Apricot Pie And Gravy

At Tarawa's Top Hotel

Single men have been booked into the same room as single women; desserts have been served before soups; apricot pie has been served with gravy; bras and panties have been returned to male guests . . .

Drinkers have ordered whiskies and received pineapple juice; diners have been confronted with grinning Gilbertese who kneel to serve food.

These, and other crazy things, have happened at Otintai Hotel, on Tarawa, GEIC, and the pub’s energetic manager, Peter Barker, is quite ready to admit it. Peter explains: “Otintai wasn’t planned, it evolved”.

Today, even though the service isn’t so haphazard as in the days of apricots and gravy, the Otintai is certainly no Travelodge or Pago Pago Intercontinental. There’s no air conditioning, no running hot water, no buttons to jab for room service.

Pinball machines and cigarette machines are unheard of, and the lively, colourful Gilbertese staff don’t know what a tip is.

Guests can be tossed out of their rooms at any hour by girls wanting to clean up, and when visitors want to page a friend the best they can do is yell—there’s no better system.

Otintai is an un-professional hotel.

Peter Barker is a travel agent, not a trained hotel manager. The only member of his staff to have had any formal training is vivacious Valima Natomo, 21, of Funafuti, who spent nine months training as a cook at Hawaii’s East-West Center.

I spent more than two weeks at the Otintai and found it to be a real, and engaging, treat.

Food is excellent and varied; the rooms, less than 10 ft from Tarawa’s sleepy lagoon, are comfortable. The easy-going staff (they often strum guitars when they should be work ing) are always smiling. If food orders are wrong, it’s a great joke for a minute, and then the right order appears. I collected a mysterious pair of red socks in my laundry and a female guest collected a man’s singlet in hers.

$4.50 a day

There are 11 twin rooms at the hotel, eight of them with showers and toilets. All rooms have fans and the rate is $4.50 a day without meals —with food, the rate is probably double this.

Operated by the GEIC’s govern ment-owned Wholesale Society, the Otintai was originally used as a transit home for pilots and staff of Fiji Airways. Over a year ago, the WS refurbished the house and extended it along the foreshore of the lagoon. A bar, a lounge, a kitchen and an office were built. New rooms, modest but adequate, went up only feet from Tarawa’s high water mark.

“Most of the staff couldn’t speak much English but they wandered in from Bikenibeu Village, and have learnt from scratch,” Peter Barker told me.

“Today we’re still making mistakes and are far from perfect. But every one is happy and they feel the Otintai belongs to them, which, of course it does.”

Tarawa's modest pub, Otintai (Gilbertese for sunrise), has character, good food and lively staff who keep the guests entertained.