Banking on a Timeless Paradise

Lynn Ferrin, Special to the SF Chronicle

Sunday, November 26, 2000

(11-26) 04:00 PST YAP, Micronesia -- There she was, a bare-breasted young woman greeting our plane at Yap's international airport. As the passengers shuffled through the tropical heat toward customs, she draped garlands of jasmine around our necks. Flanking her on pedestals were two donuts of white stone, each about a yard in diameter - the local currency.

I knew I had come to a far place.

It's not only that Yap preserves the most traditional culture of the far- flung islands of Micronesia - it also feels about as far away from here as you can get. We flew from San Francisco to Honolulu (five hours), from Honolulu to Guam (seven hours), from Guam to Palau (two hours) and from Palau to Yap (one hour) with various other hours spent waiting in airports.

I had spent some time in Palau, snorkeling and kayaking its exquisite waters, and was eager to stop off in Yap for a few days. I wanted to check out the stone money and the old villages, swim in the warm coral seas, paddle through the mangroves and spend some time in the presence of the mellow Yapese.

Yap is just one of the thousands of specks of land that make up Micronesia (which means 'tiny islands'); they're scattered like confetti over more than 3 million square miles of the Pacific between Hawaii and the Philippines.

The 21 inhabited islands and atolls of Yap, one of the Federated States of Micronesia, sprawl over 100,000 square miles in the Western Carolines, but their land mass covers only about 46 square miles. Yap's main island is actually an uplifted piece of the Asian mainland that broke away a long, long time ago. It is surrounded by mangrove swamps and a shallow fringing reef where herons and whimbrels feed.

The Spanish, Germans, Japanese and wartime U.S. Navy have all had a presence here - none of it particularly beneficial to the Yapese. During World War II, Yap was bombed by the Americans for three years, then became a major staging area for the American invasion of Okinawa.

These days things are relatively quiet around Yap, which has a population of about 12,000. Locals still fish and raise taro on their fertile land. (The other diet staple is Budweiser, and the Yapese have found that empty cans make good betel-nut spittoons.) The currency, aside from the stone money, is the U. S. dollar. Yap was a U.N. Trust Territory administered by the U.S. for decades after the war, and English is the official language.

In the capital, Colonia, 'downtown' is a string of nondescript cement buildings and a few small hotels strung along a road around a small bay. Many villages around Yap still have old thatched meeting houses on raised stone platforms, with centuries-old 'stone paths' through the forests connecting them.

Yap did not open for tourism until 1989, and even today the Yapese like to keep it low key. About 5,000 or so tourists come each year, mostly Americans hoping to scuba-dive with the manta rays that cruise a channel in the reef.

Outside customs I was met by Tilus Alfonso, the tour coordinator for my simple hotel, the E.S.A. Bay View. He was driving a plush air-conditioned van with the mysterious legend 'Living Salon' on its sides. He was also chewing betel-nut. In Yap, practically everyone chews betel-nut, almost all the time.

The men, and some women, carry their paraphernalia around in coconut palm baskets. They wrap a nut in a pepper leaf, add a sprinkling of lime and chew the wad until it produces a mouthful of scarlet saliva. This makes for lots of spitting, and red splotches on sidewalks and walls. And flaming red teeth and lips. It also makes for a soft, mushy way of speaking when Yapese cheeks are full of betel nut.

Continued Timeless Paradise, Page 2