Slow Internet and a Motorbike Tour

This story starts with a need to get internet. Somehow, I failed to transfer enough money from savings to checking, and while we were in Funafuti, Tim received an email that our account was overdrawn. Crap. We have overdraft protection, so checks weren’t bouncing, but our account is such that we still get charged a fee by our bank, so I wanted to take care of this sooner rather than later.

We had heard that you could get internet at Nanumea, but there’s no wifi so you have to physically plug your computer into the network. The problem is that I have a relatively new computer, and its relatively low profile, so there is no network cable input. I mean, everyone uses wifi these days, right? So, Tim had the idea to take a router in with us, and maybe we could connect the router to the network and then I could connect my computer to the router via wi-fi. Brilliant. Except we couldn’t get it to work. Jerry, the internet guy, didn’t know how to configure the router so that it could talk to the network. Tim kept asking him to show him how he configures a computer, but they were talking past each other. So, Jerry said I could just use his computer to do my stuff. Brilliant again. Except all the new, and I’m sure totally necessary, website security protocols make you jump through hoops whenever you try to log in from a new computer. Keeping in mind that the internet was painfully slow, I mean each page would take about 2 minutes to load, I had to go through a chain of self verifications to get to my bank accounts. First the bank needed to send a verification email to my yahoo account. Then when I tried to log on to yahoo I found out that yahoo also has this sort of verification required when you use a new computer, and yahoo gave me a choice of receiving a text message to the US phone I haven’t used in years or receiving an email to Tim’s gmail account. Thank god for gmail, which stopped the madness. Of course, gmail also had the verification hoops, and at first it looked like our only choice was to get a text to Tim’s old US phone that he hasn’t used in years, but then we noticed there was the option to simply type in what that phone number was. Now, we had to dig deep into our memory storage to recall what Tim’s phone number used to be. It took us about 5 minutes, but then… success. So, then I had to follow the verification trail back, and remember it takes a couple minutes for reach web page to load. In the end, it took me over an hour to make a transfer from my savings to my checking.

But there’s always a silver lining. All of the time we spent in that little office gave Tim a chance to talk with Jerry, and he invited him out to the boat for a beer that evening. So, after hanging out on Exodus for awhile and enjoying a beer with Tim, Jerry volunteered to arrange a motorbike tour of the WWII relics for us and True Blue V.

Motorbike tour

Helmets? Yeah, right.

No, the guy driving the motorbike pickup truck is not Jerry, but a friend of Jerry’s, and it turns out he’s not even from Nanumea and didn’t know where any of the WWII relics were. He drove us around to the other side of the island and then stopped at the end of a road and told us we could look around. A little bit confused, we asked him if the wrecks were nearby, and he said he had no idea and maybe we could ask someone. There happened to be an old man nearby, so we asked him and got some vague directions and headed that way, but soon enough we were lost again with no idea which way to go. Then we came across a young couple on a motorbike eating pandanas fruit, and they agreed to show us the wrecks. They turned out to know exactly where they were going, and they showed us two plane wrecks and some mobile artillery. It turned out to be a fun day, and once upon a time I would have been frustrated by how it unfolded, but not anymore. I just relaxed and enjoyed the ride.