Travel Pacific - Mauri
Yasuhiro Sato’s paradise
A back-to-the-basics resort that’s a winner with the divers
Yasuhiro Sato escaped in 1993 from Japan, where he sold ham, to discover tropical island life. After working as a diving instructor at Cairns, Australia, he began exploring the Pacific Islands for a place nobody else knew of.
“I wanted to be a primitive man with poor people,” he says. At the north end of the atoll of Tarawa he found the islet and village of Buariki. This is an uncrowded natural spot quite different from South Tarawa, an-hour-and-a-half or so across the lagoon, depending on the weather and speed of your boat, and the overcrowded home of 20,000 Kiribati people
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“It is my dream, Buariki, because it is the navel of the world,” he says. Since 1995, Sato has operated the Mauri Paradise resort there, one of the very few in Kiribati. It is primarily for divers. But Sato is just as happy to accommodate guests having that back-to-basics urge, who don’t yearn to spend hours underwater.
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The resort is very basic and there’s a limit on diving since to avoid disturbing reef life and coral Sato doesn’t want to saturate diving spots with bodies.
Accommodation is four small Gilbertese-style sleeping huts equipped with mosquito nets. There’s solar power lighting. It’s stark but attractive. The resort is full with eight guests. There’s an overwater lounge with a small bar and another hut is where the cooking of mostly local food, and mostly seafood, takes place.
Activity, apart from diving, is what you make of it. Sato’s hope is that guests mingle with the adjacent village of 300-400 people to learn what Gilbertese life is really about.
Mauri Paradise draws about 200 guests a year. Half are Japanese and the others mainly Australians, many of who were Sato’s pupils at Cairns. There’s a lot of repeat business. The future? Sato wants to preserve the resort as is. Otherwise it wouldn’t be the navel of the world.
Rates are $A700 for five nights, six days and $A1180 for nine nights, 10 days. Contact: Phone and fax 011-(686) 21-646.
