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The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific
J. Maarten Troost
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Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Travel
The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific
J. Maarten Troost
Travel books are advertisements. A writer goes somewhere, finds what’s fascinating, obscures what isn’t, and produces a book that makes you want to go there too.
Not Maarten Troost — he went to one of the worst hellholes on earth.
And, fully aware it sucked, he stayed for two years.
And then he wrote the funniest travel book I have ever read — funnier even than Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, which has held the championship for almost a decade without serious competition.
Start with the title. Were you hoping The Sex Lives of Cannibals has some hot sex — maybe with some hunky cannibals? It doesn’t. All it has is Maarten Troost, a 26-year-old slacker, for a narrator. And it has Tarawa, an atoll in the Equatorial Pacific that is memorable mostly as the hunk of coral where 1,113 Marines and 4,300 Japanese soldiers died in three days of combat in 1943.
How did Maarten Troost get there?
It was the summer of 1996 and I had just finished graduate school in Washington, D.C., which is where I’d met my girlfriend, Sylvia. Both of us had studied international relations. I focused on Eastern Europe (think triumph of good over evil), and Sylvia concentrated on Western Europe (think agricultural subsidies), for which she has been teased mercilessly. While Sylvia passed her semesters with determined ambition, I drifted through, racking up modest grades, until finally there was not an exam left to be taken, not a paper to be turned in, and I was discharged. Job offers were not forthcoming, most likely because I didn’t apply to any jobs. Nor was I particularly adept at what is called networking, which is highly encouraged among job seekers, but perhaps not entirely useful for reticent souls utterly flummoxed by what career to pursue.
Soon enough, the money runs out and he’s forced to call Dad.
Dad says, “I believe at this point you owe me $180,000.”
Then Sylvia is offered a job as country director for the Foundation for the Peoples of the South Pacific-Kiribati Office.
Well, why not? This tiny country — 33 atolls, containing about 300 square miles,
