Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Kiribati

Episode Date: June 9, 2022

Located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is a country that, to most people’s surprise, is shockingly large.  It only has a population of 120,000 people, but it stretches over 3.5 million square kilometers of ocean.  On top of all that, almost everyone mispronounces it. Learn more about Kiribati, the surprisingly large country with a very odd spelling, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://podfollow.com/everythingeverywhere/ -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Darcy Adams Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Everything Everywhere is an Airwave Media podcast." or "Everything Everywhere is part of the Airwave Media podcast network Please contact [e-mail] to advertise on Everything Everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is a country that, to most people's surprise, is shockingly large. It only is a population of 120,000 people, but it stretches over 3.5 million square kilometers of ocean. And on top of that, almost everyone mispronounces it. Learn more about Kiribati, the surprisingly large country with a very odd spelling on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. We might as well start this episode with the elephant in the room and the question that many of you probably have. How the name of this country is pronounced. The correct pronunciation is. Kiribati. Now, if you look at the title of the show, you probably said to yourself that it was pronounced Kiribati. If that's what you thought, I am not going to fault you for it, because by all known laws of grammar and pronunciation in the English language, that is how it should be pronounced.

Except it isn't. The letters, T-I, form an S-sound in the Gilbertie's language. Hence, what should be Kiribati is pronounced Kiribati. However, it gets far better than just the name of the country. The largest island in the country is called Christmas Island. And how do they spell Christmas? K-I-R-I-T-I-M-A-T-I, Christmas. If there are any kids listening to this, and if you're ever in a spelling bee and get the word Christmas, spell it like this, and then get really angry and indignant when they say you got it wrong. So with that out of the way, let's talk about the country of Kiribati. Kira-Bos is one of only four countries in the world that is made up entirely of coral atolls, the others being Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, and the Maldives.

With the exception of Banaba Island, which is a raised coral atoll, most of the country is no more than a few meters above sea level. Unlike most island countries in the Pacific, which consist of either one island or an archipelago of islands, Kiribati consists of three large island groups, the Gilbert Islands, the Phoenix Islands, and the Line Islands. As a result, the country spans an unusually large distance, especially considering that it's still a pretty small country. It is both north and south of the equator, and it is on either side of the 180-degree meridian. That means that the country lies in both the northern, southern, eastern, and western hemispheres. Kiribati spans three different time zones. If you ever look at a world map of time zones,

you'll notice that there is a spot where the international date line is just far to the east in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. This is entirely due to Kiribati. It used to be that Kiribati straddled the international date line, which made for a logistical mess inside the country when one part of the country was always in a different day from the other part. In 1994, they took their two easternmost time zones, which used to be negative 10 and negative 11 hours UTC, and moved them such that they were now plus 13 and plus 14 hours UTC.

Islands in the plus 14 UTC time zone are the first place to usher in the new year every year. The distance from the easternmost point of Kiribati, Carolina Island, to its westernmost point, Banaba Island, is approximately 4,500 kilometers or 2,800 miles. A country's territorial waters extends 12 miles off the coast, but each country can also claim what is known as an exclusive economic zone, which extends out over 200 miles where they can can control the marine resources. So if you look at countries by the size of their exclusive economic zone, Kiribati would be the 12th largest country in the world. The Phoenix Island protected area, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is the size of California. And it's one of the largest

world heritage sites on Earth, as well as one of the largest marine sanctuaries on the planet. The other thing about Kiribati, which I should note, is the demonym used for the country. A demonym is just the word used to describe people from that country. in English. In English, most country deminims involve adding a suffix to the country name. Mexican, Japanese, Australian. However, Kiribati is one of only two countries in the world where the demonym is one where you add a prefects instead of a suffix. So someone or something from Kiribati is known as an E Kiribati. I bring this up because as I start to talk about their people, it's going to sound weird if you don't know how this is different. And by the way, the other

