Sneakertubes
December 26th, 2009 by Tyler
I can’t believe I made the train today. My bus came a couple minutes early and I was pretty sure I was screwed. The only other bus I could possibly take was ten minutes up the hill and even then I doubted it could get me to the train on time.
So then I whooped out my tubephone and discovered that the ten-minutes-away bus was leaving in less than five. And since I had nothing to lose at this point, I huffed it up the hill with my overfilled backpack and suitcase.
Wouldn’t you know it? I just barely made it. Which is good too, cuz the train also left early (though, with me on it). Hooray for creative bussing!
And now, if you’ll direct your attention to the eastern sidebar… and assuming you have logged into your Raving Amicks account, you will notice that I have updated our stalker page for Mason. Please peruse it at your leisure.
















Spent 1 week plus a few days fishing for bonefish with 4 of my friends. This is my 5th time to X-mas Island and maybe the best. We stayed at a new place (Ikari House) with air conditioning and separate toilets and showers and great food! Definitely an upgrade from our other visits. Anyway, for years there has been one flight in a week from Hawaii via jet. There are about 8 simple fishing lodges on the island with a fishing capacity of maybe 90 fisherman at any one time. Well, it seems the Kirimati government and Air Pacific had this disagreement on subsidies paid to Air Pacific (tremendous “trickle down” economic value from visiting fisherman). Anyway, a small charter outfit took over the route (once a week) with an 18 person capacity turbo-prop. On our flight in there were only we five fisherman, so we had all the great fishing spots to ourselves for a week! To give you an idea of the isolation, X-mas Island was only inhabited during WWII with permanent residents starting then. Our head guide “English”’s grandfather was the first person to live permanently on X-mas Island. Give this a hard thought – “English” is married, has 3 children AND HAS NEVER BEEN OFF THIS ISLAND! Not even to the nearby island of Tarawa! Anyway, we fished nearly dawn to dusk everyday, got treated well and had a great time. Here are some pictures. X-mas Island is not for the faint-hearted, no bars, no restaurants, not much of anything except “stayin’ alive!” (for  all the locals) and fishin’ for us visitors. .