Budget Travel, Isringhaus Style

San Diego, CA
1737 PST

For a long time now, Kristian has been reminding me that this is a budget circumnavigation, and we need to think of every possible way to decrease expenses. Of course, I understand this. I don’t feel that my tastes are extravagant. I’m accustomed to, and enjoy, roughing it, living outside, eating camp meals. I’ve even quit smoking and, a most unexpected and significant sacrifice which is surprising even me, I quit drinking coffee (for the time being, at least), partially in an effort to save money. I’m all about frugality.

Nevertheless, some of Kristian’s money-saving plans seem a bit over the line. When he starts talking about hunting wild goats and building desalinization systems out of collapsible jugs and ground tarps, it throws me into a passionate rage of anxious, pessimistic nay-saying, and drives me almost to desperation. I am starting to detect subtle indications of a mildly malicious enjoyment on his face when I flip my buckets on these occasions. I simply can’t tell if he’s serious, and I’m not sure he can either. I know he enjoys thought experiments; perhaps he gets a kick out of hypothesizing about the most effective spot to stab a shark with his marlinspike. That’s probably all it is.

I would console myself with this thought, if it weren’t the case that even his sponsorship proposals were laden with what are, in my mind, unrealistic allusions to “camping in the wilderness wherever it is legal and living on the resources of nature like fish, small mammals, and fruit.” I reminded him that there were very few mammals at all on Nuku Hiva, and that we were unlikely to catch them even if there were. There are goats, he retorted. The goat debate still continues to this day. I also requested he remove the section of the proposal that declares, “For the last two years we have worked on traditional tall ships. Thus deprivation and hard physical labor are no strangers to us.  We will eat raw fish that we just knifed with our sailor knives if need be.” Although we frequently worked twelve hour days, six days a week, I would hardly describe the life of a tall ship sailor as one of “deprivation.” Aside from that, I immediately considered the impracticalities of fishing with a heavy rig knife, as well as the absurdity of telling someone who we wanted to give us money that this was our plan for finding sustenance.

At first, I was skeptical about fishing in general, thinking that we didn’t have room for the required gear. Oh yeah, and we have no idea how to fish. But I have warmed to the idea since soliciting my family members for advice, which they are all quite happy to give, sometimes loudly and simultaneously. It seems I am the only Hedlesky who is not a competent fisherman. I was inundated with advice about circle hooks, bait-catching rigs, appropriate hook size and line test, where to and not to cast for which and not-which fish, until my brain mushified. In a normal world, I would buy some gear, try it out, and if it didn’t work, I’d go buy something else. However, since we are assuming it will be expensive to purchase anything in Nuku Hiva, we have to come with everything we need. We bought some 12- and 15-pound-test line, some circle hooks of various sizes, and, when we find a stick of driftwood suitable to be a fishing rod, I’m sure we’ll be merely a few patient hours away from success.

            Because, of course, we will catch an impressive excess of fish, Kristian wants to create a smoking device out of found objects to preserve the fish for later consumption. When he presented this idea, naturally, I descended into a cranky, desperate, nay-saying fit, and found myself ten minutes later on the Internet, researching how to build a smoker out of a cardboard box. I’m sure it will be the same with the issue of water on the Tuamotus. The Tuamotus, the largest group of atolls in the world, are located south of the Marquesas and north of the Society Islands (the group to which the popular vacation destination of Tahiti belongs). Since none of the Tuamotu Islands are more than a few meters in elevation, they have no natural sources of groundwater, and the inhabitants therefore rely on catching rainwater, which amounts to about 55 inches  per year.

           We reminded ourselves of this fact this morning. "I guess we’ll just have to buy water if it’s such a scarce commodity," I said.

          

          “What? Absolutely not. We don’t have the money for that. We’ll have to rig a desalinization system of some kind.” I felt the “nays” rising, eagerly clamoring for a voice.

“We have that jug, and that tarp. We’d have to have the whole thing thoroughly enclosed, so no water is lost to the atmosphere.”

“I’m not going to respond, Kristian.”

“You’re taking all the fun out of this for me,” he said with an adorable smile.

Now that we’re at a café with WiFi for the last time, I’d better get on looking up solar water distillation methods on the Internet before it’s too late. After all, we need to be thinking about our budget.