Day eleven and twelve. Colonia, Yap.

Probably the sadest island ever. No hope or no will for change?

Landing at the most poorly equipt international airport I've ever seen should have given us a hint of what we were inn for. A couple of walls (not connected to enclosed rooms), a roof, and some steel gates. Oh yeah, they did have the walk-through metal detector but that was it! Fortunately we managed to rent a car, cause as we were about to find out, there was little else to do.

Driving around the whole island we found a lot of potentially beautiful places, but every thing was badly undermanaged. It seemed like nobody gave a damn about the place, and we found no signs of economic venture of any kind! Only trashed dirt roads and car wrecks just about everywhere. Fortunately the plants on this island were still active and worked hard on consealing the human presence, as in growing all over and using trashdumps and carwrecks as foothold. Also, it seemed like the whole island only had a 14,400 baud modem on share, so they were quite isolated. On the radio the DJ was constantly appolgising for the delayed social security checks, confirming our fears of the state of union. Apparently the USA were still paying the government for having used the island as a staging post in the second world war. And the indigiones peoples had gotten lazy.

We were actually quite happy to leave after two days but had a hard time forgetting the people doomed to stay there for a lifetime. Sometimes a tropical paradise can act as an isolated prison obviously.

---