of fish and seafood (albeit diminishing) and they grow coconuts, bananas, pawpaw, pumpkins and other vegetables, as well as raising pigs, with little effort. They live in grass huts which are cool and comfortable and have only limited access to western goods and internet so want for very little. This doesn't mean they are simple people. School is very important, most children speak some English, and many adults we met were well travelled. When we arrived it was white ribbon day and there were a good number of women dressed in black preparing to march.

We hired bicycles rather than a motorcycle on Butaritari so we could meander along the roads and avoid missing things. We underestimated the heat and stopped for a rest near a village called Tabukintetau. One of the families came out and ushered us into the cool of their house and gave us drinking coconuts. They also introduced us to toddy which is a delicious black syrup made from cooking the flesh of young coconuts. We had had something similar in Vanuatu at Lakona Bay.






One feature of Butaritari that had intrigued me since looking at a google map was a series of channels on its north west side. They are so sharply defined they look man-made. We hired a longboat with a guide for the day to take us up to the channels. On the way we stopped at Bird Island with its nesting terns, frigates, and gannets. The channels are naturally formed and were used by US Frigates......






We stopped to watch a couple of men harvesting young giant clams. They had a bucket-full of flesh.




On our last morning in Butaritari Johnny who had been a skipper on trading ships travelling between The Solomons, Vanuatu, Fiji, and Kiribati came to have a look at the boat and brought with him a full stand of bananas. The day before we had been given a massive pumpkin and a dozen limes so we were heading back to Tarawa fully laden. The Stand ripened all at once when we arrived in Tarawa and we became the go-to place for locals to get a free hand of bananas.











Postcript: We left Butaritari thinking it a wonderfully benign place and it is for the most part. But all societies have their secrets and shortly after we left a 9 year old girl from the school where the graduation was held was raped and murdered which was quite a shock.