 Breakfast at The Village Hotel / Sunday best |
 by Philip Game
How much more to swallow? The bottle is still half full of the sour, grey sludge. Rain beats down on the thatch overhead, feet scuff the loose coral underfoot.
Fill the coconut-shell cup, raise it, close the eyes… ugh. Lips slowly going numb.
The mysteries of Pohnpei, Micronesian island of rain-drenched forests, dense mangroves and long-abandoned stone cities, only deepen through a glass of paralysing sakau. This extract from an Indian pepper bush tastes like a bitter thickshake; the way Pohnpeians knock back the stuff at roadside bars belies the elaborate rituals they associate with sakau.
The Germans built a belltower and a naval cemetery; the Spaniards left a crumbling city wall. Japanese colonists bequeathed a taste for sashimi, cubed tuna; Americans, who still pull the strings in the newly-independent Federated States of Micronesia, built most of the modern infrastructure and introduced nickels and dimes, baseball and yellow school buses.
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