country is Vanuatu. The islands of Kiribati, in particular the Gilbert Islands in the West, were probably settled about 5,000 to 700 years ago, depending on the island. And this was part of the original Micronesian migration. Geographically, Kiribati is often grouped with Micronesia. However, given its location, it has had influences from both Polynesia and Melanesia. The Polynesian influences have come from invasions from Samoa and Tonga, and the Melanesian influences mostly came from Fiji. The population of Kiribati is heavily lopsided, with 90% of the population living in the Gilbert Islands, and 52% of the population living on the single island of Tarwa, which is also the capital. The Gilbert Islands were named after a British captain, Thomas Gilbert, who passed through in 1788.

They had limited contact with Europeans through the 19th century, but the contact they did have spurred conflict between the different clans and islands. In 1892, this conflict was used as the pretext for declaring the islands a British protectorate, by the ship captain Edward Davis. He literally went from island to island and got all the chiefs to agree to allow Britain to keep the peace. In 1916, it became part of the crown colony of the Gilbert and Ellis Islands. The Ellis Islands today are what are known as the nation of Tuvalu. The islands then became part of the British Western Pacific territories,

which was just an administrative division that managed many of the smaller British Pacific Islands. In World War II, the Gilbert Islands were occupied by the Japanese. This resulted in one of the most important battles in the Pacific Campaign, the Battle of Tarawa, in November of 1943. It was one of the first major battles in the Central Pacific, and the first where the Americans actually faced stiff resistance to an amphibious landing. After the war, the British began the process of decolonization and giving independence to most of their colonies. In 1974, in a referendum, the Ellis Islands voted to separate themselves from the Gilbert Islands, and they went on to become the country of Tuvalu, which I've previously done an episode on. In 1979, the Gilbert Islands became independent and selected the name Kiribati. Oddly enough, the name of the Gilbert Islands in the local Gilbertese language isn't Kiribati.

It's Tongaroo. Kiribati is the word in the Gilbert's language for Gilberts. They went with Kiribati instead of Tongaroo, so it was more inclusive of the Phoenix Islands, Line Islands, and Banaba Island. Kiribati became a member of the United Nations in 1999, a full 20 years after independence. I mentioned that there were three island groups in Kiribati, with the Gilbert Islands having the vast majority of the population. The Phoenix Islands, which lie to the east, is mostly unpopulated. There is only one island with people, Canton Island, and that has a population of only 20, which was down from 60 people just 20 years ago.

The United States actually claimed the Phoenix Islands when Kiribati became independent, but they later pronounced the claim. The Phoenix Islands are very difficult to visit, which I know because, I have researched what it would take to actually visit. The rest of the population lives in the Line Islands. The biggest of the Line Islands in terms of both population and area is the aforementioned Christmas Island. Christmas Island is the largest coral atoll in the world in terms of exposed land area. In fact, it alone is responsible for 47% of all the land in the country of Kiribati. Of special note in the Line Islands is Fanning Island. Fanning Island is the only place in the country which is visited by cruise ships.

Why do cruise ships only visit Fanning Island? It's because it's the closest point of a foreign country to Hawaii. The United States has a law known as the Jones Act, which prohibits ships that are not flagged, manufactured, and owned by U.S. citizens from traveling between U.S. ports. There are basically zero cruise lines that can meet this criteria. So if you want to sail from Hawaii to California, you have to stop in a foreign country somewhere along the way.

