After picking up our mooring on our first evening in Majuro we had much-needed safe arrival drinks, a nice dinner on a flat boat, and a solid good night’s sleep. Since we always try to follow proper protocol when arriving in a new country, we had attempted to radio port control when we arrived and again in the morning, but since there was no response, we headed to shore to take care of all the formalities in person.
Clearing in was easy. It simply involved visits to both the Customs and Immigration offices, and since we are U.S. citizens there was no limit placed on the duration of our stay in RMI. There was some confusion for our non-American friends and getting a straight answer from Immigration seemed to be a bit of a challenge. When asked about this, one immigration employee said, “I’ve heard it’s 6 months.” You’ve heard? Don’t you work here?
Anyway, Majuro has a ton of taxis and it’s a cheap way to get around town. Although our taxi driver had no idea where the government offices were, we just asked him to drop us off at the Marshall Island Resort. He had heard of that. And the other funny part is that because taxis are so cheap you shouldn’t expect a private ride all the way to your destination. As long as there is room in the taxi they will stop and pick up more people. We never minded, since it was just another way to meet more people.
With respect to the formalities for getting permission to visit outer islands, it’s a bit different in RMI than in Tuvalu and Kiribati. In The Marshalls, the permissions are controlled by The Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) rather than Customs or Immigration. Even though I had been assured the approvals could be turned around quickly, I’ve just gotten used to how these things go, and I went there on our first or second day to get the price sheet for the islands and a copy of the form. Then I took these back to the boat to decide which islands to request and made copies of the form. (You have to fill out one form for each island you want to request.)
We submitted forms for the following atolls: Aur, Maleolap, Ailuk, Likiep, Rongelap, Kwajalein, Namu, Jaluit, and Ebon. It’s true that most were approved and returned back to me right on the spot, but a few took a while to turn around, and we never did get approval for Ebon. Apparently, approvals are controlled by the individual mayors of the islands, not the MIA. The MIA just manages the bureaucracy. Mayoral elections had just been held so some of the atolls had new mayors, so it took a while to coordinate with them in order to get the approvals. The mayors control the fees, so they are different for each island ranging from 0$ to $250, although most are $25 or $50.
They say that some mayors want cruisers to come to their islands while some prefer that you stay away. The word on the street from the ever so credible expat community was that Mili and Kwajalein should be avoided because they had previously kicked out some of our fellow cruisers. Whatever. Our friends went to Mili without incident, and, spoiler alert, Kwajalein was a piece of cake too.
Bikini and Rongelap atolls require an extra layer of approval to visit. These are the islands that were affected so many years ago from the US nuclear testing. Since their population doesn’t live on their islands, they have Town Halls in Majuro, and if you want to visit their islands, you need to also request permission at the town hall. So, I made a stop at the Rongelap Town Hall and after asking about five different people who I needed to talk to I found a man who looked over my paperwork and then asked me to speak with the Mayor. So, he got the Mayor on the phone, and I had a pleasant conversation with him about the fact that Tim and I are engineers. I could just see him coming up with a list of things for us to help with when we got to the island! He gave us approval, but unfortunately, we never made it there, but that’s because we decided to stay longer in Ailuk than we planned.
Gresham Family Exodus 