Either this will be somewhere in Mexico, if you're going to Southern California, or it has to be Fanning Island. Fanning Island is 1,100 miles or 1,800 kilometers away from Hawaii, so you have to go far out of your way to get there, but for some cruise ships, it's their only option. There isn't much in an economy anywhere in Kiribati. The entire economy for the country is only about $187 million a year, with a per capita GDP of only $1,600 per year. As is the case with all atolls, there is very little in the way of land or

resources. The biggest money makers in Kiribati are coconuts, selling fishing rights, seaweed farming, remittances, and aquarium fish. There's actually very little tourism to Kiribati, given its remote location. The only flights to Kiribati are from other small island countries. One big future problem is if the sea levels should rise, because pretty much everything in the country is less than two meters above sea level. Even a small rise in ocean levels would make most of the country disappear. And there are already plans in the works for settlement of the entire population if this should happen. When I do episodes on small countries, I'll usually throw in some small anecdote about a visit that I had, as I've pretty much been to all the small countries in the world. And I have been to Kiribati. Sort of. In 2007, I flew to Tarawa with the intent of spending four days there before heading to Fiji. I was flying in from the Solomon Islands

with a brief stop and Nauru. At the time, Americans needed a visa to visit Kiribati. It was the only country in the Pacific that had that requirement at the time. Getting an E-Kirabas visa wasn't easy because they don't have many embassies. So, when I was in Fiji, I made a special trip to the Kiribati Embassy in Suva. I rented a car, drove all the way across the island, and showed up in the Kiribati embassy right when it opened on Monday morning. I had been in touch with the Minister of Tourism, so I knew what I had to do, and I had everything ready to go.

The people at the embassy processed it quickly, and I was on my way. The problem was, unlike most countries that put a sticker in your past, port, Kiribati just used a rubber stamp and a ballpoint pen. Before I arrived in Kiribati, I was in the Solomon Islands, where I went to one of the outer islands and got caught in the rain. Everything got wet, including my passport. When I arrived in Tarawa, I found that the ink from my visa had bled off the page. You could still sort of tell it was a Kiribati visa stamp, but the ballpoint pen ink used for the dates that it was valid was gone. When I presented my passport, the guy at the immigration

counter wouldn't let me into the country. For the only time, in my 13 odd years of traveling around the world, I threw a fit. And the reason was I was stuck in the middle of the ocean, and they were going to send me back to the Solomon Islands, which was the exact opposite direction I wanted to go. Eventually, the airport manager stepped in, apologized, and told me that the flight to Fiji that I was supposed to be on in four days was going to be there in six hours. And if I was willing to wait, I could get on that flight. I said, sure, and wrote a tersely worded email to the Minister of Tourism, the guy who helped me get my visa, and told him what happened. When I finally arrived in Fiji, I sent the email and headed to Hawaii to begin the next leg of my

adventure. Unbeknownst to me, the Minister of Tourism forwarded my email to the president of Kiribati. And about three months later, Americans didn't need a visa to go to Kiribati anymore. I haven't returned to Kiribati since then. You pretty much have to go there on purpose as it isn't along the way to anywhere else. However, I would very much like to go back to give it a proper visit. Given its remote location and its lack of a modern economy, Kiribati has changed very little. It has not been overrun with tourists, and there are no mega resorts to be found anywhere in the country.

If you ever do visit, just make sure to keep your passport dry and make sure you pronounce the name of the country correctly. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thorne Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener Decreasing Entropy over at Apple Podcasts in Canada. They write, Fantastic, interesting, and informative.

David Lee Roth once saying, Now take the traveler and the tourist. The essential difference is, the traveler doesn't know where he's going, and the tourist doesn't know where he is. Leave it to Gary to try to make travelers of the rest of us. These are fantastic snippets of information that are designed to inform us of where we are and why. Great job. Good enough that I went to patreon.com. Even though I've just joined the Completionist Club, unfortunately I'm still waiting to hear about something that is nothing that can

controls everything. And no, I'm not talking about Rockefeller. Thanks, decreasing entropy. First of all, let me formally welcome you to the completionist club. You will find that the Canadian chapter has all the amenities of the American club, the only difference being that they serve Putin and Caesars, and there will usually be a party to watch the Grey Cup. As for nothing that controls everything, the only thing I can think of might be a vacuum? And there are two reasons why I have not done an episode on vacuums. The first reason is that I haven't gotten enough pressure to do it. And the second reason is that the topic literally sucks.

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